Moving into a luxury apartment complex comes with expectations of tranquility and harmony, but for Redditor u/ComedianTraining7414, this idyllic vision was shattered when her upstairs neighbors, a family with three energetic children, started disrupting her peace with constant noise.
Despite repeated attempts to maintain civility when confronting them, the woman’s sleepless nights took a toll on her. Seeking solace, she began reporting the “menacing” behavior to the apartment management, unaware that this would eventually lead to a $4,000 fine. Now, after learning that it’s too much for her neighbors to pay, she turned to Reddit’s ‘Am I the Asshole?’ community, asking its members to help her make sense of the ordeal.
Image credits: Liza Summer (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Jessica West (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Karolina Grabowska (not the actual photo)
The woman added more details about the whole situation
Image credits: u/ComedianTraining7414
Image credits: Andrea Piacquadio (not the actual photo)
It’s easy to understand ComedianTraining7414’s concerns. Adults need between 7–9 hours of sleep to function at their best. However, humans have evolved so that we are more easily startled by unexpected sounds than by objects suddenly intruding into our field of vision. Our nervous systems react to noises that are loud and abrupt (gunshots), rumbling (airplanes), or whining and chaotic (leaf blowers, coffee grinders) by instructing our bodies to boost the heart rate, breathe less deeply, and release fight-or-flight hormones.
But the physical responses that helped save us from predators back in the day have obvious downsides in the 21st century when you’re trying to get some sleep and there are three kids in the apartment above yours.
Even if you think you’re immune to city noise, it may still be affecting your health. In one study of 4,861 adults, a 10-decibel increase in nighttime noise was linked to a 14 percent rise in a person’s likelihood of being diagnosed with hypertension. Health experts studying more than 1 million people in the vicinity of Germany’s Cologne Bonn Airport found that people subjected to the background noise of greater than 40 decibels were at increased risk of cardiovascular diseases, kidney failure, and dementia compared with those who lived farther from the flight paths, where things were quieter. (For comparison, the legal nighttime noise limit in Washington, DC, is 55 decibels.)
Image credits: Ketut Subiyanto (not the actual photo)
The impact of noise pollution is even worse on kids. A sad study examined the cognition of 2,800 students in 89 schools across Europe. It found that aircraft and road noise significantly affected reading comprehension and certain kinds of memory. The results, adjusted for family income, the mother’s education, and other confounding factors, were linear. For every five-decibel noise increase, the reading scores of British children dropped by the equivalent of a two-month delay, so that kids in neighborhoods that were 20 decibels louder than average were almost a year behind.
Yes, the author of the post doesn’t have any kids of her own, but she still needs to recharge.
A healthy soundscape “is not a wishy-washy amenity,” said Peter James, a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health whose team is using Park Service data to explore whether excessive noise is partly responsible for disparities in cardiovascular outcomes in disadvantaged communities. “It’s a potential public health factor we need to understand to make sure everyone has the same opportunities.”
People have been debating whether or not the Redditor went overboard. However, I think we can all agree that after the mom refused to remedy the situation, someone had to do something.
Some people defended the mother, saying that the author of the post took everything too far
But most thought she did nothing wrong and that it was the mother who could’ve easily prevented this conflict
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