Auditory Overload

Mister and I share an office at home. Two computers, one room. We spend most of our time together in this room – me, blogging and devouring the internets, and him by playing his silly little game. He talks to his guildies, so I hear those conversations. Battles get loud, so I hear that as well. And everyone knows that music is a necessity, so that’s going. Then, on top of that, Mister will talk to me too. Sometimes it takes me a few seconds to realize he’s talking to me and not the guild, because I’m so busy trying to tune it all out.

Before we moved into this house, we lived in an apartment. There was no separate room for the office, so Mister’s desk was in the corner of the living room while mine was in the bedroom. Rather than spend all that time apart, I commandeered the laptop and would lounge on the sofa with that. Also, instead of music, the TV would be on, because, well, it was there. So I’d be trying to watch TV, surf the internet, and have all the game sounds going on at the same time.

It’s amazing that I get any blogging done at all. With all that noise, I can barely concentrate on what I’m reading, never mind keep a single train of thought long enough to actually write a blog post.

On my latest On the Internet post, I included some links having to do with writing and creating. One of them was The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People. Want to know what that habit is? Solidtude. The creative types featured in that post all take some quiet time to flex their creative muscles. That’s something I don’t often get is quiet time. I could get up earlier and use the early morning for that, but you know what? I’m not really a morning person. Also, I find that having a time limit like that is more frustrating than freeing.

There used to be a time when I would get up an hour early to spend some time checking emails and relaxing on the internet before getting ready for work. Often times I would find a LOT of stuff I wanted to read or have a lot of pent-up writing to do, but not enough time to do it. I’d end up getting in the shower way too late, rushing to work, and spending the rest of the day really distracted because I’d be too busy thinking about all the inspiration that hit me in the morning. I didn’t really like that too much. Being inspired, yes, I like. But not being able to take advantage of it while the iron’s hot, so to speak, kinda sucks.

Despite the noise and resulting lack of concentration, I’ve been trying. I have a pretty decent set of headphones that, while not noise canceling, do OK at muffling the sound a bit. If it gets too much, I’ll play music or find some quiet background noise to play to further block out all the noise. When all else fails, I step away and go someplace where I don’t have so many sounds coming at me all at once.

Mister doesn’t have this issue. He can listen to half a dozen different conversations at the same time and follow all of them. I get overloaded and stop being able to follow any of them. As a result, he sometimes forgets how hard it gets for me when all the noise is going on. But as soon as he realizes how distressing it is, he’s considerate. He’ll turn down the game noise to a manageable level rather than taking full advantage of the speakers he has, and he’ll turn down the music to a soft background level. He’s awesome that way.

Sometimes, even if it’s not too loud, there can be too much noise. Do you have the same issue?

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