Please be quiet! The amazing benefits of silence – for both our bodies and minds
Our noisy world is linked to heart disease, anxiety, depression, and even hearing loss. But there’s another important reason we need more quiet in our lives.
No dogs barking. No lawnmowers. No loud engines. No sirens or car alarms. No planes. No construction. No delivery trucks. Just pure, peaceful silence. My ears were amazed by what they weren’t hearing when I opened the door, stepped into the garden, and listened. It was autumn last year, and I had just moved 600 miles north, from southeast England to Abernethy Forest in the Scottish Highlands. Sometimes, the wind would quietly rustle the treetops, like a soft wave on the shore. Then it would be quiet again. That night, I lay in bed, letting my ears enjoy the gentle silence. For the first time in a long while, I didn’t need earplugs.
Over the next few months, my ears slowly relaxed from tension I hadn’t even realized I was holding. I almost expected to look in the mirror and see them drooping like a sleepy puppy’s. “Isn’t it too quiet for you there?” people asked, either confused by our move or worried we wouldn’t manage. But I love it.
A study from the University of Pavia in 2006 showed how much the body and brain enjoy silence. The researchers were looking at how different types of music, like classical, techno, ragga, and rap, affected stress markers such as blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing. They added a two-minute silence between the music tracks as a control. Surprisingly, the silence led to the lowest stress levels of all. The researchers even found that this relaxation was greater than the calm felt after five minutes of quiet before the study started.
Silence has been important in spiritual and religious practices for thousands of years. It is used for self-discipline, gaining knowledge, and getting closer to the gods. “The fact that silence is central in different cultures and times shows how important it is,” says Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who works to protect quiet places.
However, in today’s noisy world, silence is often seen as something that needs to be filled.
When Sarah Anderson, author of The Lost Art of Silence: Reconnecting to the Power and Beauty of Quiet, was researching her book, she was surprised to learn that many people see silence negatively. “They find it boring, uncomfortable, or even unsettling,” she says. Anderson herself loves quiet, but she admits that when she attended a silent retreat, she often wondered if she should be doing something with all that time, feeling like it was being wasted.
Since the Industrial Revolution, noise has often been linked with work and progress, says Hempton. “In all the noise, we’ve forgotten how valuable quiet is.”
I didn’t move to the Highlands looking for silence, but once I found it (or at least more of it), I realized Hempton’s point: “Silence is not the absence of something, but the presence of everything.” Being in silence has made me aware of things I usually miss, like soft sounds, textures, colors, and patterns. It’s like my senses have become sharper.
The quiet around me has also made me quieter. I talk less, move more gently, and handle things like gates and bins carefully instead of slamming them. Why would I make noise in a world that’s already full of it?
Reducing the noise outside has made the noise in my head louder. I can finally hear my own thoughts, or as writer Pico Iyer puts it, hear myself not think, allowing deeper thoughts to come through.
In silence, I can organize my thoughts, feelings, and memories more clearly. I might notice worries about a choice I’ve made or gain a new understanding. I’ve become more reflective and less quick to judge. Hempton isn’t surprised. “In a quiet place, the mind calms down because we tend to echo the environment we’re in,” he says.
The idea of silence as something present, not just the lack of sound, is not just a vague concept. Our brains treat it that way. A study in 2023 from Johns Hopkins University showed that the brain processes silence the same way it processes sound – as an “event.” Silence is not only noticed because there is no sound, but it is actually experienced. As Ian Phillips, a professor of philosophy and brain science and co-author of the study, says: “We really do hear silence.”
There is also evidence that paying attention to silence can help grow new brain cells in the hippocampus. Researchers placed mice in a soundproof room and exposed them to different sounds, including complete silence, for two hours a day. All the sound experiences, from Mozart to baby mice crying, helped create new cells in the hippocampus. This is the first step of brain cell growth. However, after a week, the new cells only became working brain cells in the mice that were exposed to complete silence. This surprised the researchers, but they thought that because silence is so rare for the mice, it made them pay more attention, which might have helped their brains prepare for future challenges.
A totally silent environment would have been just as unusual for our ancestors. “It would have been worrying, signaling a predator or a lack of food,” says Hempton. That may explain why, in a 2013 study by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences using virtual reality, people found looking at natural landscapes without sound was not relaxing, but unsettling.
“Soundscape” is a term for the combination of sounds in a particular environment and how we perceive them. This includes natural sounds, like animals, plants, and weather, as well as human-made sounds, like talking, music, and noise from vehicles or industry. “We can tell different things about a soundscape – like whether it’s pleasant, busy, expected, or important,” says Joshua M Smyth, a professor of health psychology at Ohio State University. For example, you might find the morning bird songs pleasant and predictable, while the noise of house renovations next door is busy but annoying. “Noise is never neutral,” says Smyth. “How we think about it is a big factor in how stressful it is.”
People are afraid of silence, which is why the TV is always on, and we keep scrolling on our screens.
A 2016 study from the University of Gävle showed this. People were exposed to a vague sound. Some were told it was the sound of a waterfall, while others were told it was the noise of machines. The people who thought it was a waterfall found the sound more relaxing.
In the Cairngorms, where writer Nan Shepherd “listened to silence,” the pine forest reduces noise, and the hills stop the wind. Among the trees, it feels like being in a painting. But Hempton is right: it’s not completely silent. There are goldcrests in the trees, a stream flowing, and snow falling in winter.
Natural sounds are good for our brains. Unlike city noises or phone alerts, they are part of our history. “Our brains evolved by hearing nature’s sounds, often with no other noise at all,” says Richard Cytowic, a professor of neurology at George Washington University. “Silence is important. We need it to think.”
But with the world getting louder, it’s harder to find silence.
The average noise level in cities has increased by 0.5-1 decibel every year for the past 30 years. This constant noise is not only annoying, but it has been linked to health problems like heart disease, anxiety, depression, hearing loss, and slower mental development in children. A 2020 report says one in five people in Europe are exposed to harmful noise levels.
It’s not just humans who suffer. Hempton says that noise pollution stops birds from hearing their predators and makes them sing louder or at higher pitches, which wastes energy. In a 2013 study, researchers played traffic noise in a quiet area, and the number of birds dropped by 25%.
We can get used to the noise around us. For example, people who live in noisy places like New Delhi are more tolerant of noise, especially honking cars, than those who live in quieter cities like London. Anderson, who moved to a new part of London, once found the airplane noise unbearable but now hardly notices it.
But the opposite can happen too. I realized how used I had gotten to the quiet of my new home when I visited London, where I grew up. One Sunday, I got on a quiet train at a nearly empty station. But when I arrived at London Euston, I was hit with a loud mix of noises: announcements, ringing phones, people talking, traffic, sirens, subway trains, and buses. It felt like going from a calm place to a noisy world. Like everyone else, I put on headphones, but I wasn’t listening to anything. I just wanted to escape the noise.
Hempton believes headphones and earplugs aren’t the solution. He says our sense of hearing connects us to people and places, and using these devices cuts us off from the world.
It’s understandable to want to replace city noise with music or podcasts, but it can make silence feel so rare that we immediately try to fill it. Cytowic explains, “People are afraid of silence.” That’s why the TV is often on in the background, or we scroll endlessly on our phones. Our brains were never built to handle this constant stimulation.
What does he suggest? “Turn off the TV. Go for a walk. Leave your phone at home. Look at the trees, look at the sky.”
Smyth tries to add short moments of “quiet” to his day. “It might be almost silence, or a sound that calms me,” he says. “If I’m in a noisy place, I’ll take ‘sound breaks’ by leaving for a while or creating a new quiet place.”
I’ve tried to share my love of silence with my husband, but it’s not always easy. Talking about how great it is to sit quietly in the morning feels like I’m criticizing him when he’s having breakfast while on his phone with the radio on. We argued when I tried doing mouna vratha, a daily silence practice (it means “vow” and “not speaking” – usually for an hour), and he stood in front of me, miming questions. Even though I couldn’t hear him, it still felt like interruptions. It showed me that silence, like noise, feels different. A heavy silence, full of anger, isn’t peaceful, but silence when you’re with someone, reading or walking or looking at the night sky, can be calm even without words.
I stopped the daily silence practice after a few days. It seems like people are now selling silence as another way to improve ourselves, be more productive, or creative – using it to get somewhere, not just for the experience. Silent walks have even become a trend on TikTok. I still try to have quiet time every day without distractions, but I don’t expect anything from these moments of peace, and I don’t use a timer.
As I write, the house is quiet. I hear the soft hum of the computer, the occasional sleepy whimper from the dog, and my own breathing. These are small sounds we might miss in everyday noise. Does it matter if we do?
Hempton says that faint sounds are the most important for our health. “We evolved to hear things really well,” he says. “Sound used to tell us everything – what was around us, the time of day, the season. It connected us to the world.”
With so much information around us now, it’s not as important as before. But if we never get away from all the noise, we won’t give ourselves the chance to listen to silence and understand what it offers.
“To listen, you need to be quiet,” says Hempton. “What I love most about listening is that I disappear.”
Published: 3rd February 2025
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