Is there a polite way to ask her to shut up?

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Dear Hera,

How do I politely tell a complete stranger their nose has ruined my life?

I live in a downstairs unit beneath a woman whose nasal passages start singing precisely from 10pm – 5am.

Every night, sometime between “I’m just going to read one chapter” and “I’ve reached a new acute level of rage”, she begins snoring. The sort of snoring I can hear over the fire crackles of my newly acquired white noise app.

I’ve tried everything. Earplugs. White noise. Ocean sounds. Yelling. Throttling a tennis ball at the ceiling, but that just wakes me up further.

My white noise app now sits at 3/4 volume, which just defeats the purpose of being able to quietly slip away into slumber. I can still hear her. I told my landlord, not sure what I was hoping for, he was sympathetic but basically shrugged and said there wasn’t much he could do. Fair.

I’ve scoured Reddit threads which just get violent and at the end of the day I just want to sleep. Any tactic that requires me exerting more force at the ceiling to stop her slumber results in more time lost for my heart rate to go down, and then to sleep. At this point I’ve lost weeks of sleeping. Unfortunately it’s been a particularly dry winter in Auckland so no such rain, lightning or other natural ambient sound has aided in my sleep.

I’m sick of structuring my life around her REM cycle. Is there a socially acceptable solution here? 

Sleepless in Sandringham

Dear Sleepless in Sandringham,

I can see from the timestamp on your email this letter was sent in a fit of nocturnal despair. 

I feel for you. Sleep deprivation is a form of torture, and your increasingly homicidal mood is perfectly relatable, if not legally recommended. But you may be fighting a losing battle. While you haven’t done anything to deserve this unending midnight torment, people are legally entitled to sleep in their own apartments, no matter how deviated their septums, and besides investing in state-of-the-art earplugs, there’s not much you can do. 

It’s not your fault, but it’s arguably not your neighbour’s fault either. They may not know their snoring is an issue. They may know, but not care. Is this selfish? Maybe. But when you live in an apartment you have to accept a certain amount of ambient noise from the strangers sharing your walls. Obviously it’s best to try and be considerate, but people have wildly different noise sensitivities and expectations about what constitutes reasonable hooting and hollering. I’ve lived beneath heavy steppers, operatic climaxers, amateur German karaoke enthusiasts who lived for the dulcet tones of Bon Jovi and alcoholics who called the ambulance several times a week, so I’m not unsympathetic to your pain. I’m sure I’ve unintentionally been a bad neighbour too.  But unless your neighbour is honk-shooing over the legal decibel limit, this might be the sign that apartment living is not for you. 

I’m not blaming you for being sensitive. If anyone is responsible, surely it’s the presumably shoddy insulation in your apartment. But you have to be practical. There’s no point antagonising a neighbour for an involuntary bodily response, any more than there is writing a strongly worded letter to the zoo, asking if they can ask the baboons to keep the howling down.

If this person was your spouse, there would be a meaningful personal incentive for them to try to find a reasonable workaround, because you could always threaten to divorce them. But considering your only interaction with this neighbour is yelling and throwing tennis balls at the ceiling in the middle of the night, they may be less inclined to compromise. 

This topic is divisive and always drives people in the comments section insane, and I’m sure many readers will be quick to point out that your neighbour probably has debilitating sleep apnea that could kill her at any moment, so it’s your moral responsibility to stuff sleep clinic pamphlets in her letter box to prevent a lifetime of oxygen deprivation. 

I’m not saying you can’t try to have a conversation. But sleep studies are expensive, and a lot of people balk at the idea of having a cumbersome breathing apparatus strapped to their face every night. Ultimately, you have to accept that if your neighbour doesn’t feel inspired to fix their problem, you will have to find your own workaround, if you ever want to sleep through the night.

It sounds like you’ve tried a lot of different solutions already, but just in case, here are some other things you might consider, if you haven’t already:

• Moving your bed to another room or wall (if you have another room)
• Trying one of those bluetooth headbands
• Trying brown noise instead of white (can be better for masking low, rumbling frequencies)
• Buying an industrial fan
• Adjusting your bedtime to before the snoring begins
• Trying to improve the insulation situation
• Ask your landlord to improve the insulation (lol)
• Ask your landlord if you can move into another apartment in the complex
• Ask your landlord if you can break the lease early

I’m sure the commenters will have other solutions to offer.

You can certainly have a go at bringing it up with your neighbour. If I were you, I’d opt for a polite note, rather than a face-to-face conversation, as it’s less humiliating for your neighbour, and will allow you to moderate your irritation. The kinder you can make the note, the more effective it’s likely to be. If I were you, I’d send a craven and sycophantic box of treats alongside my plaintive missive, because you catch more flies with honey than Raid Maximum Overkill Bug Annihilator.

In the note, you could state the problem and ask if they’d be willing to find a solutions. If it’s an insulation problem, you could ask them to use a rug or you could pretend to have a PhD in sleep diseases and tell them you’ve detected an audible abnormality in their sleep cycle which, if left untreated, can lead to spontaneous aortic combustion. But it’s an awkward conversation at the best of times, and a lifelong snoring problem often takes trial and error to address, so even if they’re willing to make some changes, it’s unlikely to be an overnight fix. 

But in the end, if none of these solutions work, and your neighbour continues to play the devil’s bagpipes, moving house might simply be the best solution.