Heroes Not Zombies

I made up a wee mindmap of virtues for myself which I pasted into the front page of my moleskine. I survey it every morning so I can have one of the virtues, or areas of virtues, in my mind as I go through the day. This morning I settled on the “Calm” area – slow, silence and tranquillity are my three virtues there, so imagine my surprise when I see this article in the Guardian as I travel through to Glasgow on the train.

Coronary heart disease caused 101,000 deaths in the UK in 2006, and the study suggests that 3,030 of these are caused by chronic noise exposure, including to daytime traffic.

This is quite astonishing. I know that noise can be really irritating but I hadn’t thought through the idea that chronic noise levels induce chronic inflammatory (“stress”) responses in the body that might actually lead to death from heart disease!

So, tranquillity and silence turn out to be even more important than I had realised.