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Our childhood understanding is that noise can impair hearing or affect concentration when doing things, so every time we pass by cafes, convenience stores and bookstores, we see people who work or read books with their heads in front of their computers. There is always a doubt: the environment is so noisy, can they really concentrate on their work and study?

However, a recent study found that those people are really working hard! The slight noise in the coffee shop is more conducive to work and study.

Who doesn't have a colleague in the office who likes to hit the keyboard crazily? | Gifer World Health Organization (WHO) identified high sound levels (sound levels are physical quantities consistent with people's subjective perception of sound intensity, in decibels) or noise as the second largest environmental cause of health problems after air quality, which can lead to serious health effects, such as stress, coronary heart disease, stroke and sleep disorders.

The Harvard School of Public Health has also pointed out that 40% of employees believe that the working environment in the workplace will have a negative impact on their mental state, work efficiency and so on. Among the many factors that cause environmental stress, noise is often regarded as the first cause of stress.

For example: the buzzing sound of building construction, colleagues talking loudly, the sudden sound of landline phones, the crackling of keyboards, the creaking of seats, the running of coffee machines. Always rise and fall one after another in a small space.

Maybe there will be a colleague B who suddenly starts to scream. Gifer used to focus on industrial ambient noise, but there has been a lack of research on the impact of workplace noise levels on our health. Recently, researchers from the Institute of place and Happiness at the University of Arizona published an article in npj digital medicine magazine to help office workers understand the problem.

The researchers set up three different types of offices: a traditional private office with room for one or two people, a semi-enclosed office separated by a partition, and an open-plan office. To measure the impact of noise on employees, the researchers asked 231 employees to wear two devices for three days in a row, one to measure sound levels in the employee's work environment, and the other to measure participants' physical stress and relaxation levels through heart rate variability (HRV). Monitor every five minutes and use mathematical models to determine how changing sound levels affect a person's physical health.

The picture shows the effect of sound on the physical health of employees. The green solid line is normal blood pressure, and the red dotted line is hypertension. | the results of reference [1] show that when the sound level in the office environment exceeds 50 decibels, for every 10 decibels, the physical health will decrease by 1.9%. But when the sound in the office is less than 50 decibels, for every 10 decibels, physical health is reduced by 5.4%.

Generally speaking, the sound of more than 50 decibels in the work environment will do harm to physical health, but it is not as quiet as possible, and it will also do harm to employees when the environment is too quiet.

Why is a quiet environment harmful to the human body? This result far exceeds the researchers' expectations, but it all seems to make sense if this conclusion is linked to the survival instinct of the history of human development.

Working geese | Gifer our ancestors needed to be alert to all possible threats in the environment in order to survive, so, in an overly quiet environment, the brain becomes more nervous, and any slight sound change can distract us and create more stress. For example, in a very quiet time, the sound of a needle falling on the ground will be "magnified" countless times by you, and your attention will be immediately distracted. In contrast, when a variety of sounds appear in the work environment in a low-frequency and continuous manner, they mix and blend into background noise, masking sudden sounds that can be distracting and minimizing the chance of distraction.

This is why many people choose to work in coffee shops or bookstores, although the environment is not quiet, but they can still maintain a high level of concentration.

Flickr, an open-plan office space that has been widely loved by bosses in recent years. Do you think that as long as the office keeps the sound of 50 decibels according to this research, you can work hard? It's not! Open office space also faces another major problem-visual noise, which simply means that as long as there is any action or activity of others in one's line of sight, it will cause visual interference, affect concentration and interrupt thinking. Psychology professors say that unpredictable sports on the edge of one's line of sight compete for cognitive resources, and everyone has different abilities to filter out visual stimuli. For some people, working in a dynamic or chaotic office is almost impossible to concentrate.

If I see a group of people gathered around me, I want to know what they are talking about.

Is someone going to get fired?

Are you saying that I look handsome today?

Most importantly, working in an environment that will be seen by supervisors and colleagues makes employees feel compelled to show pressure to meet the expectations of others, such as typing down and pretending to be busy but not actually thinking at all.

You who rub the keyboard until it sparks but the actual output is zero | Gifer now this problem is getting more and more attention. Some bosses will place potted plants or install super-large curved computer monitors to cut off the line of sight; some bosses will paint the walls of the work area with monotonous white and paint the walls and floors of the hallways that are often moved into dark dark colors to reduce the unconsciously attracted attention of employees.

Do you know who to forward it to?

Reference:

[1] Harvard School of Public Health. The workplace and health. (2016).

[2] Srinivasan, K., Currim, F., Lindberg, C.M. Et al. Discovery of associative patterns between workplace sound level and physiological wellbeing using wearable devices and empirical Bayes modeling. Npj Digit. Med. 6, 5 (2023). Https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-022-00727-1

This article is from the official Wechat account: bring Science Home (ID:steamforkids), author: everything Magazine

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