The benefits of silence
Silence can help you avoid a top killer, tame stress, and boost your productivity.
Post summary
Humans have increased the world’s loudness four fold.
Yet we evolved in relatively silent environments and are better adapted to silence.
Living in excess noise is bad for us—it increases our risk of certain diseases, stresses us out, and harms our productivity and learning.
Silence is worth seeking, even if it’s uncomfortable at first.
We’ll dive into the science of silence and explain how to find quiet.
Housekeeping
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We have a new partner, Jaspr air purifiers. You might recognize their name from our coverage of the easiest ways to avoid microplastics and our Holiday Gear Not Stuff Gift Guide. Their founder and I became friends after I started using Jaspr in my home and covering them on Two Percent. I’m psyched because I think using a Jaspr is arguably the easiest thing you can do to improve your health—all you have to do is plug it in and remember to breathe. Having a Jaspr in my room definitely improved my sleep, and I love watching the Jaspr in our kitchen kick on and filter our air after my frequent cooking disasters.
Audio/podcast version
The post
Let’s begin this week’s newsletter with a short task.
Sit silent and listen to the sounds around you. Really investigate each noise. Focus all your mental energy on becoming aware of the layers of sound around you.
Do this now for 60 seconds. Go.
What did you hear?
I had you do that so I could tell you this: Humans now live in more noise than ever.
I recently did that task on my back patio and heard cars driving in the distance, landscaping tools, a plane flying overhead, and my neighbor’s dog barking. And I’m on the edge of a desert—not in the middle of a city.
Life is suddenly loud. Really loud.
The Harvard anthropologist Daniel Lieberman told me that humans have removed many sensory inputs from our environments over time.
For example, we feel fewer temperature swings because we live and work in temperature-controlled buildings. We wear shoes, so our feet feel less. We smell less because we rarely have to smell food to determine if it’s safe (and what we do smell is generally pleasant, like hand soap), etc.
But he said this rule does not hold for our hearing.
Scientists at the University of Michigan say that more than 100 million Americans live in noise levels louder than you’d hear standing next to a working washing machine or dishwasher. That’s 70 decibels.
There are now only 12 places in the Lower 48 states where you can sit for 15 minutes and not hear a single noise created by humans.
How our bodies react to noise
Humans evolved in a much quieter noisescape. For example, when I spent a month in the Arctic backcountry, it was so silent that I could hear my heart beating.
Our sounds came from nature. Loud noises usually signaled trouble—like a predator’s or enemy’s roar, the booms of a violent storm, or the crash of a rock slide.
We evolved to associate loudness with danger, which is why we still spook at the sound of an unexpected loud noise.
Our bodies react to loud noises by releasing adrenaline and cortisol, stress hormones that kick on the fight or flight response. These doses of noise-induced stress hormones used to be infrequent but lifesaving.
Today’s jarring background noises can spur the same fight-or-flight response. But the difference is that these noises are nearly constant. This makes our hormones behave like slow-dripping water torture. Constant noise stresses us out.
Noise = Stress = Sickness
Marinating in our noise-induced has consequences. In fact, the world’s number one killer, heart disease, isn’t just a consequence of too much food and not enough movement.
The World Health Organization found that our exposure to a constant stream of decibels may be taking years off of our lives.
They discovered, “exposure to traffic noise is responsible for a loss of more than 1.5 million healthy life years per year in Western Europe alone, a major part being related to annoyance, cognitive impairment, and sleep disturbance.” They estimated noise was responsible for nearly 2,000 heart attack deaths in Europe.
This is because noise pollution can elevate stress levels, and stress contributes to heart disease. Another study found that every 4-decibel increase in average noise exposure was associated with a four percent increase in heart attacks and strokes.
Noise pollution can also impact our mental health. Other research shows anti-anxiety medication use rises a relative 28 percent for every 10-decibel increase a neighborhood experiences. People who live near loud roads are 25 percent more likely to be depressed.
Background noise impairs our attention, memory, learning, and interactions with others.
For example:
Kids who go to school near a noisy traffic zone have have 15 percent lower memory development than kids who attend quieter schools.
Workers in louder offices are less productive, even though they don’t realize it.
The relationship between noise and health is complicated and has many variables.
For example, people who live in a lot of noise may also live in more air pollution, exercise less, have fewer financial and medical resources, and so on. But loudness, the researchers all believe, plays some role in their poor health outcomes.
Silence is uncomfortable at first—but beneficial in the long run
We’ve become so used to living with noise that most of us now find comfort in constant blare, according to a scientist in Australia.
The researcher had hundreds of students spend a little time in the quiet and write about their experiences. Nearly every student said the silence made them uneasy.
“The lack of noise made me uncomfortable, it actually seemed foreboding,” wrote one student. “Perhaps because media consistently surrounds us today, we have a fear of peace and quiet,” wrote another.
Another survey found that Americans increasingly see the TV not as an entertainment device but as a companion. More than half of us keep the TV on while we work, cook, and do chores because we feel uncomfortable in silence.
Silence-induced discomfort is a new, learned behavior, those Australian scientists think.
Seek silence
Silence is worth seeking, even if it’s uncomfortable at first—and increasingly hard to find.
We know that seeking the everyday silence that comes from shutting off devices can benefit our brains and bodies.
Scientists found that two hours of the type of quiet we can find at home produces more cells in an area of the brain that fights depression. (If you live in a city and want to try this, perhaps wear earplugs or noise-canceling headphones.)
The study showed that at-home silence was more calming than listening to Mozart. Other research found that two minutes of silence led to bigger drops in measures of relaxation, like blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing rate compared to a handful of other popular relaxation techniques.
Yes, silence is more relaxing than most “relaxation” products marketers try to sell us.
Have fun, don’t die, listen up …
-Michael
Partnered with Jaspr
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FWIW, if I were president my first order of business would be to ban gas-powered leaf blowers. They're the bane of my existence. Lol.
Fascinating! And so true. I find when I'm in the mountains, it's amazing to just sit and listen to the wind in the pines and the black capped chickadees. I can feel my blood pressure dropping.