The Happiness of Silence

It's in the midst of this bustling eighteenth century urban scene that dozens of powdered wig leaders from across the land begin filing into Pennsylvania Statehouse. They'd soon be taking part in a series of conversations that would change the

fate of the nation. The stated goal of their historic meeting, which news papers at the time called the Grand Convention of States and history books would later call the Constitutional Congress, was to fix the previously ratified articles of the Confederation. But the real intention of the convention was to do something which at the time had never been done before. The delegates planned to draft a constitution that would create

a new kind of government. If you're at all familiar with US history, you probably know what happened in the months that followed the US Constitution was born. And from today's vantage point, it might seem inevitable that these leaders would succeed in their grand mission. But back on that sweltering seventeen eighty seven morning, it wasn't so obvious how the fateful meeting would go. Tensions were high at the

start of the so called Great Experiment. The task of figuring out how to create a union from so many diverse states was a really difficult one. If these lawmakers were actually going to change the course of history, they needed to concentrate in spite of all the bustle and noise on the Philadelphia streets outside. The delegates started by closing all the windows of their forty by forty foot conference room, even though the record breaking heat had them

sweating badly through their waistcoats and powdered wigs. But clamping all the windows wasn't enough to quiet the din of galloping horses and wagon wheels streaming by outside, So the delegates decided to call in a big favor from the local Philadelphia government. The city leaders got as much dirt and gravel and straw as they could find and threw it on top of the cobblestone roads surrounding the Statehouse. It was the sort of seventeen eighty seven equivalent of

noise canceling headphones. And the delegates to the Constitutional Convention actually had this giant earthen noise barrier constructed because they wanted to have pristine quiet, because they didn't want any street vendors or the sound of carriages outside or conversations to disturb their intense deliberation, their deep thinking. They're deep work, so this was a value that they had. This is author and congressional strategist Justin Zorn in his work on

Capitol Hill Today. Justin has seen that two hundred plus years later, twenty first century legislators don't really seem to prioritize Christine quiet in the same way our forefathers did. And I found that it was such erratically different reality for US lawmakers today. Everywhere you'd go, there were TVs

blasting alarms, blasting signaling floor votes. There were industry lobbyist schmoozing and backslapping and open bar receptions, phones ringing that back then there was for all the problems of that age, there was, at least in that work, a culture that honored quiet time, a culture that valued Christine human attention, which is something that's not so present in the cultures

today in most of our society. Over the last few episodes, we've talked about the importance of listening to our wise but quiet inner voices, and how doing so maybe the key to feeling happier in the new year. But how can we actually hear those inner voices and a society filled with so much noise. So, in this final episode of our special New Year's season, I want to examine what we might be losing in a culture that doesn't

make room for true silence. I want to talk about the costs of too much noise and explore whether there are strategies we can use to fight back against all the unnecessary stuff that grabs our ears and our attention, so that we, like those thoughtful constitutional delegates back in the day, can get the calm and attentional quiet we need to really flourish. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy, But what if our

minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy. The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can join us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos. It really came from a place despondency where we were pressing in our various places of work, Justin on Capitol Hill, me working with scientists and engineers, trying to work on

climate chains or removing toxic chemicals. So these things that are so important where there's so much urgency, and that experience of everybody's speeding up, adding more meetings, right more everything that we found ourselves at the end of our rope. This is Justin's collaborator, Lee mars Lea and Justin are evangelical about the problems that stem from the noise in our modern society. In fact, they've recently co authored a book entitled Golden, The Power of Silence in a World

of Noise. The book argues that we'd all be a lot happier if we could begin controlling the noise in our lives. I asked Lee to explain what she meant by this idea of noise. Noise can be described in two words as unwanted distractions, and usually that comes at us through our ears, through our screens, and even internally

through our own thoughts, ruminative, worry, things like that. So unwanted distraction, So that which gets in the way of what we want, our deepest intentions for being here, and things that get in the way of us doing what we're here to do in the world. And so let's talk about the three ways you've described that this kind of noise, the sort of unwanted distraction comes in. You know, one is the way we typically think of noise, which is auditory noise. But you will have argued that that's

actually getting a lot worse. Yeah, we we did ask the question is it really louder? And the evidence is showing absolutely. Across Europe and estimated four hundred and fifty million people are living, that's about sixty five percent of the population are living with dess levels that are thought to be harmful to health. According to the World Health Organization, siren levels have gotten six times louder in order to pierce through the den and get our attention than these

loud urban soundscapes. So it is definitely, without a doubt louder and it's not just auditory noise that's going up justin You've also talked a lot about informational noise. What do you mean by that and why is it getting worse? Yeah, it's not just the noise in our ears, it's the

noise on our screens and in our heads. And thinking about the screens, we look to a two ten statement that Eric Schmidt, who is then the CEO of Google, made this estimate that every two days we now create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until two thousand and three, and researchers have found that most people switch between different online content every nineteen seconds, that the average person spends one full hour per day every day working to get back on track

after dealing with interruptions from phones and social medias. So in aggregate, we take in about five times as much information most people in the United States as we did in nineteen eighty six. So it's like we're trying to drink out of a fire hose of information. And so that was informational noise. But you've also argued for a third kind of noise, which you call internal noise. Lee. What's that and why is it such a problem one for us. So everything we just mentioned is external, but

thinking about our internal soundscape internal noise. Ethan Cross, the professor at University of Michigan who wrote the book Chatter, estimates that we listen to something like three hundred and twenty State of the Union addresses every day of compressed speech, and that speech is not often helpful, as you know very well, could be worrying, fixating, ruminating of all kinds, just looping and carving those pathways. When we get back from the break, we're going to discuss solutions to all

the problems that stem from unnecessary noise. We'll see that there are strategies we can use to deliberately seek out the pristine attention Justin mentioned. If we're willing to put in some time and effort, the Happiness Lab will be

back in a moment. Authors Lemars and Justin Zorn argue that we need to start paying attention to some of the negative consequences that come from being around too much noise, whether that unwanted distraction comes from the auditory world, the endless information streams around us, or the soil of thoughts inside our head. Over the last few years, the pair has begun mindfully noticing what happens in their bodies and their minds when there are too many demands on their consciousness.

When I become irritable, this is a telltale sign that I am saturated by noise, because that's not my default. They also notice some physical things like tightness in the jaw the diaphragm, have trouble filling my lungs with air, even to the point where I have panic attacks at night. But I'll also notice relational tension. So it's it's physical things, it's emotional things, and also things with relationships. They're not going as well as they typically are. Justin did you

experience similar things we talk about noise. The experience of noisiness is a feeling of contraction. It's like this contracted state of being, And that's often what it feels like for me when I'm like constantly reaching from my phone to check my email, or constantly looking to be stimulated, constantly seeking some kind of auditory or informational distraction. There's a kind of contractedness in my whole being. As a society, we tend to view happiness as a kind of contracted state.

As the dopamine rush. But there's a deeper, more sustainable kind of more fulfilling happiness that's more akin to what Aristotle talked about, like eudaimonia. That's not that contracted dopamine go go go rushed state. It's a more open, expanded state of happiness that corresponds to the kind of Christine attention we're talking about. But you all are really really worried about this, Like you made the strong claim that all of the world's problems are in part due to

this noise. Well, we're living in a time when we often mistake feelings of stress for aliveness. We look in the book at how noises our most celebrated addiction these days. How we often measure progress and productivity in terms of how much mental stuff we're creating. We look in the book at how we measure GDP, for example, in terms of how much industrial stuff we're creating, but also how much sound and stimulus, how much data and content we're creating.

If you take our attention and you chop it up and turn it into eyeballs on a Facebook page that juices advertising revenue, then that increases GDP. But if you keep our attention whole, if you keep our attention pristine in a moment of undisturbed play with our kids, or admiring a beautiful piece of art in a museum, or

enjoying a walk in nature. That's not optimizing GDP. So we just thought about how bizarre it is that the way we measure progress as a society is this measure of GDP is this measure of maximum sound and stimulus, maximizing, optimizing, increasing. So we just thought about how bizarre it is that the way we measure progress as a society is this measure GDP is this measure of maximum sound and stimulus, maximizing, optimizing,

increasing the number of claims we're making our unconsciousness. Justin and Lee wanted to better understand what's needed to get to that expanded state of consciousness. They mentioned that sense of Christine attention. So they decided to explore how we can successfully quiet the noise that's around so many of us all the time. To do so, they asked an eclectic group of lay people and experts how they find

silence in their lives. The question we pose to neuroscientists and politicians and artists and a whirling dervish is what's the deepest silence you've ever known. When we asked this question, we expected some of those answers to be really auditorily quiet, right moments maybe on a mountain peak, profound moments of

deep and deep meditation. But what they pointed us towards instead were moments of awe births, deaths, and moments that were sometimes auditorily quite loud, which again kind of led the way to looking at that internal state of it and not just the external one. So you use that question and all these kind of interesting answers, you get to come to this definition of silence. You know, justin how are you thinking about silence? So, at one level,

silences the absence of noise. It's the space where no one is making claims on the consciousness. It's the space where no one is interfering with your clear perception and also your clear intention. It's not so straightforward, because silence is often scary. Silence is often uncomfortable. So it's like we're wired now to believe that happiness is the opposite of silence. Yea. And even for those tiny examples like

awkward silence. I have a teenage daughter, and there's nothing more horrifying than awkward silence in her world, the horror of the vacuum, the space where we have to confront ourselves, confront the unknown and what might become known. So experiencing silence is scary, But talk to me about some of the science showing the unexpected power of silence. We look at to the neuroscience and we ask this question, what if there were a mute button for the mind? Well,

Mehi Chick set me high. We turned to his work on flow states where people really express a lot of joy being in flow. It's an incredibly universal experience. He describes in one piece of that we describe as internal silence. That's a place where there's no more space for self referential thought. You're no longer talking to yourself about yourself, and he says that turns out to be a very

enjoyable experience. You know, you're tearing down a hill, skiing, we're in a dance class with a music blasting, but you're using that attention that you need in order to focus on that activity so much that there's no more space for that self referential thought. And that turns out to be a very happy experience for us. And so flow is the kind of thing that brings us happiness. But interestingly, it also seems just the absence of auditory

noise can make us feel good. Yeah, there's been some brain studies looking at the effects of different types of on the brains of mammals, and it was found that it was silence, more than classical music and white noise and other soothing sounds that stimulated the growth of neurons in the hypocampus, which is the region of the brain most associated with memory and with the researchers, these researchers at Duke Medical School found was that the act of

trying to hear in silence activates the brain and promotes neural development. So it's not just silence, but this act of paying attention to the silence. So far, we've heard some of the benefits of silence, whether that's experiencing less auditory noise or just calming the rapid chatter inside our heads. But when we get back from the break, we'll hear more about practical strategies we can use to achieve these blessings and to find the Christine calm that silence can offer.

The happiness lab will be right back as I chatted with authors Lee Mars and Justin Zorn about ways we can all get a little more silence in our lives. I was surprised when Lee began her list of strategies with a bit of a confession. Lee used to be a smoker. And the confession really isn't so much that I used to smoke, it's that I loved it. I absolutely love the ritual of taking a break from crisis work, which is what I was doing at the time, or

everything would just paused stop. I would take a deep inhale, deep exhale with that cigarette, Watch the smoke rise, hear the sizzle of the flame, things like that. So I loved that, And well, I'm really glad that I quit. When we quit our smoke break, we also quit quiet breaks.

We quit that interruption of constant working and flow. And so you've talked about how finding these kind of healthier versions of the smoking break, or at least these kind of healthier rituals of silence, start with this idea of recognizing what's in your sphere of control. Justin what do you mean by sphere of control? We look at this idea of what's in our sphere of control, even in

our busy lives. We talk in the book with someone who became a kind of guide for us in Jarvis Jay Masters, and Jarvis has spent thirty years on death row for a crime that the preponderance of evidence shows that he didn't commit, and he's learned how to study his own mind and study what's possible within an extraordinarily constrained set of circumstances where he's not even allowed to decide when he goes outside, when he takes a shower.

He's able to find these little moments of silence in his life, have quiet time, and have the space in his life to just be immersed in doing one thing. So we take that as a kind of signal that we can find it too. One of the practical suggestions that you've started with is this idea of just listening. What do you mean by just listening and why can it be so powerful. There's this ancient practice out of India called Nada yoga that's a kind of meditation on silence.

Have just listened to nothing, and it's something we incorporated into our lives. Sometimes just stepping outside and listening to the sound of the breeze, or stepping into a quiet room and actively listening to nothing in particular, and it's really the essence of what the researchers at Duke Med School who were studying the effect of listening in silence intentionally listening in silence can do. Just listening to nothing is edifying for the brain, and as a friend of

ours says, helps reset the nervous system. But you've also found just in that even just listening when there is noise can kind of help your reset. You told a funny story about your daughter and an annoying toy, which I wanted you to share. In the spring of twenty twenty, in the middle of the COVID lockdowns, my wife and I are twins, had just been born, and at the time our four year old was home from school, of course, and it was this moment when the babies were just crying.

There was the home of the robot vacuum cleaner and oatmeal burning and Disney musicals blaring all the time, And that was one of those moments when I think, like many people in our society at that time, I was just overwhelmed with the noise and I realized how all the external noise going on, you know, as I was trying to be on conference calls amidst that whole all that, did you know all the external noise was creating an

internal noise in me. It was this feedback loop I was finding between the noise in my ears and the noise inside. And my four year old daughter at that time had this little book that had a tiny little speaker in it that played the Frozen song let It Go, Let It Go from the Disney musical, and one day I was just listening to it, about to lose it, and I just listen to that message, Oh wait, let

it go, let it Go. Maybe a Dina Menzel and her soaring mezzo soprano is trying to tell me something here that I can find ways to let go of the internal noise even if the external noise is overwhelming. And this seems to relate to another thing you suggest, which is this idea of making friends with noise. We maybe give us some strategies for how we can do that, especially when the noise is really not the kind of thing we want to be listening to. Yeah, we turn

to the poet Padrick Otuma for this one. He says, this is actually some of the oldest technology out there, is that we say hello to the noise, we greet it. So, yeah, when noise does show up, to just notice what's arising. Again, this is kind of going back to that noticing, noticing what's happening in the body, taking it as that moment,

maybe adding some humor. And then, of course the other thing is actually when that noise stops, to then throw your own little quiet party celebration acknowledgment, acknowledgement that noise is past, and feel some gratitude there. But making friends with noise can help. But it all kind of go a little better. And that's not again to say we want to create more or invited more, but noise happens,

and so how can we greet it with grace? Justin you had a lovely story about this that involved a particular noise I hate, which was being on hold with some sort of awful customer service line and how you were able to greet the noise in a more welcoming way. Yeah, I was remembering being on hold for a couple hours for something in a customer service line with like particularly annoying music playing, and I was back to that interplay

between the external noise and the internal noise. But having to listen to that sound was creating a kind of noise within me. And this is something that Jarvis J. Masters really has figured out how to navigate in prison, Like he quieted the noise of Death Row, where you just have these constant, constant low fi radios playing and screaming and hollering and then just kind of the fear of the place. He told us that he quieted the

noise by quietening his responses to the noise. Flip side of this idea making friends with the noise is we also have to take advantage of times when there are no noise, right like when there's actually these little gifts and moments of silence, And so just to talk about how we can make good use of these tiny moments of silence, you know, it often comes back to this idea what we were talking about before, of like shifting

our idea of happiness of well being. For me, it's like I'm in the car and all of a sudden, the music stops streaming, and sometimes I like instinctively freak out. I'm just like, oh my god, the music stopped or the podcast stops streaming. What happened? But it's like, can we take a moment and relax into that sudden quiet, or maybe even we're stuck at the post office in line. It's really frustrating. And sure, you know, maybe we have other things we need to do, and that's legit, that's real.

But it's like, can we take these little inconveniences like the podcast stops streaming, or we're stuck in line at the post office, and rather than seeing it as a burden or even a cause of stress, can we shift our orientation to see it as a little gift, a little pocket of silence in our lives. This was a

really helpful suggestion for me. Right after I read your book, I was waiting for some zoom call and someone was coming lee and I was sitting there and I was, you know, my internal noise was about to start raging. Where is this present my times a value? Lada? And I was like, wait, this is a gift. I can stay here and just breathe and hear the silence and you know, again, it wasn't that long, but it meant that I greeted that moment in a completely different mindset

than I would have otherwise. We have so few unstructured moments that when they show up that we could just actually do that expanding that Justin was pointing us towards, instead of contracting in that moment because we're not maybe in control or didn't go completely as we'd hoped, that we could expand and that greet that moment and celebrate that little moment of silence that we got. We'll make for a very different day and a very different zoom call.

As you surely found absolutely what you were just saying about, like that feeling like, oh my god, I'm so busy, I can't be waiting for this Like that for me has been such a learning because we look at the connection between silence and humility, like silence as being comfortable in this space of being able to let go of one of life's most basic responsibilities these days, which is having to think of what to say. It's like, this silence is about resting the mental reflexes that protect our

reputation and promote our point of view. And it's like there's something so relaxing and nourishing and edifying about coming into that humility of not having to constantly fill the space. Another thing you've talked about that we can do is that when we are engaged in activities, we can pay attention to those activities in a different way. We can kind of find silence in what we're doing. Well, give

me an example of how something like that might work. Yeah, I mean, maybe we look to a ritual that you have, for example, maybe making coffee in the morning as your ritual. If we can like slow that activity down by ten percent, bring that much more attention to it, then we can find the silence inside that. And really that's not a lot of doing, it's not a lot to ask, it's a light lift, right, So if we can bring that

attention in, we can find the silence inside there. We're so interested in not adding more to the to do us, but just kind of taking away, simplifying, slowing down, finding that space and silence. And Justin and I are finding that silence nut by running off to retreats for six months of the time. But really, like in a full, busy, pretty compressed, demanding life, silence is always with us. And if you want to take it to the next level, you know, if you have time and space for a

little bit of sanctuary. One of the things you suggest is finding space in nature that we can find silence in nature. Yeah, so nature is the way for many people to find their quiet, and it does seem connected to that self transcendent experience we touched on earlier, where you are getting more connected to a smaller sense of self but in relation and feeling connected to a larger sense of being. It's definitely one of the most common ways,

including just listening. This doesn't mean you have to go far far out, even just stepping outside in the midst of a busy day and hearing bird song with birding in particular, birds are with us with it's the wild coming into our very being. We do look a little bit in the book at you know, for example, the research Amingkoo that shows that you just playing with soil for five minutes can actually change the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system from fight or flight, moving towards tend

and befriend. So we have this practice in the book of How to Find Silence in the Mind through Nature, this practice of like once a day connecting with something bigger than yourself like a towering tree, your stars in the night sky, and once a day connecting with something smaller than yourself like a blossom or a trail of ants or a sparrow, and how these practices for us produce quiet inside. It's another way to get quiet inside is to really look very carefully at the things you're

bringing into your life that are causing more noise. And one of the biggest ones for so many of us as our technology. You've advocated something that we've talked about before on this podcast, which is this idea of a tech sabbath. What is this and why can it be so powerful for finding silence? You know, with tech, one thing we come back to, and this relates again to silence and nature, is this space where nothing is making

claims on our consciousness. It's like sometimes bird song could actually be really high decibel, or the sound of Niagara falls, or you know, a huge Russian river is actually super high decibel, but it's like, why is it not noisy for us? It's because it's not making claims on our consciousness. And technology, especially if you think about reminders and pinging notifications and you know, the urge to check our email when it's always available, like that's making claims on our consciousness.

So when we think about a tech sabbath, you don't want to be too prescriptive. About it and say like, oh, you must do this, you miss do that, because you know we all have responsibilities. Back to that idea of our sphere of influence, in our sphere of control. I'm not in a space in my life I can totally put my phone in one of those lockboxes because I have little kids around and professional responsibilities that I have

to attend to. But one thing I'll do, for example, is take the email app off my phone for a time a certain time a day, so I can only check my email when I'm at the computer, knowing that that's one little change I can make that's going to impact the number of claims made in my consciousness. And that leads to one of the last things I wanted to talk about, which is that we also have to think about our own interaction in terms of creating noise.

How many claims on other people's consciousness we're making that we don't need to be making, and so lee talk about ways that we could reduce the noise that we're causing for other people. Noise is a really subjective experience, right One person's noise is another person's symphony, and so we often don't think of our actions as noisy. You may have noticed, you know, when I play a podcast or the radio or the music or whatever in common space, I'm not thinking of that as disturbing others. So we

can really open up. Actually a lot of this we're talking about individual experiences, but most of the time we're really in relationship right or either at work, we're at home, or with others. So this is so much of this is actually about negotiating creating some agreements around noise and silence.

So we do invite the reader to first look at their own contributions, and if you're not sure how you contribute, you could ask a truth teller in your life about what habits you may have that create noise for them,

and then really commit to lessening that. It comes back again and again to this idea of like, do we value that contracted state of the dopamine rush that's often noisy, or are we valuing as progress as what we're seeking states of Christine attention where we can really savor life, where we can really hear another person, and that includes

at home, among families, among friends, in workplaces. So we talk in the book about what it would mean to find a society that honors silence, like, what if this was a value as workplaces and organizations and schools and even whole countries and communities to value pristine attention as a public good. For many of us these days, avoiding unwanted distraction isn't as simple as throwing a bunch of dirt onto the cobblestone streets outside our homes or offices.

But I hope this episode has given you hope that the pristine attention our forefarther sought is possible in the modern day if we commit to using the right strategies. You can start the way Lee and Justin suggest it, and do a bit of a noise audit. What kinds of unwanted distraction or coming through your ears or your news feeds or the stressful thoughts in your head? And

how does all that noise make you feel? If the answer is not so good, can you take a careful look at your own sphere of influence to find spots where it's possible to decrease some of that mental clamor or perhaps you can find small moments of silence to cherish and visit spaces that give you a sense of calm. And if changes like these are hard right now, given your circumstances, that's okay. Maybe you can find ways to befriend the noise around you, treat it with a little

bit more grace, or just let it be. I hope that using strategies like these can give you the bandwidth you need to hear what your wise voice is saying you really desire. In twenty twenty three, thank you so much for joining me on this special New Year's season of The Happiness Lab. And not to worry is my producers and I are already hard at work on our next full season, as well as some bonus episodes I think you'll enjoy. Until next time we meet, be sure

to stay safe and stay happy. The Happiness Lab is co written by Ryan Dilley and is produced by Ryan Dilley and Courtney Guerino. The show was mastered by Evan Viola and our original music was composed by Zachary Over. Special thanks to Shanebeard, Greta Kone, Nikole Morano, Morgan Ratner, Maggie Taylor, Jacob Weisberg, my agent, Ben Davis, and the rest of the Pushkin team. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and by me doctor Laurie Santos,