Why We Need More Silence in Our Lives
The world is a noisy place, and silence is rare, particularly in large cities, where most people are increasingly living. Yet, research shows that periods of silence are necessary for well-being and productivity.
What is Silence?
Silence has been defined as the “the condition or quality of being or keeping still and silent;” “stillness;” and “an absence of speech or noise.”
From a spiritual perspective, silence is often used as a metaphor for inner stillness. A silent mind, free from the avalanche of thoughts and activities, is both a goal and an important step in spiritual development. Many religious traditions imply the importance of being quiet and still in mind and spirit for transformative and integral spiritual growth to occur.
Our World of Noise
We are continually filling our brains with music, TV and radio news, podcasts and, of course, the multitude of sounds that we create nonstop in our own heads.
A 2011 World Health Organization report called noise pollution a “modern plague,” concluding that “there is overwhelming evidence that exposure to environmental noise has adverse effects on the health of the population.”
As our environments become louder, more people are seeking silence, whether its through meditating or going to a multiple day silent retreat.
Research has shown that noise can have a pronounced negative physical effect on our brains resulting in elevated levels of stress hormones. If you live in a consistently noisy environment that you are likely to experience chronically elevated levels of stress hormones.
A study by Gary W. Evans at Cornell University published in 2002 in Psychological Science examined the effects that the relocation of Munich’s airport had on children’s health and cognition. Evans reported that children who are exposed to noise develop a stress response that causes them to ignore the noise. These children not only ignored harmful stimuli they also ignored stimuli that they should be paying attention to such as speech.
“This study is among the strongest, probably the most definitive proof that noise — even at levels that do not produce any hearing damage — causes stress and is harmful to humans,” Evans says.
An 2004 paper by environmental psychologist Dr. Craig Zimring suggests that higher noise levels in neonatal intensive care units led to elevated blood pressure, increased heart rates and disrupted patient sleep patterns.
Another study by Jaana I. Halonen and colleagues published in the European Heart Journal looked at an alleged correlation between hearing loss and heart disease. According to the study, a steady exposure to constant noise without any breaks can lead to higher blood pressure and heart attacks.
Mathias Basner, at the University of Pennsylvania published a study in The Lancet. He reports: “In our 24/7 society, noise is pervasive and the availability of quiet places is decreasing. We need to better understand how this constant exposure to noise is impacting our overall health.” He adds: “From earbuds blasting music during subway commutes to the constant drone of traffic heard by those who live or work near congested highways to the beeping of monitors that makes up the soundtrack heard by hospital patients and staff, what we hear all day impacts many parts of our bodies.”
The Research on the Impact and Benefits of Silence
Silence is supports our overall well-being. It nurtures the mind, body and soul. In contrast the noisy world is drowning out our creativity, our inner connection and hampering our resilience.
According to a 2006 study by L. Bernadi and colleagues published in the journal Heart, two minutes of silence relieves tension in the body and brain and is more relaxing than listening to music. This was attributed to changes in blood pressure and blood circulation in the brain.
A 2013 study by Simone Kühn, Patrick Haggard, Marcel Brass published in the journal Brain Structure and Function found two hours of silence could create new cells in the hippocampus region. This is essential since the hippocampus is linked to our ability to learn, remember things, and even our emotions.
A 2015 study by David S. Black published in JAMA Internal Medicine, older adults experiencing insomnia found relief in the form of improved sleep quality and less daytime impairment after undergoing a 6-week intervention of silent mindfulness meditation.
Research by Joseph Moran and colleagues published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, found that the default mode is also used during the process of self-reflection. “When the brain rests it is able to integrate internal and external information into “a conscious workspace,” said Moran and colleagues.
When you are not distracted by noise or goal-orientated tasks, there appears to be a quiet time that allows your conscious workspace to process things. During these periods of silence, your brain has the freedom it needs to discover its place in your internal and external world.
Silence in the Workplace
One of the things I have noticed in thousands of meetings and conversations over the past 40 years of work, is how every moment is filled with conversation with virtually no space for reflective silence. You’ll notice this too with TV news hosts and guests where all the air is taken up with continuous talk, with not even a pause between sentences.
Yet research has shown that moments or minutes of silence can have a beneficial impact on productivity personal effectiveness and relationships.
New research at MIT Sloan, suggests that pausing in silence during negotiations can improve outcomes — and not only for the person who initiates the silence, but for both parties in the negotiation.
“When put on the spot to respond to a tricky question or comment, negotiators often feel as though they must reply immediately so as not to appear weak or disrupt the flow of the negotiation,” said Jared R. Curhan, who collaborated with Jennifer R. Overbeck of Melbourne Business School, Yeri Cho of the University of La Verne, Teng Zhang of Penn State Harrisburg, and Yu Yang of ShanghaiTech University.
“Our research suggests that pausing silently can be a simple yet very effective tool to help negotiators shift from fixed-pie thinking to a more reflective state of mind,” said Curhan. “This, in turn, leads to the recognition of golden opportunities to expand the proverbial pie and create value for both sides.”
The paper, “Silence is golden: Extended silence, deliberative mindset, and value creation in negotiation,” is published in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The research consists of four studies. In the first study, the research team explored the effect of silence as it occurs naturally in a negotiation.
Participants arrived at a laboratory two at a time and were randomly assigned to one of two roles — candidate or recruiter — in a negotiation simulation. The candidate and recruiter negotiated over multiple issues concerning the candidate’s employment compensation package.
Using a computer algorithm to measure intervals of silence lasting at least three seconds, the team found that periods of silence tended to precede breakthroughs in the negotiation. In fact, breakthroughs were more likely to occur after silent pauses than at any other point in the negotiation.
Three subsequent experiments looked at how people can use silence as a strategy. Again, participants were randomly assigned roles in an employment negotiation; but for these studies, at least one party was privately instructed to add silent pauses to their negotiation. The researchers found that when silence was used as a tactic, the initiator tended to adopt a deliberative mindset and was more likely to recognize opportunities for both sides to get more of what they wanted.
Curhan explained that these findings are important not only for what they showed — that silence improves outcomes — but also for what they didn’t show. “We expected that initiating silence would have a negative effect on the counterpart’s subjective value. That is, if I lapsed into silence, my counterpart probably wouldn’t feel good about the relationship with me, or about the negotiation process; it can make the experience weird or unpleasant,” he said. “We didn’t find any of that.”
Related to this, Curhan noted the study did not investigate the words that people used prior to silence, or the body language that accompanied it — in essence, the different variables that might give meaning to the silence. “You could speculate that saying, ‘Hey, can you give me a second to think through what you just said,’ and then going silent for 15 seconds would probably be less aversive than if you just went silent after being asked a question,” Curhan said. “These are details that we didn’t look at: What words and gestures do people use before they initiate a silence or during the silence that either facilitate or destroy its effects?”
Cultural norms
What one culture considers a perplexing or awkward pause, others see as a valuable moment of reflection and a sign of respect for what the last speaker has said. Research conducted at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands in Dutch and also in English found that when a silence in conversation stretched to four seconds, people started to feel unsettled.
Anglophone societies tend to be uncomfortable with silence, but communication and understanding don’t have to be verbal — pauses can hold a lot of meaning.
In contrast, a study by Haru Yamada published in Global Advances in Business and Communications Conference & Journal, business meetings found that Japanese people were happy with silences of 8.2 seconds — nearly twice as long as in Americans’ meetings.
These cultural differences are reflected in the saying in the US that ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease’ while in Japan it’s reckoned that ‘a silent man is the best one to listen to’.
In Japan, the power of silence is recognized in the concept of haragei (belly talk), which suggests that the best communication is when you don’t speak at all. “As soon as you need words there’s already a failure to understand each other so you’re repairing that failure by using words,” says Dr Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University.
The Finns — who prize privacy, reserve and the art of listening — are also happy to sit in studied thoughtfulness, says Donal Carbaugh, a professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “No-one is saying anything but everybody’s thinking. They are engaged. The frame around silence at that point can be very positive.”
Ways to Incorporate Silence into Your Life
In 2011, the Finnish Tourist Board ran a campaign that used silence as a marketing ‘product’. They sought to entice people to visit Finland and experience the beauty of this silent land. They released a series of photographs of single figures in the nature and used the slogan “Silence, Please”. A tag line was added by Simon Anholt, an international country branding consultant, “No talking, but action.”
Eva Kiviranta the manager of the social media for VisitFinland.com said: “We decided, instead of saying that it’s really empty and really quiet and nobody is talking about anything here, let’s embrace it and make it a good thing”.
Mindfulness is one of the best ways to bring stillness and silence into our lives.
Attaining mindfulness has become somewhat of a holy grail for overworked millennials. But the science is clear. People who meditate regularly over a period of many years seem to lose less grey matter than non-meditators. A recent study found that regular meditation leads to more folding of the cortex, which is responsible for fast mental processing. Meditators who practiced regularly for more than five years showed significantly larger volumes of grey matter, so meditation seems to make our brains grow.
There are retreats that promote the power of silence by refraining from reading, writing, or eye contact. One hundred scientists went on a retreat for research and found shutting off speech heightens awareness in other areas.
Other methods of supporting silence as a family:
- Going for a quiet walk around the neighborhood together.
- Drawing or painting at the kitchen table.
- Playing with Legos or blocks.
- Jigsaw puzzles.
- Putting together models or figurines.
- Making collages from old magazines or newspapers.
- Coloring in coloring books, or make colorful mandalas.
The truth is anything works, as long as it is done silently. Looking online, you can find literally thousands of ideas for people of different ages.
Using Silence at Work
In meetings resist the temptation to always say something in the conversation, and listen in silence instead. Research by Stephen Levenson published in Cognitive Sciences, shows that typically we leave just a fraction of a second between taking turns to talk. Western English speaking people tend to be most uncomfortable with long gaps in a discussion according to the research. Yet, research shows that maintaining a period of silence is a powerful conversational and negotiating strategy.
Gavin Presman director of UK-based training and development provider Inspire, says “In “Chinese negotiators are very, very aware that Americans like to fill silences and they are trained to stay silent and impassive because that will make the Americans uncomfortable and possibly make concessions without the Chinese having to do anything.”
Pausing with silence can have a powerful effect in presentations and speeches, other research shows. A classic example was when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs launched the first iPhone. “He introduced pauses so that you didn’t miss his key points. Because silence makes us nervous, our instinctive reaction is that we’d better pay attention, there’s something going on here,” says Matthew MacLachlan, of UK-based Learnlight, a language and soft skills training provider.
In my book, I Know Myself and Neither Do You, I describe how a solitude, quiet and silence are powerful forces in developing leaders’ self-awareness.
I argue: “While some would argue that it’s possible to become more self-aware during the course of our daily activities, or in the company of others, I would argue that solitude and stillness are necessary to fully achieve desirable self-awareness. Many people have lost their capacity and desire to experience solitude and stillness, and therefore, are damaging their self-awareness.
Artists, musicians, leaders and everyday people throughout history have embraced solitude, stillness and quiet as both a way of replenishing their souls and feeding their creative inspiration.
Solitude and still go hand in glove. If you’ve ever quietly and easily solved a problem in seconds or minutes that you’ve been wrestling with for weeks or months, then suddenly feel a quiet within, that’s a stillness. Or if you’ve walked alone in the park among the trees or along the beach, and feel a quiet calmness come over you, that’s stillness.
Leaders need those moments of stillness, only achieved by quiet solitude, to develop a clear sense of what action or decision to make next, particularly in a crisis. Their capacity for self-awareness expands.
Some organizations are beginning to recognize that the pressure for constant relationships behaviors in the form of meetings, electronic communication, and open offices may actually be a cause for productivity and employee well-being problems, and have moved away from these practices to product employee work time, and provide places where employees can be in solitude and quiet.”
Our world desperately needs an escape from the continuous activities accompanied by constant noise and stimulation. Cultivating the practice of silence can be one way you can do that.
