Making Room for Silence

I am something of an information junkie. I constantly feel the need to fill any empty space with podcasts or audiobooks. Whenever I have to wait for something for more than a few seconds, I instinctively reach for my phone to read. I listen to podcasts while washing dishes, when driving on my own, or while doing jobs around the house. Over time, I’ve become remarkably good at filling almost every potential moment of silence with voices talking about self-improvement, software development, politics, and occasionally comedy.

Where this aversion to silence comes from, I don’t really know. It feels tied to a compulsion to learn as much as I possibly can, to make use of every spare moment. On the surface, that doesn’t sound like a bad thing.

But I think I may have overdone it.

I’ve noticed that in the rare moments of silence I do have, my mind tends to race uncontrollably. The worst is at bedtime. Instead of drifting off, I jump from thought to thought, replaying the events of the day, over-analysing conversations, or making plans for tomorrow. I lie there at my brain’s whim, when all I really want is to go to sleep and not think about anything at all.

That led me to wonder: could it be that these thoughts would normally have surfaced throughout the day, if only there had been space for them? Have I crowded out the natural pauses where my mind might quietly process things on its own? And perhaps more importantly: am I missing out on ideas that might arise spontaneously, if only there were a little more silence and emptiness in my day?

Recently, I watched a lovely BBC series called Leonard and Hungry Paul. Both of the main characters are gentle and endearing, but something about Hungry Paul in particular stayed with me, something the narrator also draws attention to: his ability to sit in silence. When waiting for someone or something—moments where most of us would immediately reach for our phones—he simply waits. Calmly. Patiently. As if he has an infinite tolerance for stillness.

Watching that left me with a desire to invite more silence into my own day-to-day life. I want to give my mind more freedom to wander. I want to go to bed feeling as though my thoughts have already had the time and space they needed to settle. I want to make room to write things like what you’re reading right now.

I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with all of this. Writing it down is partly an attempt to bring more clarity to my own thinking. But I also suspect I’m not alone. Many of us feel similarly over-stimulated, constantly consuming information, rarely leaving our phones alone long enough for silence to creep back in.

I’ve encountered these ideas before in Oliver Burkeman's 4000 Weeks and Meditations for Mortals, which I highly recommend.

I’ll leave you with a quote from him:

“Fortunately, there are […] pieces of advice for navigating a world of infinite information that are more genuinely helpful. The first is to treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.”