Edel Coffey: In a world of noise, silence truly is golden
Edel Coffey: Photo: Ray Ryan
There’s a line in Claire Keegan’s novella Foster that goes: ‘Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’ It’s a line that has regularly come to mind over the years, and it came back to me again last week as I listened to the writer Tahmima Anam, author of The Startup Wife, talking about how women can use silence to their advantage in the workplace.
Anam has worked in tech startups for the last ten years, a particularly male world, and has learned a thing or two about using her voice in that environment. Staying silent, particularly in the male-dominated world of tech, seems to go against everything women have been told about making our voices heard. But Anam is very clear that she is in favour of women speaking out to create institutional change. Her point is that a lot of the talking women do in the workplace is motivated by making other people feel comfortable.
And it’s often something that is expected of women in particular. We are supposed to smile, nod enthusiastically in agreement, make encouraging noises in meetings, and generally smooth over any awkward silences with a bit of mood-lightening chit-chat. Essentially we make the workplace a more comfortable place to be and we do it unthinkingly, automatically.
Anam suggested that instead of filling the silence, women should try holding the silence. ‘It’s not your job to smooth things over.’ To my mind this felt revolutionary. I wondered how much energy a person could save in a day if they delegated the task of looking after uncomfortable silences. The post-pandemic re-integration into the world of socialising has been a difficult re-entry for many, fraught with stalling small talk and the dreaded awkward silence.
I have to admit, I’ve never met an uncomfortable silence that I wasn’t willing to fill. There’s something about an awkward silence that makes me want to throw myself on it, like a heroic bomb disposal expert, defusing the situation with a barrage of nonsensical small talk in order to avert the apparent disaster of a few seconds of silence. When I think about it, this small talk is probably equally as uncomfortable as the awkward silence itself.
But why is silence sometimes so uncomfortable, so difficult for us to sit with? Since our return to ‘normal life’, I’ve started to realise that, for me, silence has become a really necessary part of a balanced lifestyle.
So I’ve started turning off my phone after a certain time in the evenings, turning off the TV too. Awkward silences aside, I’ve always been a fan of silence in general, but our world is becoming noisier, more distracted and more cacophonous. It feels harder and harder to find a little quiet time amidst the notifications, the emails, the reminders, and the social media, more and more difficult to mute the onslaught and disentangle ourselves from the metaverse.
Even as I write this column, a car alarm is blaring through my street and the low-grade interference of a radio left on in the kitchen is burbling through the house. It’s no surprise that the practices of meditation and mindfulness have seen such a huge rise in popularity in recent decades. I wasn’t surprised to discover that silence is medically proven to have many health benefits. A report by the World Health Organization (WHO) found that noise from the environment (cars, trains, planes etc.) could actually be linked to health outcomes like cardiovascular disease, sleep disturbances, and cognitive impairment amongst other things.
Silence has been proven to boost cell growth in the brain and even a ten-minute rest in a quiet darkened room has been shown to improve memory. It is credited with everything from helping to lower blood pressure, improve concentration and focus, calm racing thoughts, stimulate brain growth and creativity, reduce cortisol, and improve insomnia and mindfulness. There are, it seems, no downsides to silence, unless you really, really don’t want to hear your own interior monologue.
As for the uncomfortable silence, which is a little less relaxing and restorative, I’m going to try and stop feeling completely responsible for it. After all, it takes two to tango. So, next time I find myself in the grip of an awkward silence, I’m going to try to let it hang there for a second or two longer than I normally would and see what happens. It might actually be more comfortable than hearing myself filling the void with mindless chit-chat. Besides, in my experience, letting those awkward silences breathe a little bit can often lead to much more interesting conversations.
If you give a person space to respond, a second or two of silence to think about what they actually want to say, they will often surprise you. I’m going to try to stop thinking of these conversational lulls as me being rude or making the other person feel uncomfortable and instead think of them as the lost art of shutting up for a second or two. After all, many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.
