What Do You Do If A Co-working Space Is Noisy?

• Put earplugs in (or headphones if you must)

To drown out office noise in a crowded workspace, many of us use headphones and loud music. However, experts warn that this is a risky solution. The louder your music needs to be to drown out the noise around you, and the louder the music, the more damaging it is to your hearing.

Furthermore, because white noise is not as obvious as music, it can be deceptively loud. As a result, if you use white noise to drown out office chatter, you may end up damaging your hearing even more.

Noise-cancelling headphones can be effective at drowning out noise, but they are not a good fit for an office environment. Instead of masking the original sound by playing a louder noise over the top, these headphones work by listening to the sound waves around you and emitting sound waves that cancel out the original sound. However, this technology works best for constant, low frequency noise, such as an airplane’s roar.

Hearing experts recommend ear plugs to block out noise without damaging your hearing because all of these options have drawbacks. Rather than blasting your ears with louder noise to drown out your colleagues’ chatter, ear plugs create a barrier to prevent the sound (or acoustic) from entering.

Take a silence break every day

While silence has long been used by researchers as a control condition in sound studies, it has only recently been discovered that silence is a fascinating state in and of itself.

Silence has been shown in studies to be more relaxing for the brain than any other type of music. When comparing different types of music in one study, the study participants’ brains found the silent pauses in between the music to be the most relaxing.

This, according to researchers, is because our brains are never truly quiet: they’re always processing something, and when we listen to music or focus on a task, we’re diverting the brain’s attention away from its default processing mode. When we are surrounded by silence, on the other hand, we allow the brain to return to its essential processing without interruption, and our brains appear to enjoy this opportunity.

Silence can also encourage new brain cells to grow and become functioning neurons, according to a mouse study. We don’t know if this effect also applies to humans, but it’s possible that a daily dose of silence could make you smarter.

Whether your office has a quiet nap room or you have to hide in your car during your lunch break, try to find a small pocket of silence every day to give your brain a break from processing all the noise and distraction at work.

Establish a regular quiet time in the office

Noisy office environments are common nowadays, but they are not conducive to productive work. We can focus on finding a balance between collaboration and quiet periods to give our brains a chance to focus rather than simply accepting that the modern workplace is noisy.