tl;dr - White noise all the time and lots of it, not just your phones tiny speaker. You cant control your neighbor but you can control if your apt is silent or not. Silent apt + noisy neighbor = nightmare.
My upstairs neighbors are nice people but they walk like water buffalo. And I think they must not have a couch because they walk for hours on end.
For months this drove me insane. Can't focus, can't sleep, can't relax. Using headphones helped a lot but then I felt like a prisoner in my own apt.
Then I learned the fix : white noise. White noise everywhere. Right now I have the fan over my oven on in the kitchen, in the living room a small alarm clock tuned to FM static, and in my bedroom a big stereo turned to FM static.
Then on top of the white noise you play some music or netflix, etc. This really helps a ton. Just watching TV isn't enough, TV has a lot of silence in it. Gotta create a nice base layer of white noise. Now I can sleep and am much much more relaxed.
You will still hear them some, but it should improve your situation a bit.
