Turning Down The Noise
Christine Jackman is a talker. Bring up just about any subject and she can converse – fluently and entertainingly – on the topic. She is not the sort of person you would think would be eager to go on a 10-day silent retreat. That, however, is exactly what she did. And then she wrote a book about it.
More accurately, Christine’s book, Turning Down the Noise: The Quiet Power of Silence in a Busy World, examines the one thing that many of us are missing from our hyper-stimulated, overscheduled lives: silence. Along the way, she discovers the many ways that noise, both acoustic and digital, is actually making us ill.
The World Health Organisation has found that exposure to excessive environmental noise – things like traffic, passing aircraft, construction and neighbourhood activity – contributes to ischemic heart disease, sleep disturbances and cognitive impairment in children. According to the European Union noise pollution is responsible for 43,000 hospital admissions and at least 10,000 premature deaths in Europe each year.
“There is a mountain of evidence that shows the unhealthy impact that environmental noise and digital noise, is having on us,” Christine says. “I thought some of the most interesting material was the research that found even if you feel you’ve slept well, your body registers noises that happen around you as you sleep – your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up.”
Noise isn’t the only thing that has a measurable impact on the body. Silence does too, stimulating the growth of new brain cells. As she explored some of the world’s most quiet places for her book, Christine says that she learnt to recognise the physical effects of silence on her body.
“You feel your entire body unfurl, your senses stretching out to take in what’s around you,” she says. “For most of history, that’s how humans experienced the environment and our brain recognises it as a sort of balm.”
It is a balm that women, in particular, are in need of given the multiple roles many of us juggle: worker, wife, mother, daughter. “You are the traffic controller in your house – if anyone has a need, they come to you, whether it’s the kids, the partner, the dog, the cat,” Christine says.
“[In silence] you feel your entire body unfurl, your senses stretching out to take in what’s around you … and our brain recognises it as a sort of a balm.”
For most of us, dedicating 10 days to a silent retreat is not an option. Even committing to daily meditation may be too big of an ask for many busy women.
“It took me roughly 10 years after first reading about a vipassana retreat until I could finally go on one,” Christine says. “As a single mum with two kids, finding the time and finding someone to care for my children for that time was an enormous challenge.”
To that end, the book tells how to build small chunks of silence – slivers, slices or slabs, as she describes them – into your daily routine. This can be as simple as turning off devices, taking a walk in nature, or taking a moment to pause between tasks. “Give yourself a full stop before you move on to the next thing, so you’re not racing from task to task,” Christine says. “Take the time to acknowledge, ‘I am about to finish this’ and then, ‘I have finished this.’”
Another simple option is using the car as a quiet space. “We tend to use a drive as a productivity space. We take calls, we listen to podcasts – even putting on music is a way of distracting yourself,” Christine says. Instead, she recommends taking that time in silence to give your brain a break – or if you can’t manage that, at least take a moment or two in the car, after you have parked before getting out, to just breathe and be.
And don’t beat yourself up when you don’t get it right. “I was feeling out of sorts the other day because my thinking was really crowded – I was juggling emails and WhatsApp conversations and all sorts of other things – and then I thought, hang on, I wrote a book about this!” she says with a laugh.
Words_ Ute Junker
Photo_ Evie S/UnSplash