Hi, it's Andy here and welcome to Radio Headspace. Welcome to Friday, the end of the week.

I was chatting with a good friend the other day. I'm not going to say who it was because

they have neighbours and because it's about the neighbours. But they had particularly

sort of noisy neighbours and they were telling me about how difficult it had become living at home,

especially in lockdown. Always feeling like their noise, the neighbours' noise was part of their

noise, their life was part of their life and it all had become very sort of complicated.

He was saying sort of how often he had started to almost listen for sounds coming from next door,

not in a sort of glass against the wall, listen kind of way, but just in his mind, almost like he

was on alert the whole time, just waiting to sort of hear something. It really reminded me of what we

do in the mind so often, which is to go back to those places that frustrate us or that we find

difficult, almost to sort of keep the story going to keep the emotion alive. It's not always

intentional, it's just something we do. We might even do it if we have some discomfort in the body,

continually going back to that place in our mind to remind ourselves of just how uncomfortable it is.

And he reminded me of when we had young children and what we still have young children,

they're only three and five, but it feels like they've been around forever in a good way.

And if I think back to when they were babies, you'll know if you've gone through this,

babies cry a lot in the night. And after a while, you hear those cries so often that you don't really

know anymore what's real and what's not. It's almost as though it becomes an imprint, a groove

in the mind. And because it's not always particularly pleasant to be woken up in the night,

it's something that you're perhaps almost waiting for, anticipating in some way. And I would genuinely

sometimes have to sit up in bed, almost sort of not shake my head, but to be really clear,

that there actually there was no crying going on at all. I'd woken up because I'd been dreaming of

...