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Why You Should Spend Time In Silence
The noise is driving you nuts
I recently spent more than a month in the Arctic reporting my new book, The Comfort Crisis. It investigates how our modern, comfortable, effortless environments are at the root of many of our common physical and mental health problems. This tip into comfort, convenience, and ease is all invasive—often in ways we don’t expect. Take how our soundscape has changed.
One morning in the Arctic I exited my tent and walked a few hundred yards out on to the tundra. The snowy peaks of the Brooks Range Mountains were illuminating to the north, and the eastern sky was cantaloupe and pocked with grey and shining white clouds. There was no wind.
I could hear only the muted churn of a distant river and my own breath. I stood there for a long time, listening to the nothing. Soon I was able to pick up another sound. It was my heart beating. It began to thump loudly in my ear. Then I could hear the inner workings of my lungs. This was, undoubtedly, the most quiet I’d ever experienced.
It occurred to me that I could have stood there all day and this quiet would have remained. It would stay unaltered by commuting times, airplanes, construction, the hum of mechanical devices, and all of the other noises of the modern world.
Then I picked up another sound. It began gently. Then it was gaining volume and coming in fast. It was a low whooshing. I turned to find it. Nothing. It was getting louder. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. I looked up. WHOOSH, WHOOSH, WHOOSH. A raven was flying directly overhead, her coal wings able to, in all that silence, produce a sound like an apache helicopter.
It’s not that the wings of birds in our cities and towns aren’t making this sound. Or that the rivers, winds, and wildlife everywhere don’t emit their own sort of music. It’s just that so much of their sound is drown out by all noise us humans are making. The silence of the natural world, uninterrupted by modernity, is increasingly hard to find.
The thing about silence is that it’s nowhere. That’s what theoretical physics tells us, anyways. Even the quietest places are inundated with white noise. It’s the sound that electromagnetic waves make as they travel through space. White noise can exist even in the…
