You Can Hear it in the Silence...

Silence and isolation works for me, but I understand I am in the minority... Are you someone who needs your headphones in? Or are your thoughts as entertaining to yourself as mine to me?

Photo by Christopher Sardegna on Unsplash

Oh hi friends

I started writing this substack more than a week ago and filled it with anecdotal information like being in the South of France, swimming in the Mediterranean Sea while my nieces went to school and my sister had a baby boy. But time flew by, and frankly, my ability to read, write or do anything beyond soak up the family vibes disappeared as I chose to pour all my attention into snuggling a brand new baby as the hours whiled away. A few days became a week, became a fortnight… but I have landed back in London with a bump this afternoon, still thinking about an article I read almost two weeks ago that has stayed front of mind.

The article in question was by

Embedded

- an interesting reflection on silence in an age of lost airPods… It turns out a lot of people need sound on ALL.THE.TIME… and I wondered whether you identify with the author of that post… or are more like me (the opposite… a silence lover!)

I went on a silent retreat (lost my AirPods)

Recently we’ve had to allow cast on some of our shows access to Spotify in their downtime. Silence isn’t something I have ever struggled with - I like the quiet, and I find it is really good for my imagination as well as for processing the day -or not!

My thoughts while reading that article were conflicted though. Am I the weirdo because I can read in a park, go for a walk or even sit on the tube in silence and forego headphones? I was such a late adopter of noise cancelling headphones- I picked them up last November in a Black Friday sale at Gatwick Airport on my way back to Australia. I was STUNNED when I put them on and the whole world went quiet, and then completely disappeared when my own music played. Great invention for working from home mid pandemic with other people around… but for completely blocking out the real world? Call me old fashioned, but I worry about all the ways we are isolating ourselves from each other. Turns out this is not a new worry.

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," wrote French philosopher Blaise Pascal.

In the 1600s.(!!!!!!) Before iPhones and Instagram - and this week’s newest social media drop, Threads.

If philosophers could say this 400+ years ago, maybe I really am the weirdo. Because at worst, I am neutral in silence - and at best, I really enjoy it.

A study at University of Virginia nine years ago found Doing something is better than doing nothing for most people - here’s an excerpt:

Psychologist Timothy Wilson and colleagues at U.Va. and Harvard University found that study participants from a range of ages generally did not enjoy spending even brief periods of time alone in a room with nothing to do but think, ponder or daydream. The participants, by and large, enjoyed much more doing external activities such as listening to music or using a smartphone. Some even preferred to give themselves mild electric shocks than to think.

"Those of us who enjoy some down time to just think likely find the results of this study surprising – I certainly do – but our study participants consistently demonstrated that they would rather have something to do than to have nothing other than their thoughts for even a fairly brief period of time," Wilson said.

The period of time that Wilson and his colleagues asked participants to be alone with their thoughts ranged from six to 15 minutes. Many of the first studies involved college student participants, most of whom reported that this "thinking period" wasn't very enjoyable and that it was hard to concentrate. So Wilson conducted another study with participants from a broad selection of backgrounds, ranging in age from 18 to 77, and found essentially the same results.

"That was surprising – that even older people did not show any particular fondness for being alone thinking," Wilson said.

Look. I was surprised by this too - despite having had a housemate who needed to have a DVD playing as she slept, and knowing that silence is used as a form of challenge or torture on TV programmes like I’m a Celebrity and SAS Who Dares Wins, when someone is locked underground in silence. (Ok - on Celeb you are likely sharing a grave space with snakes and cockroaches!) but that form of torture on SAS is one of the final hurdles- yet the one I have always thought was the easiest. So I went down a rabbit warren of reading Oliver Burkeman’s old columns in the Guardian to get a bit more insight into the routes we should take to care for our mental wellbeing. I will not in any way say I have this nailed, but I do know that for me it is a priority that I have to feel safe in my own head. And that kindness has been cultivated over time and is still so far from kind by external standards.

From the vantage point of holidays and shiny happy instagram reels, sometimes it is easy to forget (or maybe we didn’t know each other then!) but I was in therapy for 18 months with severe PTSD. Diagnosed actual PTSD, not instagram self-assessment. I know what it is like to have an unsafe mind, and I have found myself sobbing in a doctor’s chair, genuinely convinced I must be having a psychotic break when outside influences tried to convince me things hadn’t happened in the way I remembered. I would hope to never give anyone a lecture in pulling themselves up by the bootstraps - because LIFE IS HARD… and the truth is that after my counselling ended, I was then offered more for a reflective study so that the team of people who helped nurture me through to recovery could try and understand how I was somehow the only woman on their East London caseload that got better during covid, not worse.

I get that it isn’t an easy ride.

But the way I got better, genuinely, was sitting inside all my thoughts. Pulling them apart. Reliving the flashbacks, having weekly therapy, doing my breathing exercises, staring at those awful thoughts and beliefs and worries in the face, journalling, sobbing my guts out, avoiding alcohol, cutting out people who couldn’t support me, learning how to communicate my needs, going to church and hiding on the back row (and being very selective about who I opened up to there) not going many other places… silence, silence, silence. I had to get to a point where my mind was in alignment - it wasn’t lying to me, it wasn’t fighting to protect me, it wasn’t shoving memories into my consciousness or trapping me in a loop. And that meant sometimes I had to take the headphones out and sit in the thoughts. I can’t fix much for anyone else, but if “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," I can keep choosing to take the time to calm any of the inner voices and challenge you too, to see if you can face your own solitude for a few moments each day?

PS. I promise my head is a jungle. I’ll overthink posting this, did I offend anyone, did I explain myself enough, was what I said about those dark days vague enough, or too vague… gosh do I sound smug, I didn’t mean to sound smug, should I have put in that anecdote about the guy who would call for four hours a night, or was it right you edited it out, how vulnerable should you be on here - Substack is for clever people etc etc etc. So the top line (or bottom, based on its location) is this. Life is too short to be at war with yourself when it is just you and your mind in a room. I hope you can find the joy, or at least the neutral in those moments… and not long for an electric shock instead, like those in the experiment.

Please, don’t leave me here in a silent rambling void. Drop a like, or a comment below.

Bec x