Why working in a noise-free environment brings many health benefits
Picture: iStock
WORKING from home during the pandemic undoubtedly presents its challenges, but life without the office chat, the constant whirring of printers and pinging of phones brings at least some benefits — one of them being peace and quiet. Statistics from the labour market thinktank Eurofound, recently showed that approximately 40% of paid hours worked by employees in Ireland were performed at home at the height of lockdown, one of the highest rates in Europe. And while some may have struggled with interruptions and changes to routine, others have relished the snatches of solitude and silence that home-working brings.
Such is the renewed appreciation for silence and its potent effects on our health and emotions that, according to the , New Yorkers are embracing an unexpected trend of breakfasting in silence to help them “cope with the pandemic”. A ritual that is well established on yoga retreats and that has roots in Buddhism and monastic living, the silent breakfast was born out of a need to carve out some time to escape the digital intrusion that threatens to become all-consuming when our bedroom or living room becomes our office. It’s not for everyone.
“Dining is fundamentally a social activity and it is hard to be social in silence, but for many people, breakfast is the least social meal of the day,” says Charles Spence, an experimental psychologist at Oxford University.
“Perhaps a silent breakfast might be seen as helping to reduce the sensory overload and also has a slightly meditative thing going on.”
What experts do know is that constant exposure to loud noise can have consequences for our health that range from elevated heart rate and blood pressure to a flood of stress hormone levels and an inability to concentrate. But does it follow that pursuing peacefulness will undo the damage? A number of studies have indeed shown that our brains and bodies respond to bouts of silence in the same way they respond to meditation, by lowering stress hormones and breathing rate so that, afterwards, better levels of concentration and a sense of calmness take hold.
And there could be more benefits to injecting even short, sharp hits of silence into your day, says Dr Julie Darbyshire, principal investigator on Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences’ SILENCE project which looked at the effect of quietness on hospital patients. “There are potentially massive health gains from everyone having a bit of quiet time in their day.”
Here’s what some quiet time can achieve:
If you can train yourself to retreat into quietness for two hours a day, it could boost your cognitive ability.
Researchers at the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and other centres found that two hours of silence helped to create new cells in the hippocampus region of the brain linked to learning, memory, and emotions.
From their studies on mice, the team observed that silence triggers the brain to produce more cells that increase alertness and readiness for “future cognitive challenges” and Imke Kirste, a researcher at DZNE and Duke University who worked on the study, suggests that these cells appeared to become functioning neurons.
“Silence is really helping the newly generated cells to differentiate into neurons and integrate into the system,” Kirste said.
Listening to classical music has been shown to be helpful in lowering a raised heart rate and blood pressure, but so too has exposure to silence. Cardiologists [exa.mn/SilenceHeart] discovered that a two-minute silent pause between recordings of classical music had a dramatic effect on relieving tension in the body and mind. In her own research, Darbyshire assessed the effect of noisy hospital wards on patients’ health and found the constant loud sounds in ICU units - during the day, noise levels were equivalent to those of a busy restaurant and even at night there were sounds louder than 85 decibels, around the level of a road drill, up to 16 times an hour – to be hugely detrimental. “Noise is a distraction and a stressor and a quiet and calm environment is definitely better for patients and staff in hospitals,” says Darbyshire. “It would make sense that complete silence has a calming effect and doesn’t cause someone’s heart rate to rise.”
Eating in silence – or at least a quieter environment – can positively impact our enjoyment of food. In both laboratory and real-life settings, Spence has shown that people drink more when exposed to loud music and suggests that loud noise can affect the taste and texture of food - not always in a good way.
In a paper published last year in the journal , Spence showed that exposure to unpleasant sounds when eating can mask specific tastes such as sweet and salt and also impair our ability to discriminate between different types of alcohol. “There’s also emerging evidence that we transfer the emotions we attach to sound to whatever else we evaluate,” Spence says. “So things don’t taste as good when we listen to music we dislike or sounds we find irritating.” Silent meals may mean you eat fewer calories.
In what they dubbed the ‘crunch effect’, scientists at Brigham Young University and Colorado State University discovered that being able to hear the sounds your food makes while you're eating – all that chewing, chomping and crunching – means you consume fewer calories than you do while eating when listening to music, a podcast or exposed to any distracting sound.
In one of their trials, they asked participants to wear wore headphones playing either quiet noise or noise loud enough to mask chewing while they ate snacks. Wearing the louder headphone sounds, the volunteers ate four pretzels compared to 2.75 pretzels when wearing the quiet headphones. "Sound is typically labelled as the forgotten food sense," says Ryan Elder, assistant professor of marketing at BYU's Marriott School of Management. "But if people are more focused on the sound the food makes, it could reduce consumption."
Most of us eat on automatic pilot. “It’s a behaviour so well practised and rehearsed that we don’t need to think much about how to do it and the upshot is we can allocate our attention to other tasks while we are eating,” says Professor Jeff Brunstrom, a researcher in behavioural nutrition at the University of Bristol.
“But eating is an automatic behaviour only up to a point, and when noise distraction takes us to a limit, it compromises our capacity to eat this way.” His studies have shown that a consequence of mealtimes distracted by noise is that people eat a larger meal at their next sitting.
“There is plenty of evidence that by eating more attentively, as we would during a silent breakfast, has an effect on overall food consumption in a subsequent meal,” Brunstrom says. “You will likely eat less if your previous meal has been mindful.”
Complete quietness can boost the satisfaction you get from doing any activity from a yoga routine to knitting, says Dr Jennifer Wild, consultant clinical psychologist and associate professor at the University of Oxford and author of (Robinson).
“Research in the early 1980s found a link between being fully absorbed in a task and feeling fulfilled,” says Wild. “Silence can support us to fully absorb our attention in what we are doing – whether that’s reading, walking, gardening or running - and the more absorbed we are in the here and now with our full attention, the happier we are.”
Quietness is also essential when learning a creative new skill or technique. “Science shows that what people love most about their favourite activities, such as rock climbing, reading, playing chess, and so on, are the moments during these activities that they’re discovering something new – the moments they’re being creative – and this is likely to be during periods of silence,” Wild says. “Silence can be very helpful for our overall mood.”
Slamming doors, alarms and noises from other patients and staff were all found to have a detrimental effect on recovery in Darbyshire’s studies. Quietness has the opposite effect and can induce calm and even lower perception of pain. In one trial, anesthesiologists at Penn State University’s Milton S. Hershey Medical Centre found that bouts of silence helped patients who had undergone elective hysterectomies to stay more relaxed.
Of 56 patients studied, 28 were asked to wear noise-cancelling headphones and 28 to listen to Jazz music in the postoperative care unit while researchers kept a regular check on their heart rate, blood pressure and pain and anxiety levels. Results showed that heart rates were significantly lower in both groups immediately after surgery but that the silent group reported less pain than the jazz group after ten minutes.
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