On silence, the body that has something to tell us, and the courage to listen

Imagine sitting in an empty room for a quarter of an hour. No phone. No book. No music. No one else. Just you and your thoughts.

For a great many people, that doesn’t sound like rest. It sounds like a punishment.

In 2014, the psychologist Timothy Wilson ran a series of studies asking people to do exactly this. Many found it so unpleasant that they would rather give themselves a mild electric shock than sit quietly with their own thoughts (Wilson et al., 2014). (I wrote about this remarkable experiment in more detail in an earlier piece — if it intrigues you, you can read it there.)

But in this article I want to ask a different question. Not: how are we being manipulated? Something more personal, and gentler:

Why has rest — real rest, without stimulation — become unbearable for so many of us? And what are we missing because of it?

What happens when everything goes quiet

Our brain is not a machine that switches off when there is nothing to do. Quite the opposite. When we stop taking in stimulation — no screen, no sound, no task — a particular network in the brain actually becomes more active. Scientists call it the default mode network — in plain language, the “setting the brain falls into when it has nothing in particular to do.” In that setting the mind begins to wander: it pulls up memories, reflects on ourselves, works through feelings, looks ahead, looks back.

And that is where the discomfort lives. When we grow quiet, the things we have kept at bay all day with busyness start to surface. Unprocessed feelings. Worries. Questions we would rather not ask. The voice that wonders: am I actually on the right path?

We think we are fleeing the silence. But that is not true. We are fleeing what rises up in the silence. The silence itself is innocent. It is what it makes visible that frightens us.

Why this is harder now than ever

People have always had moments of emptiness. Waiting for the bus. A queue at the shop. The moment before sleep. A walk with no destination. Once, those were little islands of quiet, built into the day whether we wanted them or not.

Today we carry in our pocket a device that can fill every one of those islands. No waiting moment need ever be empty again. No queue, no waiting room, no quiet moment before sleep. The instant emptiness threatens, we fill it — with scrolling, with videos, with news, with other people’s lives.

A small chemical in our brain plays a part here: dopamine. Dopamine is not so much the chemical of pleasure as of anticipation — it is what keeps us wanting something new, something next. Every notification, every fresh video, every new bit of stimulation gives a little dopamine signal: more, more, more. The device is designed precisely to play on this system. And the more we give in, the more our brain grows used to constant stimulation — and the more unbearable ordinary silence becomes.

So it is not that we as people have grown weaker. It is that the stimulation has grown stronger, cleverer, and always present. We are not broken. We are overstimulated.

Does this mean the person who can be alone is the strongest?

Here I want to be honest, because this is a question that easily goes wrong.

It would be tempting to say: “whoever can sit alone with their thoughts has won, is the strongest, is happy.” But that is not true, and it is a dangerous thought.

On social media you see it often: videos of people radiating that they are perfectly happy alone, need no one, are flawlessly at peace. Do not believe that image too quickly. It is often staged, idealised — a single snapshot sold as the whole truth. A human being who truly needs no one does not exist — because people are social creatures, and connection is not a weakness but a foundation of our existence. Chronic loneliness is even demonstrably harmful to health: a large meta-analysis found that loneliness and social isolation raise the risk of early death by roughly a quarter to a third, comparable to other well-established risk factors (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015).

Being able to be alone, then, is not the same as “needing no one.” And it is certainly no reason to look down on those who find it harder.

So what is true? This:

The healthiest person can do both. Be alone and connect. And chooses people out of freedom, not out of fear of the emptiness.

The capacity to be alone without panicking is a sign of a stable inner foundation — the psychiatrist Anthony Storr wrote a whole book about it (Solitude: A Return to the Self, 1988). But the goal is not to become a loner who needs no one. The goal is to be able to bear the silence and to love people. Not one or the other. Both.

What your body is trying to tell you

Here comes the loveliest part, and the part I really want to leave you with.

When you do not flee the silence but stay in it a little while, something happens. You begin to notice things that lay hidden beneath the stimulation all day. Your breathing. The tension in your shoulders. A tiredness you had not allowed yourself to feel. Or the opposite: a calm, a contentment, a small happiness that needs no reason.

There is a scientific word for the ability to notice the signals of your own body: interoception. In plain language it is your “inner hearing” — the ability to listen inward and feel what is happening in your body: your heartbeat, your breathing, hunger, tiredness, tension, ease.

Just as your eyes look outward, interoception looks inward. And like any other sense, you can train it. People who are good at interoception, who can listen well to their bodies, tend in research to be more emotionally stable and to make better decisions. Because your body knows things before your mind does. The knot in your stomach before a decision that is not right. The tiredness that says: rest now, before you collapse. The calm that says: this is good, stay here.

But you can only use this inner hearing if you are quiet enough, now and then, to listen. In constant stimulation, the noise drowns out the voice of your body. The silence is not empty — the silence is precisely where your body can finally be heard.

My own small ritual

I want to tell you something that works for me — not as a prescription, but as an example.

At the weekend I leave my phone in my bedside drawer until halfway through the morning. It stays there. No scrolling when I wake, no news, no messages, no notifications hijacking my morning before it has begun.

And I cannot tell you how productive I am then. How clear my head is. How much I get done, how much I notice, how much calm I feel. Those few hours without stimulation at the start of the day are often worth more than the rest of the day put together.

The curious thing is: at first it felt uncomfortable. My hand reached automatically for the phone. But after a few weeks it became something I looked forward to. The silence went from threat to gift.

How to begin — small and gentle

This is not a call to become a hermit or throw your phone away. It is an invitation to win back small moments of silence. A few ways to begin:

1. Take rest where you get the chance. Not as a grand exercise, but in the small moments that are already there. The queue at the till. Waiting for the kettle. The first minutes after waking. Let one empty moment a day be truly empty.

2. Listen to your breathing. The simplest anchor there is. You need not do anything special, only notice: I breathe in, I breathe out. For a few breaths. Your body does the rest.

3. When you are outside, listen to the outside. The birds. The wind in the trees. The rain on the window. These sounds ask nothing of you, sell you nothing, want nothing from you. They are simply there, and they cost nothing to notice. It is one of the purest forms of rest there is.

4. Begin by putting your phone away for one moment a day. Not all day. Not forever. Just one moment — the first hours of the morning, or the last half hour before sleep. See what happens. Be curious rather than strict.

5. Be kind to yourself when it feels uncomfortable. At first the silence will feel strange. Your hand will reach for the phone. That is normal — the research proved that almost everyone feels this. The discomfort is not a sign that you are failing. It is a sign that you are learning something new.

In closing

Rest has not become unbearable because we are weak. Rest has become unbearable because we have forgotten how it feels, and because everything around us is built to keep us forgetting.

But it is not lost. It is waiting. In every empty moment you do not immediately fill. In every breath you pause to notice. In the sound of rain you let in rather than click away.

You do not have to conquer the silence like a strong loner who needs no one. You only have to let it in now and then — softly, curiously, like an old friend you have not seen in a while. And to listen to what your body, in that silence, has been wanting to say all along.

When were you last quiet for a few minutes — truly quiet, without stimulation — and what would your body tell you if you gave it the chance?

No demanding exercise. Just a question to carry with you, into the next silence you allow yourself.

Related reading

• Yesterday Is History: The Science of Letting Go
• The Desire Path in Your Mind
• Discipline Doesn’t Begin with Making the Bed

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Sources

• Wilson, T. D., Reinhard, D. A., Westgate, E. C., Gilbert, D. T., Ellerbeck, N., Hahn, C., Brown, C. L., & Shaked, A. (2014). Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind. Science, 345(6192), 75–77. (via PubMed — DOI)
• Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: A meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227–237. (via PubMed — DOI)
• Storr, A. (1988). Solitude: A Return to the Self. Free Press.