Living In A Loud Ass City Could Be Hurting Your Heart Health, According To Science

Unsplash/Anubhav Saxena

All those car horns, ambulance sirens and even pedestrian outbursts you hear on your morning commute are doing more than putting you in an irritable mood. A new research review suggests that these kinds of unfiltered and unwavering noise pollution could be negatively impacting your heart health as well.

The study review, which was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, found that a raucous and disruptive environment can increase a resident’s risk of heart disease stemming from things like coronary artery disease, hypertension and heart failure. While most of us probably have pretty healthy tickers at this point in our lives, it’s important to know how where we live could be affecting our long-term health.

According to the researchers, these pervasive noises trigger the body’s fight-or-flight stress response, which disrupts the body all the way down to a cellular level. The chronic flood of hormones throughout the body damages the heart over time. If this isn’t enough, the city’s noisy interjections also make it pretty difficult to keep up a healthy sleep routine, and poor sleep is linked to poor cardiovascular health as well.

Unsplash/Goh Rhy Yan

“Ten years ago, people were saying that noise is just annoying, but now I think there’s considerable evidence that noise makes you sick, and one of the predominate diseases is cardiovascular disease,” lead author Thomas Münzel told The Washington Post in a phone interview.

This isn’t to say that all that environmental noise causes heart problems. It’s that it’s associated with exacerbated symptoms like higher cholesterol levels, blood pressures and heart rates. And those things might not seem like make-or-break health markers now, but they certainly don’t help mitigate your risk of heart problems later in life.

If you barely even notice the cacophony in your day-to-day life, props to you. But if those blaring sirens consistently jolt you to your very core, the city might not be your forever home.