Music On/Off :
In a recent interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein, journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates argued that serious thinkers and writers should get off Twitter.
It wasn’t a critique of the 140-character medium or even the quality of the
social media discourse in the age of fake news.
It was a call to get beyond the noise.
For Coates, generating good ideas and quality work products requires
something all too rare in modern life: quiet.
He’s in good company. Author JK Rowling, biographer Walter Isaacson, and
psychiatrist Carl Jung have all had disciplined practices for managing the
information flow and cultivating periods
of deep silence. Ray Dalio, Bill George, California
Governor Jerry Brown, and Ohio Congressman Tim Ryanhave also
described structured periods of silence as important factors in their
success.
Recent studies are showing that taking time for silence restores the nervous
system, helps sustain energy, and conditions our minds to be more adaptive and
responsive to the complex environments in which so many of us now live, work,
and lead. Duke Medical School’s Imke Kirste recently
foundthat silence is associated with the development of new
cells in the hippocampus, the key brain region associated with learning and memory.
Physician Luciano Bernardi found that two-minutes
of silence inserted between musical pieces proved more
stabilizing to cardiovascular and respiratory systems than even the music
categorized as “relaxing.” And a 2013 study in the Journal of Environmental
Psychology, based on a survey of 43,000 workers, concluded that the
disadvantages of noise and distraction associated with open office plans
outweighed anticipated, but still unproven, benefits like increasing morale and
productivity boosts from unplanned interactions.
But cultivating silence isn’t just about getting respite from the
distractions of office chatter or tweets. Real sustained silence, the
kind that facilitates clear and creative thinking, quiets inner chatter as well
as outer.
This kind of silence is about resting the mental reflexes that
habitually protect a reputation or promote a point of view. It’s
about taking a temporary break from one of life’s most basic
responsibilities: Having to think of what to say.
Cultivating silence, as Hal Gregersen writesin a recent HBR article,
“increase[s] your chances of encountering novel ideas and information and
discerning weak signals.” When we’re constantly fixated on the verbal
agenda—what to say next, what to write next, what to tweet next—it’s tough to
make room for truly different perspectives or radically new ideas. It’s
hard to drop into deeper modes of listening and attention. And it’s in
those deeper modes of attention that truly novel ideas are found.
Even incredibly busy people can cultivate periods of sustained quiet time. Here
are four practical ideas:
1) Punctuate meetings with five minutes of quiet time. If you’re able
to close the office door, retreat to a park bench, or find another quiet
hideaway, it’s possible to hit reset by engaging in a silent practice
of meditation or reflection.
2) Take a silent afternoon in nature. You need not be a rugged
outdoors type to ditch the phone and go for a simple two-or-three-hour jaunt in
nature. In our own experience and those of many of our clients, immersion
in nature can be the clearest option for improving creative thinking
capacities. Henry David Thoreau went to the woods for a reason.
3) Go on a media fast. Turn off your email for several hours or even
a full day, or try “fasting” from news and entertainment. While there may still
be plenty of noise around—family, conversation, city sounds—you can enjoy real
benefits by resting the parts of your mind associated with unending work
obligations and tracking social media or current events.
4) Take the plunge and try a meditation retreat: Even a short
retreat is arguably the most straightforward way to turn toward deeper
listening and awaken intuition. The journalist Andrew Sullivan
recently described his experience at a silent retreat as “the
ultimate detox.” As he put it: “My breathing slowed. My brain settled…It
was if my brain were moving away from the abstract and the distant toward the
tangible and the near.”
The world is getting louder. But silence is still accessible—it just
takes commitment and creativity to cultivate it.