Dr Catherine Conlon: Is it time to bring more silence into our often frenzied lives?

Have you ever woken up and listened to …nothing? Silence.

In our noisy world full of background music, traffic, beeps, and flashing notifications on our phone, many of us don’t experience a great deal of quiet. So that, all of a sudden, when we do, it seems a welcome and precious gift in our lives.

Paul McCartney previously recounted how his masterpiece, Yesterday, was born. In a 1998 interview with author Barry Miles for the biography Many Years From Now, he said “I woke up with a beautiful tune in my head and thought ‘That’s great, but what is it?’ With an upright piano by the bed, I sat down, played a sequence, G, F sharp minor 7th, B, E minor, and back to E and it all flowed naturally.

“I loved the melody but doubted I’d written it since it came to me in a dream.”

The evidence tells us that silence is exactly what it feels like – a precious gift to our health that offers huge rewards for mind, body and spirit.

Blood pressure

Silence may help to lower blood pressure, improve concentration and focus, calm racing thoughts, stimulate brain growth, boost creativity and improve sleep. Good reasons to turn off your phone, dial down the music, and periodically escape from our noisy world to a haven of quiet and solitude.

High blood pressure, known as the ‘silent killer’, could be improved by silence. A paper published in Heart (2005) outlined how a two-minute period of silence after listening to music significantly reduced participants’ heart rate and blood pressure, being even more effective than relaxing music in lowering these key indices of heart health. Previous research linked a chronically noisy environment with raised heart rate and blood pressure.

While more research is needed to investigate the long-term impacts of silence, these initial studies are promising.

There is also evidence that silence may benefit concentration and focus. That is why golfers taking a putt, tennis players lining up to take a serve, and students taking exams demand silence. Freed from the distractions of external noise and vibrations, our brains seem to be able to concentrate better on the task at hand. This applies to work, and relationships as well.

Researchers at the Turku University of Applied Sciences in Finland subjected 59 participants to tasks performed with silence, background noise, or talking in the background. Those who worked in silence performed best with the lowest stress levels.

Silence also seems to be able to calm racing thoughts, although anyone who has tossed and turned in a silent bedroom at night might disagree.

A paper, Progress In Brain Research (2023), outlines how silence can induce a heightened sense of alertness, potentially triggering a brake on the parasympathetic vagus nerve, and activation of the sympathetic nervous system. But with training, outer silence can trigger an inner silence that prevents this activation and allows a sense of calm to develop.

Quieting the mind might also lead to a healthier brain. An animal study published in Brain Structure And Function (2013) outlined how two hours of silence stimulated the growth of new cells in the hippocampus region of the brain in mice – the region related to memory and emotion.

Silence may reduce cortisol. The Finnish researchers who found links between silence and improved focus and concentration, found that people who performed their tasks with noise in the background also had higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, that is linked to weight gain, feelings of overwhelm, difficulty sleeping and higher levels of chronic disease.

Creative boost

Silence has also been found to be linked to significant boosts to creativity as well as productivity.

Although clinical research on the exact relationship between silence and creativity is patchy, there is a clear link between sleep and creativity and that sleep is optimised by a lack of noise.

Professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California and author of Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker has spent over two decades researching sleep.

At the heart of his research are the changes in the brain during REM sleep. The critical stress chemical noradrenaline is shut off within your brain when you enter the dreaming sleep state.

REM sleep is the only time in 24 hours when your brain is entirely devoid of this anxiety-triggering chemical.

The evidence shows dreaming REM sleep offers another distinct benefit: information processing that inspires creativity and promotes problem-solving.

Walker’s extensive studies on participants asked to perform problem-solving exercises before and after REM sleep found that a creative form of memory mixing took hold as they entered REM sleep.

Rather than identifying the most obvious connections between snatches of memories, the brain became biased toward seeking out the most distant, non-obvious links between sets of information- and the more creative response is born.

Impact on insomnia

While the research is unclear how much of our improved creativity comes from silence itself, or the impact of silence on sleep, what is clear is that silence does improve insomnia.

A paper in Sleep Science (2013) outlined how external noise can disrupt night-time sleep to the same degree as a sleep disorder.

In our busy, chaotic worlds, we often forget to include periods of calm that have transformative effects on our health – lowering blood pressure, improving focus and concentration, reducing stress and the health damaging impacts of chronically raised cortisol, as well as improving sleep.

Isn’t it time we all periodically ditched our phones, took out our earbuds, turned down the volume on the nearest device, and focused on getting more silence into our frenzied lives?

Who knows – you might even compose a masterpiece.

• Dr Catherine Conlon is a public health doctor in Cork.