Who ever sits in silence anymore?
Imagine me in my bed. It is past midnight, dark but never perfectly dark. The curtains glow ghostly white in the columnar light of my phone screen. Streetlight pours over my static body. I am lulled by the sound of Seinfeld, the sitcom dialogue running like a current through my headphones, the laugh track looping until I lose consciousness. This is how I sleep.
Imagine me in the shower. Any time of the day or night, the bathroom is transformed by warm LEDs into a pseudo golden hour. My phone rests upside down on the metal grate of a shower caddy, sprayed with droplets from the busted showerhead. YouTube videos play on shuffle. I am only half listening; waterfall drowns everything into a murmur. This is how I shower.
Imagine me making dinner. I cut onions, grate garlic, open cans of beans with firm twists of the wrist and hand. Vegetables sweat and simmer on the stove. My eardrums thrum with the rhythm of a reality television argument. A woman decides she hates her boyfriend. Someone says someone else is “really fake, right?” I smile at the cutting board and shake my head, detached, tethered to the present moment only by the smell of toasting spices and the slicing knife’s haunting sharpness. This is how I cook.
Imagine me on the sidewalk. There is a hat over my ears or a scarf against my cheeks, protecting me from the wind, cupping the frozen mist of breath against my face. The muffle of headphones softens my footfalls. Between my ears, two women dissect Canadian politics, a mortician deadpans an unsolved murder case, a twenty-five-year-old reads his old tweets and laughs aloud. This is how I walk.
I have rarely felt silence in almost three years.
My need for constant entertainment began in high school. While applying for university, the pressure of GPAs, admission averages, and potential rejection caused me to have what my doctor called ‘a bit of an episode.’ As I started to spiral, I adopted some ironclad coping habits. I struggled to get out of bed in the morning, so I let myself watch Netflix once I left my room. I struggled to shower, so I played podcasts or YouTube videos from my phone speaker. I struggled to sleep, so I stayed up watching Family Guy reruns until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. The common theme was noise. For months, I worked diligently to ensure that I didn’t spend a single waking moment in the terrifying emptiness of quiet. I was never fully feeling, never fully living, always distracted.
During that time, thinking was a risky ordeal because I suffered badly from intrusive thoughts. Silence posed an opportunity for my brain to fill in the blanks—even innocuous moments, like waiting for class to begin or riding the bus or shaving my legs, were an opening for some devious mental popup. Chain-smoking endless streams of content felt like the best form of protection. Being constantly entertained didn’t come without costs: These practices alienated me from myself and the tertiary experiences of my life. But the habits allowed me to go through the motions and maintain my sanity. After a few months, I got a diagnosis, started on meds, and became less miserable. Still, my need for noise stayed.
Constant entertainment was not just my personal depression life hack—it’s a scientifically vetted strategy. Experiencing occasional intrusive thoughts is not uncommon, but when intense and frequent, they quickly become distressing. If you’ve ever sat in a quiet meeting and felt you might start yelling uncontrollably or gotten the overwhelming sense that you might hit someone while driving, you have had an intrusive thought. They only become dysfunctional when you can’t turn them off.
How do you cope with a stream of distressing thoughts you can’t seem to stop? A 2014 study on OCD found that using “distraction as coping behaviour is an effective technique for managing clinically significant intrusive thoughts.” Scientists determined that people’s ability to distract themselves from intrusive thoughts was essential to their ability to function. Instead of enduring the cycle of becoming upset and calming themselves down, patients could shift their attention before they had begun processing an emotional situation. While they couldn’t fully work through whatever had upset them in the moment, the strategy was adaptive, allowing participants to continue operating without becoming inconsolable.
Luckily for stressed-out people craving distraction, there is an endless variety of options to choose from, ranging from a minor auditory earworm to a fully immersive virtual world where no real-life concerns can intrude. We all know intuitively that music is pleasant, and television and podcasts are engaging, but nothing shuts your brain off completely like a TikTok or a Reel—they are a perfect trifecta of sound and image and text. Even better is combining multiple kinds of distraction at once, scrolling TikTok while you watch a show and online shop in a second tab. There are a million jokes on X (previously known as Twitter) about consuming five different types of content to eliminate the possibility of a single thought, but they are only half-joking. Distraction can feel more silent than actual silence, because it may be the only time that you get peace from your internal monologue.
“Not only do I have music playing at all times, but playing it out loud feels too far away […] so I keep my headphones on […] I usually fall asleep to TV if not music,” said Gianna Mountroukas, U3 Arts. When I asked why, she admitted she’s “tired of thinking” constantly—she feels like she’s “never in silence” even when the music is off. Like me, she is hungry not just for physical quiet but moments of internal peace, respite from a tireless stream of consciousness. These can be difficult to achieve without the aid of distraction.
Although the studies I discussed deal with mental illnesses, this process can exist with any kind of stress for any kind of brain. Even if you’re predisposed to mental wellness, just checking the news is enough to send anyone into a spiral. There is an endless list of things that you might want to avoid thinking about. Accordingly, many of my peers reported complicated relationships with silence.
Several of the people interviewed for this article described a love for background noise. Rowina Debalkew, U3 Arts, said that silence “can be both comforting and disturbing” depending on the circumstance, but she “can’t walk anywhere without music.” Theo Shouse, U2 Arts, said “Silence [is] only for sleep. Otherwise, I require constant podcasts and music.” Alvise Ceolato, U2 Arts, explained he only enjoys silence while smoking, as he’s forced to “listen to the pace of [his] breath.” Otherwise, he says silence “makes me feel like I need to judge myself and try to look at my own true colours.”
These reports indicate a widespread use of distraction as a coping mechanism. Dismissing our collective obsession with entertainment as stupidity or sloth is an incomplete conclusion—clearly, something deeper is going on. Still, recognizing that we distract ourselves for a good reason does not mean the practice is beyond reproach.
Personally, I began to wonder just how much I was blocking out. It had been too long since I sat with myself and puzzled through any big questions because I’d learned to avoid mental pathways that could end in anxiety. But over the summer I decided I wanted to reconnect with myself, with that internal monologue I had been blockading. I needed to reflect: What am I like when nobody else is around? Am I happy with how I’m spending my time? What are my dreams?
You can’t work these questions out with yourself in a 15-minute rap session. They require time and deep attention, the cumulation of many little ideas and realizations during the passing moments of your life. I got worried that I had robbed myself of many such moments because I was scared of what I’d feel along the way. The more time I spent in quiet, growing less and less afraid of what awaited me there, the more I felt the floodgates open. Instead of coping by preventing the upset before it began, I tried to complete the emotional cycle. I let myself fully experience my thoughts, fretting and crying and whatever else I needed to do to process them. Once I learned to sit with the discomfort, my brain became more peaceful. Silence became soothing. Being deeply connected to my surroundings allowed me to ground myself in times of stress and refocus on what was happening in the world outside my head.
I’ve seen promising signs of others reconnecting with their ability to exist without digital distraction. There was that New York Times article about the Neo-Luddite teens, who meet up to paint watercolours in the park instead of going on their phones. There’s the You Don’t Need a Smartphone pamphlet by New York indie writer August Lamm, who is trying to help others reclaim their attention and time. And there are the people ‘raw-dogging’ long flights, braving 19 hours with no entertainment. A BBC news article published in Aug. 2024 identifies the trend as a result of “collective yearning for balance as people seek to reclaim mental space and foster a deep connection with their inner selves.” McGill student Gaby Godfrey, U4 Arts, described this practice on a smaller scale—whenever they fly home they “have to sit alone with [their] thoughts for a minimum of 45 minutes,” if only to prove they can. Instead of using quiet moments as opportunities for distraction or productivity, I see a growing respect for the ability to unplug. Granted, it’s strange that doing nothing is not just a normal part of everyday life, but a bizarre enough practice to warrant a ‘trend’ and a place in the news cycle. Still, I’m glad the idea is coming to the fore.
I heard many other heartening accounts of my peers taking back their quiet time too. Sam Batson, U3 Arts, used to feel the urge to “consume media at every given moment,” before she concluded that this habit “increases stress rather than soothes it.” Now, she loves “just chilling in all the natural noises of life.” Instead of constantly listening to music, Celia O’Hara, U3 Arts, has begun taking silent walks—she finds them better for reflecting and reconnecting with her sensory environment. And when I asked Johnny Carter, U3 Education, about quiet, he said it makes up a significant portion of his normal day. He missed it badly at summer camp, where the kids preferred constant music blasting.
I’ve been rejoining the world in this same way, a little at a time. I took a month away from Instagram. I have downloaded countless social media time-saving apps from the webstore. I own a physical notebook and a dusty typewriter. I’m learning to fall asleep in silence again, to shower with only the sound of the water running. These steps might sound small, but the habits are deeply ingrained and shockingly hard to kick. Being bored can be scary and uncomfortable, especially when the feeling has grown foreign—sitting in silence has become a skill which must be cultivated.
The idea that you feel better when you’re not constantly entertained is well-documented and intuitively obvious. But to address this pervasive issue, I think we must first give ourselves more credit, recognizing that we do these things for a reason: To make ourselves more comfortable and our lives more livable moment-to-moment. Understanding this behaviour for what it is—a coping mechanism—helped me unburden myself of guilt for what I thought was laziness or a character flaw or me wasting my own time. Once we correctly identify the problem, we can start to regard coping strategies like distraction with appropriate criticism, and effectively weigh the short-term comfort against the long-term costs.
I’m not suggesting we all throw away our headphones and embrace a monk-like reticence. That would be hypocritical—I’m listening to music as I type this. But I think that the ability to sit with your thoughts, to be bored, to endure the joy and discomfort of every tedious and terrifying and wonderful moment of your life, is an undervalued skill. If you, like me, crave distraction, don’t just slap yourself on the wrist when you see your screen time report—try to identify what you’re avoiding. If you want to nurture this skill, start small. Sit on the bus or an airplane or the curb and look around, notice everything you can, listen to what happens when you aren’t wearing headphones.
Imagine me walking through my neighbourhood at night. It’s twilight and the sidewalks are abandoned; the sky is all grey clouds, the power lines and houses darkly contrasted, the yellow windows lit from within. My pant legs swish past each other at the knees as I walk. The wind makes a shushing noise as it moves through the trees.
It’s quiet. My thoughts are no longer too large for my body. I bet yours aren’t either— but you should see for yourself.
