Upstairs Neighbors Sensitivity - Coping Strategies?

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For now I'm living in a rented apartment part of a townhouse in quite a central area. I'm happy where I am and been here over a year but one of my ongoing life stresses is the neighbours above me.

They are a couple in early 20s like me and actually I have good relationship with them mostly (had drinks with them before) but in recent months their sounds and noise above has really got to me for some reason.
The floorboards above very creaky, they often play loud music and the sound of them being a couple disturbs me deeply, because I've not been in a relationship before but hoping change that. They are extroverted and have loud people over more now restrictions are less. Sometimes I think they make noise to disturb me personally, but I've identified that as rigid thinking.

One day I felt very overloaded after coming back from a walk and they were playing loud music and I shouted really loudly and sure they could have heard it.

I've considered possibly moving to a top floor apartment instead but I wondered what coping strategies I could implement so I didn't have to move, so I can overcome my stress. Any ideas? I've recently got some earplugs.

I'm sorry I don't have any advice, but I have sympathy. I live below an older woman and yes she may be rather reserved and doesn't have many visitors, but she is still bloody noisy. She is an obsessive cleaner and she doesn't have carpets, and every floorboard creaks, so you know exactly which room she's in. She is literally always on her feet all day - and all night because she's an insomniac - and for some reason she moves furniture a lot and is always vacuuming. One time when I had the flu she seemed to be doing some very noisy activity in the room above the bedroom where I was trying to rest, and all the banging of feet to and fro just painfully went through my head.

If your distress is primarily cognitive (meaning you mainly just dislike the idea of the noise), you can try changing the way you think about it (not focusing on your lack of an intimate life, for example), as well as asking them to play music and have guests less often or at certain parts of the day only.

If your distress is primarily sensory, don't bother with "coping" unless you want these people effectively controlling when and for how long you wear ear plugs and to have to deal with random sensory overload. Just move. Even if they stop with the music, nothing is going to stop the floorboards from creaking.

If you have the option of moving to a top floor apartment I would consider taking it. I'm not sure that the noise can get better. If you ask them to keep it down it might just erode your friendly relationship with them and probably won't lead to an improvement in the noise, especially not the creaky floorboards, which, as starkid mentioned, they can't really help.

Otherwise, you might try masking some of the noise with a fan, or a white noise machine. Or if there is music you like, that doesn't bother you as much, maybe play it to drown theirs out.

You could try meditation to try to cope with the stress of the noise, but I'm not very optimistic that it would work.

Making use of "white noise" relaxing ambient background music might help as suggested by Bee. I use music to drown out the sounds of any nearby noises such as vacuuming, angle grinders, barking dogs, other music etc. The I am able to focus on my writing or whatever else I'm up to.

I used to live in noisy buildings, I'm definitely not the best at dealing with unexpected sounds, but I have found a few suggestions that did help to some extent.

I recommend noise cancelling headphones, I finally broke down and bought a decent pair a year ago. They help me a lot with concentration and keeping calm when there is a lot of noise. I also suggest an air purifier, fan, or white noise machine with various settings to help drown out noise at various sound levels.

I also tried to think about the noises differently or to simply ignore them, but this never really worked that well. If I was ever successful at ignoring the sounds it never lasted for more than a few days. Usually someone would visit, point out the sound, and then I have to work at ignoring the sounds all over again lol