I've been living in apartments/condos since 2000, and I've never really considered myself overly noise sensitive... that is, until I moved into this condo in 2008. Bear with me, because this is a little long:

I found soon after I moved in that my neighbor had a son who had his bedroom next to our adjoining wall, and he would play the drums, which is just about the loudest instrument possible. We fought about this quite a bit until I finally called the police, and I haven't heard any drumming since. It goes without saying though that those neighbors and I are not on good terms.

Even though the drumming has stopped, I found I'd developed a level of noise anxiety I've never had. Any noise coming from their unit would bother me. If I heard them in the corridor, I would get anxious. If I heard that son just jumping around a bit or making noise that I could hear, I would get anxious. No sane person would ever consider the noises I hear to be malicious in any way, but they still gave me anxiety attacks... and it was about to get worse.

The way my condo is situated, my living is above the garage of another unit. The owners of that unit are a very nice couple, and I got along with them fine, and we've never had any problems. However, they recently moved out and rented their unit to the brother-in-law of my neighbor. We haven't had any interactions, but I'm pretty sure that since they're related to my neighbors, they can't be too fond of me neither.

But now when these new neighbors use their garage and I hear their car doors close and other random thuds, I can feel my heart rate go up and I get anxious. Again, they're not doing anything deliberately malicious, but any noise related to them just gets me going (e.g. if I can hear their voices in the hall, or hear their screen door slamming, etc etc).

The thing is, I know this is an issue with me because when garage downstairs belonged to the previous owners (the ones I got along with), I never thought twice about it. Also, when I hear other neighbors go on with their lives and make random noises, it doesn't affect me at all. It's the fact that my formerly drum-playing neighbors and I are on such bad terms that it's coloring everything they do as possibly malicious, and putting me on a constant state of anticipation.

What can I do to snap myself out of this state? I hate dreading having to come home.