Education
What’s So Fearful About Silence?
Learning to deliberately disengage.
Posted May 11, 2025 Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
Key points
- Silence is the absence of sound and it can feel unnatural and intolerable.
- As a society, we are so accustomed to hearing external prompts that, when absent, fear tends to get triggered.
- We can learn to take pleasure from our senses, including quiet.
Have you ever gone somewhere to listen to the silence? Probably not. We are a sensation-seeking society and most comfortable when our five senses are engaged and attending to something.
Silence is the absence of sound and it can cause discomfort for people. Judging from the loud volume in restaurants and our pervasive attention to sound-generating devices that play music, podcasts, video games, and other noise-making apps, it’s safe to say that we may be overstimulated with sounds wherever we are—which has become the new normal. The absence of sound can feel unnatural and intolerable.
I wasn't looking for the sound of silence when I ascended a mountain-top overlooking the majestic Waimea Canyon, the "Grand Canyon" of Hawaii. At that moment, there was total quiet. Almost 5,000 feet below, I could see but not hear the white water of ocean waves crashing on the shore. It was an eerie feeling to hear only the sound of my breath or the ground below my feet as I hiked the dirt path. Even the chirping of birds and the scurrying of land critters were absent at this altitude. The visual array was amazing, but it was silent.
Escaping from all external noise is getting harder and harder to do. Finding a place away from cellphone service and the incessant electronic sounds of current life requires planning. And apparently that’s a practice that’s so uncomfortable for many of us that we may find ways to avoid it.
Psychological research confirms that silence is so unpleasant for some people that they would rather self-administer electric shocks, while deprived of other stimulation and sound, as an alternative to staying with their own thoughts.
Timothy Wilson, Ph.D., and colleagues conducted a number of experiments detailing various effects on human subjects (college student volunteers) when their minds were disengaged. In one rather extreme study reported in the journal Science, participants were left alone in a room for 15 minutes without books, electronic devices, or paper and pencil. About 67% of the men and 25% of the women self-inflicted electric shocks to avoid the absence of external stimulation. The takeaway was that some people don’t know how to steer their thoughts in a pleasant and calming direction, so they try to avoid being alone with themselves at any cost.
As a society, we are so accustomed to hearing external prompts that, when absent, fear tends to get triggered. But if we can learn to embrace the quiet, let our thoughts and breathing come to the forefront of our attention, knowing that there is no real danger in allowing this, then there’s more potential for awareness, growth, and peacefulness, which are hard to retrieve in other ways. You can learn to embrace the silence or understand why you distract yourself from it. You can meander through the world of the senses as well as the world of experiences. Both lead to a fuller, richer life and enriched creative process.
Rick Hanson, Ph.D., psychologist and author of Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom, wrote about taking pleasure from our senses. According to him, paying attention to certain sounds can intensify pleasure. He suggests the sound of "waves on the seashore ... and silence itself." But I wouldn’t begin with silence as the past few paragraphs suggest its difficulty.
When you are ready, take the time and notice the quiet. Relax into it. Let your observations and internal chatter come and go, catch yourself going on a tangent with some thought or feeling. Choose to let it go and stop if and when it seems too difficult or unnerving. Return to the silence when you can.
As I basked in the quiet of the mountain top, I wondered how else to find this blissful state when the experience of the moment faded into a distant memory. It could be as simple as taking a time-out from electronic chatter—no phones, computers, TV, radio, and for the moment no sounds of people or animals begging for attention.
Sometimes my noise-cancelling headphones do the trick. Designed for air travel, I might put them over my ears to block sound instead of listening to music or talk. I simply relax into the gentle white sound of nothing. Ten minutes will do. And then I’m transported back in memory to that awesome, hushed, peaceful mountain top.
This post is based on a chapter in my book, Inward Traveler: 51 Ways to Explore the World Mindfully.
