Silence and the Art of Shutting Up, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Silence

Have we ever experienced a noisier time? I don’t mean decibels but in terms of disturbances, interjections, dings, pings, bleeps, bloops, vibrations, flashing icons, context switching, and the attention economy. Personally, I find it overwhelming. In Dopamine Nation (2021), Anna Lembke, Director of Stanford Addiction Medicine, on the delicate balance of pleasure and pain within our dopamine pathways, writes:  

“The phylogenetically uber-ancient neurological machinery for processing pleasure and pain has remained largely intact throughout evolution and across species. It is perfectly adapted for a world of scarcity. Without pleasure we wouldn’t eat or reproduce. Without pain we wouldn’t protect ourselves from injury and death… 

But herein lies the problem. Human beings, the ultimate seekers, have responded too well to the challenge of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. As a result, we’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance. 

Our brains are not evolved for this world of plenty.” 

This abundance can be described in many ways, but the abundance that I want to focus on is that addictive noise that is a product of technology and, at times, technological excess. 

I am a “geriatric” millennial which means I remember the exact moment I first surfed the internet in 1995 when my dad showed me a “virtual tour” of Graceland (it was just a series of photos), and I started my freshman year of college just as Facebook extended its tendrils beyond the elite schools. Within the last 30 years, what started with the grating, anticipatory noise of a dial up modem (“I hope my crush is online”, “was my away message a hit?”, “Napster feels wrong, but I just want to download Allstar, not the whole Smashmouth album”) has evolved into a never-ending cacophony of tech-driven noise delivered onto your physical person (and beyond).  

My brain struggles to understand this, to come to terms with it, and to know what to do with this influx of opinions, requests for availability, texts, emails, chats, Facetimes - and I don’t think I’m alone in that. 

Earlier this spring, around the time I began reading Dopamine Nation, the Silverchair Customer Success team began working with a professional coach named Carlos Gimeno (who I highly recommend). We had weeks of team sessions with Carlos, followed by weeks of one on ones. One of the first sessions covered silence. This was serendipitous and has led me to spend the last few months contemplating silence, its importance in my personal and professional life, and how I can control that silence instead of rummaging through technological and scheduling detritus to uncover it. 

This is a loose collection of thoughts and practices that I am pursuing, some thanks to Carlos. My intention is not to be sanctimonious or present this as a panacea; and I know I’m not breaking any new ground here - but I hope you find at least one thing useful, validating, liberating, or even cringy. I’m writing this as much as a commitment to myself as I am for others to read. 

• Create your own silence 
• Institute a technology ban during the first and last hours of your day. When your alarm goes off, pick up your phone, make sure you haven’t missed anything important, whatever that is in your life, and then put it back down.  
• Schedule time on your calendar for “nothing” silence. This could be five, ten minutes where you intend to do nothing, or meditate, or stretch. 
• Schedule times for focused silence and name it. Put a block on your calendar for however long you can and give it a purpose: “Inbox focus”; “Proposal focus”; or “[insert problem] focus”. And then do it. 
• Get comfortable with silence 
• I listen to too many podcasts. My partner knows it, my therapist knows it, and the algorithms know it. Podcasts sate my curiosity, they distract, and they entertain. For me, the default is opt-in so I must intentionally opt-out. I have to decide to not listen: on this dog walk or while cooking this meal or while disassociating on the subway.  
• Give yourself time to sit, observe, and absorb. Do it for a minute, five minutes, 15 minutes - notice the banal things outside of your current screen of choice. 
• When you schedule time for “nothing” or focused silence, how often are you thinking about the pings you’re missing, the emails that have come in, or whether or not your coworkers think you have slipped out for a quick nap? This is noise coming from ourselves, catalyzed by technological access. Get comfortable with being a little unavailable. 
• I, via my anxiety, like to fill silences: gaps in conversation; the first few moments of a video call; the yawn from my conversational partner. So intentionally leave some space, sit with the silence - maybe even appreciate it?  
• Use silence strategically 
• Noise steamrolls silence. View silence as an opportunity: you can sit with it, you can fill it with a pertinent thought or question, and others can contribute their own thoughts.  
• For me, the most important role I have in Customer Success (finally, he brings it back to Silverchair) is to advocate for my clients - to be their voice when they’re not in the room and to help them achieve their short and long term strategic goals. In order to do my job well, I have to leave space (silence) for them to communicate to me what matters. If I don’t strategically allow for silence to exist in our conversations I run the risk of not listening, not understanding, and of taking that space from someone else - perhaps someone less accustomed to talking in meetings, someone hoping for an opening. 
• Fight for your own silence 
• When you schedule silence or focus, most importantly, do not let anyone schedule over it without permission - decline the meeting. If this is not possible, drag that focus block to another time - don’t let it die on your calendar. 
• Make technology work for you, not the other way around. Delete apps, explore dumb phone options (swoon), tell Netflix no. Our attention and our silence is ours (I don’t have kids - does it show?) and we get to decide who and what we let in. 

I acknowledge there are cultural hurdles to implementing these behaviors and they can certainly be found in the workplace. Our physical and mental health relies on developing a healthy relationship with technology and the noise it can create. Just because we can do something with technology doesn’t mean we should. 

Before Silverchair I worked in industries whose bottom line depended on selling people things that they didn’t need - plenty. This is not something I have encountered here. There is no pressure to push a product, a feature, or an integration that does not align with purpose: to make our clients money, to save our clients money, or to help implement our clients strategic vision. To me, this means we are pushing a healthy relationship with technology to our clients, making technology work for them, and minimizing noise. That’s why I’m still at Silverchair after six years. That, and I’m just bad at bulls****ing a sale. 

Thanks for reading this meandering post. And to all my clients with whom I may let the silence linger for too long: sorry, there’s an art to this and I’m still finger painting. It’s hard to read a Zoom room! 

I’ll leave you with this irreverent playlist: 

1. It’s Oh So Quiet - Björk 
2. The Sound of Silence - Simon & Garfunkel 
3. Quiet on the Set - N.W.A. 
4. Shut Up and Let Me Go - The Ting Tings 
5. You Talk Too Much - Run D.M.C. 
6. Silence Kid - Pavement 
7. Your Silent Face - New Order 
8. Silent Shout - The Knife 
9. Say Shh - Atmosphere
10. Deep Layered Brown Noise (1 hour)