I am extremely affected by outdoors noise during sleep. Traffic, construction, kids crying, people shouting..
I try my best to convince myself "I'm perfectly comfortable, nothing's happening in my bedroom, whoever is causing that noise can not affect me in any way" but to no avail :(
If the source is indoors, like the whirr of a hard disk (very annoying on recent Macs + external hard disks, constantly spinning up and down) I have to turn it off before trying to sleep.
It gets so bad that even the mere anticipation of an expected noise, a clang or a honk or a yell, prevents me from falling asleep. For me it's definitely psychological than physical. Sort of an arrogant insistence that everyone and everything should be silent while I rest.
Thankfully when I'm really tired I stop caring about noise and just drop like a log.
Start using a white nor brown noise machine. Noise issues like this are typically because the noise has lots of variation in volume, spikes in loudness, etc. The steady droning of a white or brown noise drowns out lots of that kind of background noise. I just use my phone, lots of free apps available. Ear plugs help too, though they can be irritating sometimes.
Oh man, I know that feeling of dread as you're waiting for the next shout or clank. It took some time to try out various earplugs, which at first made me sleep even worse, but once I was used to wearing them while sleeping (after 2 weeks) the difference was night and day.
I try my best to convince myself "I'm perfectly comfortable, nothing's happening in my bedroom, whoever is causing that noise can not affect me in any way" but to no avail :(
If the source is indoors, like the whirr of a hard disk (very annoying on recent Macs + external hard disks, constantly spinning up and down) I have to turn it off before trying to sleep.
It gets so bad that even the mere anticipation of an expected noise, a clang or a honk or a yell, prevents me from falling asleep. For me it's definitely psychological than physical. Sort of an arrogant insistence that everyone and everything should be silent while I rest.
Thankfully when I'm really tired I stop caring about noise and just drop like a log.