The Sound of Nothing: The Science of Silence

For close to three decades, we have watched guests arrive at Ananda from some of the loudest cities on earth. Their first 72 hours of quiet are quite revealing..

It usually happens on the second evening.

A guest arriving from Mumbai, Dubai, London or New York still carrying the shape of a working week, walks out onto the terrace after dinner and stops. The lights of Rishikesh flicker in the valley below. The foothills rise dark behind. And in between, there is almost nothing to hear.

Some people breathe out. A surprising number reach for their phone.

A retreat on a Maharaja's estate in the Himalayas gives one an unusual vantage point. You get to watch hundreds of people meet silence, often for the first time in years. And what we have learned is that quiet is not the soft, pleasant thing which you see on advertisements. For many guests, it is the most unfamiliar environment they will enter all year.

And increasingly science is saying the same thing.

The noise we stopped noticing

Our ears have no lids. We can close our eyes, but hearing runs all day and all night, and the body keeps responding to sound even when the mind has tuned it out.

Cardiologists at the University Medical Center Mainz have shown how literal that is. They played recordings of aircraft and train noise, 60 events a night, into people's bedrooms while they slept. Pooling four of these studies, covering 275 people, they found that after a noisy night blood vessels dilated less well, and blood pressure was higher.

The world’s noisiest cities reach peaks of 105 to 119 decibels, more than double the WHO’s 53-decibel guideline on a scale where every 10 decibels sound twice as loud, and long-term exposure is linked to hearing loss, sleep disruption and heart disease.

Natural quiet, meanwhile, is disappearing. The American acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton spent decades searching for places where you could listen for 15 minutes without hearing a single human-made sound and found very few.

Most of our guests have not experienced real quiet in a very long time. Their bodies have adapted to noise as the normal state.

Silence, the esctacy and the agony

In 2006, a team led by Luciano Bernardi at the University of Pavia was studying how music affects the heart. They played 24 people six styles of music, from raga to techno, and slipped a two-minute pause into the sequence almost as an afterthought. During that pause, heart rate, blood pressure and breathing fell below the levels recorded before any music started. The pause relaxed people more than the most soothing track.

And then there is the other side of the coin. In 2014, psychologists at the University of Virginia and Harvard asked people to sit alone in a bare room for 6 to 15 minutes with nothing to do but think. Across 11 studies, most did not enjoy it. In one version, participants could press a button to give themselves a mild electric shock they had already said they would pay to avoid. Two thirds of the men and a quarter of the women pressed it.

Put those findings together and we start to understand the paradox we see at Ananda every week. Silence is good for us. Yet most of us find it deeply uncomfortable.

What three days of quiet looks like

Over the years, our teams have come to recognise a pattern.

Day one is busy. Guests often want the full schedule, then want to add to it. Phones stay close. The quiet gets filled with emails, calls, plans. It is what a nervous system tuned to constant input does when the input stops.

Day two is uncomfortable. This is the dip. People tell us they feel restless, irritable or unexpectedly tired. Some sleep for ten hours. Some cannot sleep at all. Thoughts they have kept at a distance start arriving. Some quietly wonder whether they made a mistake in coming.

Day three, something shifts. Walks get slower. The phone drifts further from the hand. The phrase we hear most often at this point is some version of: I feel like myself again.

The most important thing we learned came from Yoga Nidra and early meditation sessions. When guests first settled into that deep stillness, emotions they had not touched in years would often rise to the surface. Not occasionally, but regularly. It was the silence itself doing this. That observation is what led us to build emotional healing into our programmes, rather than treating it as a separate discipline.

We also noticed who struggled most. Often, it was the most capable, most driven people. The ones for whom busy-ness had been working, quite well, as a way of not having to listen to anything else.

And we noticed what really helped the sceptics. Rarely being told to sit still. More often, a sound healing singing bowl session or a walk through the forest at first light worked best, where the quiet arrives through the body rather than through focussed effort.

Easing in

This becomes a part of life, if you go gradually.

Start with natural sound, not total silence. A 2017 study at Brighton and Sussex Medical School found that listening to natural sounds shifted people's attention outward and increased the body's rest-and-digest activity. The most stressed participants relaxed the most.

Claim the first ten minutes of the day. Before the phone, before the news. It is the easiest window to protect and sets the tone for the rest of the day.

Take one meal a day without content. No podcast, no screen. Just the meal.

Expect it to get louder first. In Bernardi's study the relaxation came in the pause, not the music. For most of our guests, it comes after the uncomfortable second day. If silence feels noisy at first, that is not failure. It is the start.

University Medical Center Mainz: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10584703/

Landscapes without human generated noise - https://orionmagazine.org/article/silence-like-scouring-sand/ 
U. Virginia & Harvard study: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/07/140703142154.htm 