Silence is Rest for Your Body

Last week I was asked to speak to a small group on silence and solitude. I realize they want me to help them cultivate silence and solitude as spiritual disciplines, but I thought it would be interesting to read up on the effects of noise versus silence on our bodies.

It ends up that we live in a very noisy culture. In Europe, where they have been studying the effects of noise on health, the European Environmental Agency estimates that environmental noise contributes to 48,000 new cases of ischemic heart disease (when the body doesn’t get enough blood supply) a year.[1] How can this be?

Humans have both sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Noise triggers the sympathetic nervous system causing the body to release adrenaline and cortisol which in turn spike heart rate and stroke volume causing arteries to clamp down so as to increase the pressure to deliver more blood to our muscles. Increased heart rate and blood pressure are natural and necessary for fight or flight but shouldn’t be sustained for long periods of time. Now consider how much of your life you spend around noise: TV, music, podcasts, talking, traffic noise, household noise. It’s almost impossible to find quiet.

Silence, on the other hand, helps the body return to the parasympathetic state. Think of the parasympathetic nervous system as the body’s “rest and digest” system. When people sit in silence for even 2-minute periods throughout the day, just letting their minds be at rest, they can experience a reduction in heart rate and blood pressure.[2] When we spend time in silence, it can literally return our bodies to a state of “rest.”

How about you? How often do you ride in the car in total silence? How often do you spend time at home without the sound of the TV, music playing, or a podcast?

If you never spend any time in silence, try to pick one time a day when you are alone, turn off everything, and let your parasympathetic nervous system take over.

I’ll be writing more about how to cultivate silence in a future post.

[1] https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/environmental-noise-in-europe

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1860846/

Social image credits to Guillaume de Germain via subslpash