The Door Sign You Need For Lowering Your Cortisol

There’s nothing worse than things that up your cortisol. 

You know what I mean – the alarm that goes off & pierces through the room, when the dogs bark an octave too high, or when someone’s text message notifications go off a million times…

But really, it’s like nails on a chalkboard.

Also just to go off on a little tangent: I can’t handle when people chew apples. This is very annoying because Zaza is obsessed with apple right now. She’ll take a huge chomp out of an entire apple & I can hardly bear it. LOL. 

Anyway, you get the point. Cortisol-inducing sounds are everywhere. Especially in 2022. You can’t get away from them because people expect accessibility 24/7.

When we lived in LA there were cortisoly sounds everywhere. Horns, sirens, helicopters, it was too much. One of my goals in Austin was to eliminate as many annoying sounds as I could. It sounds psycho but these little changes eventually lead to a big difference.

In fact, my friend Ingrid changed her doorbell to play Beethoven’s Für Elise & I thought it was genius.

As we were moving into the Austin house, we were getting so many orders, especially from Amazon, & the influx was causing the doorbell to ring every 5 seconds.  

Sidenote: stalk all my grounding, kitchen must-haves that help me stay organized here.

The Door Sign You Need For Lowering Your Cortisol

To nip this in the bud I needed to find something that said ‘please don’t’ but also be warm & nice. No reason to be rude about it, right?

After looking online for about half an hour I found this beautiful wood sign with black letter that says:

Extra bonus that it’s from a small business on Etsy & they’re custom made. You guys went wild when I posted it on Instagram so I guess a lot of you are in the same boat?

When I was reading Untamed by Glennon Doyle ( whose episode on TSC HIM & HER is incredible ), she spoke a bit about the doorbell & what it does. If you haven’t read Untamed yet, you have to, but here is what Glennon hilariously said about it:

“It take me a solid minute to understand: The siren is the doorbell. A person is ringing my doorbell. I run out of my office to find my children also stunned, frozen, and waiting for direction on how to respond to this imminent home invasion. We stare at each other, count bodies, and collectively cycle through 5 stages of doorbell grief.”

Basically, yes, hearing your doorbell ring is invasive.

I just think if you can put boundaries around little areas of your life like this it can be really beneficial. Things like turning off your phone notifications, having a text sound that’s more calming, & using the bedtime app on your phone which looks like this:

You set it up in the Health app on your iPhone & it wakes you up nice & gradually instead of some jarring alarm sound.

Also, when someone is texting, that typing sound on the keyboard should 100% be turned off.

Other tips are to surround yourself with positive people who are uplifting, use noise-cancelling headphones ( I use them for meditation, breathwork, listening to healing frequencies & to be alone with my thoughts ).

Like I said, we live in this world where everyone expects access to you all the time. Between the TV, the phone, the doorbell, the baby crying, the dogs barking, it’s just too much stimulus. We need some silence to be alone with our thoughts.

The most self-aware people are the ones who are able to just sit & be with themselves. Meditation helps me with this, but a lot of people do it with walking or putting aside thinking time ( I even put thinking time in my calendar ). Bill Gates does a thinking week!

Try it.

It’ll make you so self-aware & help you gain so much clarity. This post is about a doorbell sign but it’s also about other ways to protect your peace.

So, have you ever seen a blogger dedicate a whole post to a door sign? But here we are.

Highly recommend getting one of these, especially if you have babies who nap or dogs who bark, or you could always just install a Beethoven doorbell like Ingrid.

Well, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. Lol.

x, lauryn

+ lower your cortisol with sound bowls & red light bulbs.

++ scope the benefits of meditation & how to get started.

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