How to Find Inner Silence Amid Noise
Try to remember the last time you sat in silence. Was it a pleasant experience or was being alone with your thoughts challenging?
In a world where we are constantly bombarded by noise and stimulation, holding space for silence can help reduce stress, boost creativity, and increase focus and concentration.
But silence is much more than the absence of auditory noise.
What is Noise?
I recently listened to a wonderful podcast episode, entitled “The Happiness of Silence” by Psychologist Dr. Laurie Santos. It explores the benefits of quiet in our lives and how we can foster silence, but starts with asking the question, “What is noise?”.
They identify three types of noise. The first is auditory — the chatter of conversation, the honking and screeching of cars, the clacking of shoes on pavement. We live with the creaking machinery of our cities.
The second type of noise is informational. In an “attention” economy where major corporations, the media, and advertisers all compete for a share of our interest, the goal is to draw and keep eyes on their products. Researchers have found that people switch between different online content every nineteen seconds. We drink from a fire hose of information.
The third type of noise is inner chatter. Our mind generates an endless flow of thoughts, like a butterfly flying from one flower to another. Psychologists estimate we have over 6,000 thoughts each day. This inner noise is sometimes louder than any auditory sound.
While silence may start with minimizing auditory noise, inner quiet is just as important for our mental health.
Inner Chatter Often Loudest
David Foster Wallace wrote on modern life, “Everything is so fast, and the faster things go the more we feed that part of ourselves, but don’t feed the part of our selves that likes quiet; that can live in quiet.” We must carve out space for silence, but also need to comfortable living in quiet.
One of the reasons we prefer to fill our lives with noise is that silence can make us uneasy. Research has found that being left alone with our thoughts and feelings, without anything diverting our attention away, can be an extremely unpleasant experience.
In a 2014 study published in Science, the authors explored individuals ability to sit alone and engage in conscious thought. They found that college-student participants did not enjoy spending even 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think. The experience was “so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock they had earlier said they would pay to avoid”. People would rather do something rather than nothing, even if it was negative stimulation.
A potential implication from this experiment is that one of the functions of noise is to mask even more painful feelings or ruminative thought loops. Rumination is problem-solving gone awry. Rather than putting mental effort toward solvable, concrete challenges, our mind takes up stewing on unsolvable problems.
During rumination, the mind is far from silent — our inner monologue is working overtime but not getting us anywhere.
Learning to Live in Silence
Nurturing inner silence isn’t easy, but there are several approaches you can try backed by evidence.
The first is finding activities where a flow state can occur. Flow can be achieved when we’re completely immersed in doing something we love, whether that’s playing the piano, making art, or writing. A signature feature of flow is the lack of space for self-referential thought. You’re no longer talking to yourself about yourself. Our attention becomes absorbed in the activity at hand and we lose ourselves in the moment. Being in a state of flow has been shown to quiet our inner monologue and rumination.
Capturing moments of awe, a feeling we encounter when experiencing something profound, vast, or moving, can similarly create a sense of inner quiet. Awe can help dissolve our sense of self. When this happens, “internal monologues go quiet, worries and concern evaporate, you might even feel as if you’re momentarily stepping outside yourself”. Often the activities where we experience awe can be auditorily quite loud, such as the birth of a child or being moved by music, but can create a deep internal state of calm.
A meditative practice can also promote quiet by creating measurable changes in the brain regions responsible for regulating stress and anxiety and our sense of self. Researchers have found that meditation deactivates brain regions related to inner chatter, such as the default mode network (DMN) that is running when our mind ruminates. By noticing our thoughts in the present moment without wrestling with them, a meditative practice decreases worrying and overthinking.
Silence is much more than a lack of auditory or informational noise. Pausing things that make claims on our consciousness — like phones and devices, social media, and other distractions — is a good start.
But we also must cultivate inner silence, feeding the part of ourselves that’s comfortable with simply being.
