Shoutbox

As said, in a lab you can probably do this fine... I believe the noise cancelling headphones work by using a microphone to capture input, invert it to create an anti-phase sound then add it to the output sound from the music device.

In my opinion these things are probably dangerous, you'll see kids with them in a couple of years walking across roads getting killed because they don't look and can't even hear the cars coming.

Anyway, going back on topic - my advice would just be to find some calming music and play it really loud - it's what I do when I'm studying, although you need to find new songs every now and then, because you begin to follow the song in your mind making it more of a distraction.