After Screaming into The Void

Sometimes, you just can’t take it anymore.

It’s not just the daily avalanche of bad news. It’s not just your job. It’s not just your personal problems. It’s everyone telling you how to feel about your life and the state of the world. It’s everyone telling you what to do with the little bit of time and energy you’ve got left. It’s everyone trying to make you feel better with their saccharine anecdotes, while ignoring your actual needs.

It’s the raging hypocrisy everywhere.

It’s the noise.

So, you made it through another day. You put in the hours at your job. You tended to all your responsibilities. You braced for tomorrow. You even cleaned the kitchen. You read all the dystopian news. You commiserated with all your friends. You preached to the choir. You did something practical to help someone else.

You screamed into the void.

The void screamed back.

Now what?

That’s me at the end of a given day. Maybe it’s you. There’s a thousand websites out there with podcasts telling us all about the nutrients we need to be our best selves, but there’s one nutrient we hardly ever hear anything about.

Silence.

More scientists are starting to recognize silence as more than the absence of sound. Our brains treat it as an actual event, and it’s vital for brain health. A 2013 study found that two hours of silence per day helped stimulate brain cell growth in mice, improving memory and focus.

Another study found that silence can lower stress hormones like cortisol. Research has found that silence can lower your heart rate and blood pressure. Silence throughout the day can also help you sleep better at night. It also helps patients in the intensive care unit recover faster.

Yet another study confirmed that during the early stages of the pandemic, people reported higher levels of emotional well-being, associated with more time in quiet reflection, especially nature. It wasn’t great for everyone, but many people benefited from slowing down and spending more time not doing things.

A 2022 article in New Scientist explores the “underestimated harm” that noise is doing to us. At one point, it talks about sensory deprivation tanks. These things date back to the 1950s, when a researcher named Jay Shirley at the National Institutes of Mental Health first started to discover that our brains like it when you remove most or all of the external stimulus for a little while. John Lilly continued that work at the University of Oklahoma.

As Lilly once said, “we need certain socially accepted places where we don’t answer the telephone, we don’t have to answer questions or agree with anyone on anything.” Lilly didn’t live long enough to see the rise of social media, or even the smartphone. Imagine what he would say about a majority of the world now constantly shouting at each other, 24 hours a day.

These days, a lot of us desperately need a place where we don’t have to agree with anyone about anything. We need a place where we don’t have to say anything, or feel anything for anyone else. We don’t have to come up with a solution for anything. We can just sit there. We can just not think at all.

That early work led to the development of flotation therapy. According to flotation therapy, removing all external stimuli—including gravity—can lead the brain into a theta state similar to REM sleep.

Once there, your body engages in fast healing. Advocates of flotation therapy have even found that it helps increase T Cell production. A 2018 study in PLoS One backs some of this up. The 50 participants in that study reported “significant reductions in stress, muscle tension, pain, depression and negative affect,” as well as “a significant improvement in mood characterized by increases in serenity, relaxation, happiness, and overall well-being.” A 2016 study in Performance Enhancement & Health found similar benefits in athletes.

Recently, a team of researchers at Chapman University did a comprehensive review of flotation therapy studies. Flotation therapy makes up just one part of a broader technique called Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy (REST), a term developed by psychologists in the late 1970s. Although it’s often dismissed as woo, the studies confirm there’s something to it.

You don’t have to float in a tank to see similar results. Browse the Reddit forums, and you’ll see people doing different versions of REST, whatever they can afford. One person mentioned something called a “mindfold,” a padded sleep mask that completely blocks out light. You can find several different brands of padded sleep masks online. Some of them come with extra deep pockets, so you can even open your eyes and just stare into the void.

Research has also been raising awareness about binaural beats, a sound your brain actually creates when you listen to music that delivers a different frequency in each ear. A lot of meditation music out there specifically triggers this effect. Binaural beats sync with your brain waves and slow them down, recreating the mental state we otherwise achieve only through sleep. A 2023 article in PLoS One reviewed more than a dozen studies on binaural beats and concluded:

It’s not B.S.

So, you don’t need a sensory deprivation tank. You can just turn everything off, lie on your bed, wrap your head up, and go blank.

Every week, or maybe every day, some of us reach a point where we want to tell the world to shut the hell up, because we can’t take any more. We can’t tolerate one more demand to agree with someone or like someone else’s sugary anecdote. And if one more political junkie tells us how to feel about anything…

That’s the moment you need silence.

After screaming into the void…

We can rest in it.

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