Use the G. Gordon Liddy method: just don’t mind. He once held his hand over an open flame until his flesh burned and when someone asked him what the secret was to doing that he replied “The secret is not minding”.

I would recommend getting yourself so totally engrossed in your work that you don’t notice. When I code I get so deep into it someone could smack me on the head and I wouldn’t notice.

If that doesn’t work get one of those airhorns like they have at baseball games and fire it off when people get too loud. That will get their attention!

Here too at busy times it gets really loud, with people shouting but also running, and the phone ringing constantly… sometimes I can’t concentrate at all. And I can’t even listen to music. Actually they just banned iPods and any data storage device, and also keitai (!) that can take photos.
Truly crap environment.

I’ve read that there are some people who have a neurological problem which causes them to be driven batty by voices in the situation you mention. I’m not saying you have this problem but that I’ve read about it and it could be something which is experienced on a continuum (you may have it to a moderate extent). You may be more sensitive to this than a lot of people.

Unfortunately, it’s not like you have any method of stopping it. You can’t change your biological perceptiveness levels anymore than you can just decide you’ll start hearing different frequencies of sound.

I think people who can tune things out and endure much more stimulation are experiencing life at a lower volume when it comes to their senses. There’s no “toughing it out”, there are only methods of coping. You aren’t going to build up a aural callous by tolerating it.

There’s really no way for you to control the situation from the side of your coworkers’ speaking volume. Even if you talk to them, they will probably try to keep it down for awhile but then forget and go right back to it. It won’t be intentional but they speak loudly thoughtlessly and getting them to think about it is a losing battle.

I think the only thing you can do is control what you hear rather than what they say and you’re already doing that. It’s too bad that you can’t set up a white noise machine on your desk. :-p I’m pretty sensitive to this sort of sound as well but I used to use the excuse that loud outbursts of talking (or sometimes shouting or laughing) in the office in the vicinity of my cubicle were a really big problem when I was on the phone so they had to keep it down.

You may want to try a variation on what I did. If you hear someone talking loudly, you may want to tell them you need to make a work-related call and they’re talking rather loudly. Ask if they can be quiet while you make the call and at least pretend to dial someone up (you can pretend you get no answer - the point isn’t to actually speak on the phone but to have an excuse to ask the person annoying you to keep it down). If you do that enough times with the same party, he or she may get the hint that they’re consistently loud and obnoxious. It’s a subtle way of conditioning them which has a low likelihood of socially-detrimental repurcussions.

Mike, I like your way of thinking. Not the airhorn one but just deciding to not let things bother you. A little annoyance can turn into a huge problem if you let it.

Patrick, no ipods OR keitais? Geez strict company. Are you building secret military weapons or something?

Shari, to some degree I’m like this but I don’t think it is so much wiring but rather my own conditioning. I’m very context sensitive, in other words I notice everything around me and as a result sometimes cannot keep focus. Attention deficiency syndrome to some degree. The good aspects of this are like if I’m at a gathering of many people I can listen and follow several conversations at the same time. I’m good at multitasking too. I can type an email and talk at the same time. The bad thing is that if I’m talking to someone, I also hear all the conversations around me, notice other people, at the same time and have a hard time phasing it out. If I start to pick up some peripheral activity it gains momentum and pretty soon I appear like a neurotic mess. I agree with Mike that the way to solve this is to discipline the mind to focus on the task at hand. Concentration will also gain momentum and pretty soon I won’t notice what’s around. I need to work on this a bit more.

Roy, I have the same problem. I was able to phase out the annoying noises, follow conversations and read/watch tv/work at the same time. Not anymore though, I also lost my photographic memory which sucks ’cause it made everything much easier.

What I do now to not get stressed about something is to view everything in perspective against much worse things that could happen (and have happened). That method got me through everyday annoyances, mishaps and even exams without getting stressed at all.

Hammering your eardrums with some music does help to get rid of the nasty noises though…

I came here looking for bento and by coincidence today you write about noise, my favourite topic.

Learning to ignore is great, yes. However, approximately 20% of people are more sensitive to things like this because they have significantly more nerve endings. Sometimes it’s best to respect that and rearrange things to protect yourself, when things become a serious issue.

You can also pity them a bit — they are not aware of the power of a pleasant voice, and how comfortable it is to speak well. They may have physiological/health issues they are not even yet aware of that are causing their unpleasant voices. They probably don’t know how annoying they are, and are not doing it intentionally. You can really pity them because almost certainly they do not really know the pleasure of singing.