Silence for ten minutes is something most people want to avoid with all their might. But once you know the value of silence, you can stop avoiding it and turn it on. In long-term relationships, partnerships and marriages, love marriage specialist, silence feels natural.
We are afraid of silence because it reminds us of loneliness and death. Silence is something we need more than the absence of sound; it is something we need to break out of the constant stimulus of activity.
Life in a monastery taught me that silence is an inner phenomenon that transcends the absence of noise around us. It took several months of outer silence to teach the monks that there is no noise. Just as one needs rest and sleep to interrupt the frenzy, we need liberation from inner and outer silence.
Silence comes when it comes, like darkness in the shadows when you don’t think. When one is silent, one feels guilty for it, and doubts, fears and worries creep in, as if thoughts were trying to convince one that silence is strange and fearful. Even quiet silence can make you anxious and anxious, even if you know better.
Most research on the fears associated with silence focuses on the fear that clumsy silence in conversation unsettles people. A study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2013), for example, argues that prolonged silence, which interrupts conversations, makes people feel stressed, afraid of being hurt, or rejected.
Whether you are listening to talk or sitting in a restaurant with friends, there is a feeling that there is a subliminal pressure on most people to fill the space of silence.
Silence evokes feelings of loneliness, emptiness, shyness and negativity. People who suffer from sedatephobia cannot stand silence because they need noise and human interaction. Just as it is difficult to escape external sounds, it is difficult to silence the inner voice.
One of the functions of silence is to ensure that no one is heard in another conversation. Hearing silence requires effort, thoughts fade in the chasm between them and the noise, and one hears nothing but silence.
In today’s world, a thirty-second silence in an elevator can feel like deafening silence. Even in the centre of a city or deep in the forest, the cacophony of sounds makes it clear that true silence is impossible. For some people it is impossible to meditate or sit for a few minutes in a quiet room; they need their phones, music, television, noise, traffic or anything else around them.
Family members can play an important role in helping a person overcome their fear of silence. Once you get used to spending discreet time together that is not filled to the brim with conversation, moments of silence can become a relaxing and nourishing part of your relationship with your significant other. These moments, shared with a significant other, do not have to come from a place of tension; it can be more about spending quality time and appreciating the presence of the other.
Accepting this does not mean sitting still all the time, it is just a sign that something is getting out of hand. Remember, there are a lot of things you can do to make yourself comfortable in silence. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we shouldn’t talk, it just means feeling comfortable and enjoying the moments of silence.
The antidote to the fear of silence is listening, and as you listen you will notice how incredible, wonderful and reverent silence can be, and how healing. One can strive to fill the frightening silence with words.
To combat the fear of silence, you only need to remember this one word. There are two key points in your thoughts that prevent you from exploring silence, and the exploration of silence should be effortless.
Embrace silence by connecting with yourself, your heart, nature and other people at a deeper level through Hatha courses such as IRINAs. Develop the focused attention you want to face and experience the silence.
Learning how to calm your mind, through meditation or mindfulness techniques, for example, can make a life-changing difference. It is the outer silence, which is not absolute, but quite natural, that awakens us and teaches us to listen. Before we think about how to draw attention, we must consider our relationship to silence.
Silence is taboo because society has taught us to regard it as something negative. Many of us are afraid of silence, even though it is shown to us a thousand times a day.
The ubiquity of smartphones, streaming music and media make things worse, according to communications lecturer Bruce Fall of Charles Sturt University in Australia, because they allow people to deal with the silence and its psychological trappings. A study of 580 students published in The Conversation by Bruce Fall over a six-year period shows that constant accessibility and exposure to background media has produced a mass of people afraid of silence. Watch people in conversation more and notice that most people find silence uncomfortable.
