In response to ‘I always needed background noise in my life. Then I turned off my phone and embraced the silence’ in The Guardian.

My Spotify Wrapped this year said I’d listened to 143,193 minutes. Last year, it was 179,895. The year before, 156,573. I have unknowingly controlled my relationship with silence for several years, but it’s something that I have no plans to change.

Recently, Krissi Driver wrote a piece in The Guardian about how she learned to love silence after deliberately surrounding herself in noise. From listening to music or the news in the shower, whilst washing up or folding laundry, a writing retreat made her realise the sound was stopping her from thinking creatively.

“I didn’t realise how much ‘harmless background noise’ was hurting me,” she wrote, “until one day I noticed the sound of silence.”

What does this mean for me, someone who spends a third of my entire year listening to music, yet rarely when I’m working, or in the shower, or walking to my lectures? I can tolerate silence, but only in specific contexts.

For me, this staggering figure comes from using Spotify overnight – not music, either, but over 100,000 minutes of my yearly Spotify stats belong to podcasts. What started several years ago as an attempt to calm my existential dread in the dead of night has now become a necessary part of my routine.

I can tolerate silence but only in specific contexts

I was always a child who would spend hours imagining scenarios before going to bed, living a completely separate world in the space between lights out and eventually sleep. As I grew older, this transformed into spirals of anxiety and panicking about death. Listening to something has allowed me to feel more in control of those thoughts – it has expanded the space my panic lies in from just my head into the outside world, which helps to make it feel a bit smaller.

Maybe I’m not as “addicted” to sound as Krissi Driver felt she was, but I definitely rely on it in places. It gives me a routine, even if that is knowing when to brace for James Acaster shouting ‘Papadums or Bread?’ on the Off Menu podcast.

Finding comfort in a reliable sound presence is not a bad thing at all. The world is loud: if it’s not in your headphones, it’s the sound of cars when crossing the road, or the echo of conversation in the train station. If we have no choice but to be surrounded by sound, we can at least choose our relationship with it. I may lose a few hours of silence each night by listening to podcasts, but it grounds me and reminds me to relax.

“It seems clear to me that the more sound we allow to surround us as a society, the less connected we become to one another,” Driver writes. To the contrary, I think sound is most important in my life when I am alone. Listening to podcasts at night has nothing to do with the way I communicate with others, but the way I preserve my sense of ease in my own company. We shouldn’t antagonise this, but rather embrace the comforts of a routine of noise.  

Image: Elf-Moondance via Pixabay