How To *Really* Hear The World Around You | April 2025
How natural sounds can impact your mood, your focus, and your sleep - and how your brain adapts to them.
Welcome to The Feel Good Life! A newsletter about health, prevention, empathy, and hope. Join me, Dr. Mariana, as I explore all sides of good health and a good life. New around here? Get started.
Hi!
It’s Green Prescription time (a special series I’m running for paid subscribers), and this month we’re exploring our surroundings with our ears and discovering how sounds work on our brain.
Over the course of the next three months (as part of season two of the Green Prescriptions), we will explore more science and ideas behind the positive impact of nature in health, allowing you to take it next level by creating your own movement to inspire others into learning about their health and its connection to nature. You will receive a special guideline to understand the basics of creating a movement, and a starter kit to get you going. For those of you interested in taking this BIG step, we will arrange an online meeting to guide you and clear all doubts via a live call with me. You will soon officially become a Local Outdoors Leader for Better Health! I hope you’re looking forward to this as much as I do.
Let’s begin!
Whether we realise it or not, the sounds that surround us have a great impact in our daily lives. The amount of silence that we get to enjoy will determine the quality of our sleep, our clarity and sense of focus, and our ability to think.
Maybe you live downtown in the middle of a city, or maybe in a rural area surrounded by trucks and factories. Maybe you live next to the ocean and your usual sounds are waves, seagulls and barking dogs. Maybe there’s the forest and your morning alarm is a flock of joyous birds chirping away at sunrise. Or maybe you live next to a school where recess alarms and kids are the order of the day.
There are so many different scenarios that make up our realities.
Scenarios that can easily change depending on your activities. Sometimes we become used to the sounds around us, and sometimes the noise can become a bit unbearable affecting our focus and our mood. From the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep at night, the nearby ambiences dictate in a great percentage how our day goes.
Have you paid attention to your home and what it sounds like? How about its surroundings? Is it peaceful or noisy? Is it calmer in the morning or in the evening? Are there barking dogs or singing birds? How about the noise of cars, motorbikes and trucks? Is there music playing on the background nearby? Are there sounds that relax you? How about sounds that disturb you?
Just to give you an example, I’ve been sitting down at my parent’s gardens lately, enjoying the tropical sunshine and taking these short recordings of what it sounds like at different times of the day. They have green large gardens filled with birds and butterflies fluttering all day, but also trucks and ambulances passing by on regular basis.
Being houses on main roads in the outskirts of San Jose, Costa Rica, the sounds of a rushed city and the greenery filled with birds simply coexist. I used to live here more than 15 years ago. Then I moved abroad and I can tell how the noise in the area has changed, and also how my brain struggles to process it all on daily basis when visiting.
For the rest of this post, I’ve included soundscapes from around the house I’m currently in. The different rooms are: living room, bedroom hallway, inner patio, bedroom 1, bedroom 2, kitchen. If you listen to them carefully, can you work out which is which? Can you notice the sound differences between garden, kitchen or bedroom? Can you see why these sounds matter so much to your physical and mental health?
The same happens when we travel.
Not everyone has an easy time sleeping at a hotel away from home, where the new sounds and general ambience make the brain stay more alert than usual as a protective response to the environment. Our nervous system is an amazing, mysterious thing. It works to adapt greatly while also protecting our fragile human nature as part of the basic instinct to stay alive.
Brains also need a routine, which includes not only a bedtime or meal schedule, but also a specific set of activities that are naturally recognised and performed by the brain every day. For example, putting on your pyjama and slippers, brushing your teeth, doing your skin care routine—all things we do whether at home or while travelling that dictates how our nervous system responds to those surroundings, either making us more relaxed or more alert.
The clearest example of how even small changes in our routine affect the brain can be seen in elderly people who suffer from dementia, especially in later stages, where cognitive deterioration and altered perception of time and space can cause emotional instability. In advanced stages of dementia a person needs a good, steady routine, almost to the clock, so that they can feel a certainty, like an anchor, to keep their mind’s structure under control. When a mild change happens, say a change of rooms, a visitor who they hand’t seen in a long time, loud music, or an altered bedtime, they will most likely feel an altered perception of their reality, throwing them into an anxiety spiral.
Epoch, an organisation who specialises in helping people with dementia, explains:
“The reason that change causes such a reaction to those with dementia are partly physical but mainly psychological. Experts at the Mayo Clinic and Alzheimer’s Association® state that disruptive behaviors due to changing environments are an individual’s way of trying to make sense of an increasingly terrifying and confusing world.
“In many ways, it’s very similar to a young child who is experiencing change for the first time,” says Chrissy. “When you don’t understand what’s happening around you, and you feel like you have no control over the situation, it can be very scary. Your loved one may be lashing out because it’s the only way he or she can gain some sense of control over what’s happening – no matter how illogical that may seem to you.”
If you’re generally healthy and with a sharp mind, these small changes are likely part of an active life and they won’t affect you in the same way. Such is the biological process of life.
This month, I want you to think about the sounds that surrounds you and set yourself to explore them—take some time to notice how they impact you. This is a simple exercise that you can practice anywhere and anytime as you go about your day or your weekend. The mission is to become aware of the sounds that you absorb without realising, and briefly observe how they impact either your focus, your sleep, your clarity, and your emotions.
This month’s practice is mainly about three things:
Awareness of your reality
Becoming grounded in the present moment
Activating your creativity into finding solutions
Whether you choose to go on an outdoors trip this month, regular walks, or simply sit in the garden, a park, or a coffeeshop nearby, I want you to stop for a couple of minutes and just observe/listen to what surrounds you at that exact moment. Grab a journal and take it with you, and why not, take some notes. Write down about the sounds that you’re listening and also about how they make you feel. Too loud? Does it make you feel uncomfortable or annoyed? Too many people? Does it make you anxious, or is it relaxing instead? Loud barking at night?
Another great medical example on how noise can affect the brain is a medical condition called Tinnitus—an internal ear ringing or buzzing that originates in the brain (not outside) and can appear out of the blue, impacting a person’s perception of noise. Sometimes tinnitus can be very low, and sometimes it can be quite loud, affecting a person’s emotional state, sleep, and ability to focus. It’s a difficult thing to control, but the craziest thing about tinnitus is that as an inside noise, the brain can be trained and somehow re-educated, so that the buzzing can be perceived in a different way, allowing the brain to adapt to different layers of tones, masquerading one basal sound with other more tolerable sounds.
Here’s a more detailed and fascinating read on how the brain plays a role in tinnitus perception.
A personal anecdote:
Back in 2016, I was going through a period of very high stress without realising how bad it was. One day I suddenly started hearing a strong whistle. I asked my partner what it was, to which he replied “What are you talking about, I don’t hear anything.” This left me a bit baffled. I tried to analyse the sound, covering one ear, then the other, trying to determine where exactly I was hearing it. I couldn’t find an answer, but clearly there was something going on. I desperately went to the nearest doctor’s office. They kindly checked me and said they couldn’t find anything wrong. I waited a few more days and the ringing was louder. I started to panic.
I needed to visit an ear doctor and there was none in the area. Eventually, I found one who would take me urgently, checked me, ordered a head scan and prescribed me sleeping pills for 3 weeks until the CT scan results arrived. Longest wait of my life! Turned out that everything inside my head was good. No dangerous signs of something being awfully wrong. It was just stress. A case of tinnitus caused by a severe 2-year period of stress and burnout. It’s been 9 years since and my tinnitus is barely noticeable. Sometimes when I’m too tense and stressed out, I can hear it at night when going to bed. I learned to take it as my body’s stress alarm reminding me to slow down and chill out.
Thanks to this tinnitus is that my e-course ‘Don’t Stress It’ was born. Life, uh?
From a medical perspective, there are tools to help you trick the brain in healthy ways. Soundproof headphones, white noise, or soft background music are some of the most successful ones.
Here’s a list of ideas to help you control some of those unwanted noises, whether internal or external.
Now, since we’re all about the greenery and the outdoors here at The Green Prescription Club, we want to focus on the sounds of nature around you. As you will find out, there are sounds you’re so used to that yous brain simply learned to dismiss them. That’s a normal part of daily life. What we want is this awareness, precisely. To realise all the sounds around you and learn which ones are good for your health.
There’s great power in the sounds of nature, highly impacting the brain in positive ways. Benefits such as an increased sense of relaxation, dopamine and serotonin release, mood improvement, and soothing the body’s stress (fight or flight) response.
Here’s more scientific literature on this fascinating topic.
This month, become aware of your reality and observe how it makes you feel. Awareness is everything my friends! As you go about your day, stop occasionally, make the point to listen to your surroundings, close your eyes to discover even more sounds, pay attention, take note, and carry on.
Download Your April’s Green Prescription
What’s Coming Next?
This is the 3rd prescription from season two of our beloved Green Prescriptions. There will be 6 prescriptions in total. In the remaining 3, we will dive as promised, into creating your own outdoors movement so you can become a Local Outdoors Leader for Better Health.
You’ve been preparing for this! You’re ready, and it will be exciting. More in our next newsletter.
For now, focus on this month, start listening to your surroundings, take note and enjoy the magic!
See you next time.
Love,
Dr. Mariana
