From the moment you wake up, there’s noise everywhere from your alarm clock to the cars outside to your internal thoughts. We live in a noisy world filled with distractions and there isn’t much room for silence but recently, people have understood the value of silence and solitude. I will be sharing with you 6 benefits of being silent and embracing silence and we are starting right now.
You can find the aha moments that spark a brilliant solution to your problem when you are in silence. In a Harvard Business Article, David Rock and Josh Davis explain that flashes of insight can be fostered by specific conditions. Most of us have a packed calendar and we are busy with work, meetings, and other daily tasks. As a result, you are surrounded by people or your mind is busy with work. Insightful moments are just like silence, you have to find it through the noise. Research has shown that silence helps you make better decisions. People in the study made smarter decisions after meditating for just 15 minutes. While you might not be into meditation, you don’t need to meditate to reap this benefit. No matter how busy you are, take breaks between meetings and work to find some alone time. Go to an empty room or maybe even go for a quick walk outside. You then want to focus on your inner thoughts and ignore what’s going on around you. It’s fine to let your mind wander because it goes hand in hand with internal focus. Give yourself some silence and you might find your next breakthrough insight.
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You will be happier overall. There are a lot of philosophies and religions with different views on how to be happy but there are some similarities, especially in how they view silence. Silence could be a potential solution to the lifelong question of how one is happy. If you are more extroverted, you might question how can silence help but let me explain. When you are in silence or solitude, you are able to go within yourself and examine yourself. The concept is very easy but not a lot of people do it. Some people are just too busy in their day-to-day lives but the reason why most people don’t do it is that they are afraid of finding the ugliness inside. When you are by yourself and speaking to yourself, you get uncomfortable because you fear what’s inside. If you are resisting silence and solitude, you might have something that needs to be dealt with on the inside. If you can deal with that, you will be happier. If you don’t deal with what’s bothering you internally, it will continue to bother you. Meditation is one of the best ways to reap this benefit but if you don’t want to, you can just sit there in silence self-reflecting and going within.
You can cut out filler words in conversation. Silence makes many people uncomfortable so they talk to fill up the silence. Most of them use filler words when talking so that their brain can catch up to what they are saying but the same result can be achieved by pausing. People use filler words such as um and like instead of pausing because it seems more natural than pausing. A lot of people are uncomfortable with silence so they rather use filler words than pause. If you can embrace the silence and cut out filler words, you will be able to get your message across better. Research has shown that conversational speech has short or .2 seconds, medium or .6 seconds, and long or over 1-second pauses. Great public speakers pause for 2 to 3 seconds or sometimes longer. When pausing, it might feel like forever at first because we tend to think faster than we can speak but if you keep practicing, it will feel more natural. The pause shows that you are cool and collected and you still have time to collect your thoughts.
You see the world differently. When you become comfortable with silence, you view the world in a different way. You are able to appreciate your surroundings and interact with them differently. There’s a musician by the name of John Cage who reaped this benefit and wanted to show other people how to so he created a piece called 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The song is simply 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Cage didn’t make it as a joke though. What Cage was really after was so the audience could listen to the sounds of the world with the same attention they would normally devote to a music piece. The piece was played in the Maverick Concert Hall where there are walls open to the outside. The audience was able to listen to the sounds of the outside world during the 4 minutes and 33 seconds. By being silent or embracing the silence, you are able to be more aware of what is going around you and observe the world better.
You are more creative. Quiet people are usually creators in some shape or form because that is how they best express themselves. Whether it is through writing, art, or video, quiet people tend to show their creativity through creating. This isn’t to say that someone more extroverted isn’t good at writing, art, or creating videos. Someone more extroverted might be just as good but their work might show their outgoing personality more than their creativity. Even if you are more extroverted, you can still be more creative by being more silent. The reason why quiet people tend to be more creative is that when they have some solitude, they let their imagination run wild. They visualize a lot which helps with their creativity. Having some alone time will help you be more creative.
You become more humble. You know the quote that says work hard in silence and let success make the noise? It’s the quiet people who tend to work hard in silence and let success make the noise. Quiet people also tend to be more humble because they have more self-awareness and they understand themselves and their weaknesses better. Being more humble is like a side effect of the other benefits of being silent in a sense because someone that is quieter doesn’t always have to be humble. Regardless of that, if you can embrace silence and solitude, you can be more humble, which in turn, will make you more likable and approachable.
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