Leigh Marz
Appearances
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
notice an irritability with those i love most i confess and i'll notice that i'll start to kind of lose track of things i'm repeating tasks or you know going back over i'm things are falling through the cracks so that's when i'm saturated with noise those are the signals that's the evidence if you will and then when i am actually getting enough quiet what i'll notice is that my creative thinking is much more amplified i'm more generous with myself with my time with others i
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
do more favors for people i just feel more abundance in life and so for each of us it's to look at really what are the signals that were saturated by noise and how can we take care of that maybe turn down the dial a bit and what are the signals that we are finding the silence that we need and require to really be the kind of person that we want to be in this world
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The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
Well, it's like, I think we think of it as sort of it's the place to start because in this noise-soaked environment where it is so loud and jarring and the impact of that on our health is, you know, is without question. It's the science we lay it out. And then the desire to get into a place of a quieter internal state, it just doesn't require absolute silence on the outside.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
Although that could help, that does help some, but you mentioned for yourself, it's maybe a little better to have a soundtrack or a podcast or a different place to focus. And so we're just trying to create a little bit more space for the ways that we find that internal silence that is so nourishing to us, that helps us get
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
clear on what it is we care most about, where we put our energies, and what is true in our life. And that could be in a loud environment, like I said, sort of like in my dance studio. That's how it is. It's loud, but I'm quiet.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
The Quakers have been doing that for hundreds of years. When there's a sense of polarity or positionality or rigidity in a meeting, the clerk will call for silence. And in that silence, an answer will come, some resolution.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
And so even if it means like, you know, taking a break from the problem at hand, sleeping on it for a night and coming back together, just giving a little space to it, clarity can come through that place.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
I know if silence is so good for us, why aren't we doing more of it? There's a few answers to that. I mean, there might be some things that we're, you know, uncomfortable with or not wanting to face about our lives or behavior or whatever the way things are going that make it challenging and certainly challenging. Nietzsche spoke of that years, hundreds of years ago, the horror of the vacuum.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
So, and my teenager will tell you awkward silence is the worst thing under the sun to go through. So there's, I think some nervousness and varying degrees of fear. So it's not just our personal choices that we're not, you know, choosing silence when it's so clearly good for us.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
It's also we have systems that are driving towards more content and data, whether it's eyeballs on a page and click through there. Our pristine attention is valued at zero or time playing with children or looking at art or walking through nature. But if we're clicking through and eyeballs on a page, it's being valued by GDP. So we're set up, the system is set up to make noise.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
So it's not just our own personal, you know, failings here. There are things we can do to bring more silence to our lives, but there's also a system that's driving us towards making more and more noise.
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The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
Apparently not. But there is a lot of value, which takes us back to that silence is golden. So speech is silver, silence is golden is that aphorism that shows up in cultures all over the world. And the polymath Thomas Carlyle, he liked to think of that as speeches of time, silences of eternity.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
Yeah, I think for many of us, it's a new terrain. And yet it's pretty old technology, if you think about it, just allowing for space for people to be together. There's certainly cultures that value that more. We look at Japanese ancient principle called ma. where the empty space is seen as pure potentiality.
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The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
So the kanji character is a temple gate with slats through it, and there's golden sunlight pouring through those slats. That's the kanji character of ma. So the synonym for silence, for emptiness, but pure potentiality, which is found in the artwork of
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
say ikebana flower arrangements, where the petals and the leaves of the art piece are important and featured, but so is the silence around that, the emptiness around that. Or in scroll painting, the swoosh of the brushstroke is what's at the center of the scroll, but the empty space around it is also of equal importance.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
And we find that in conversation, there's more emptiness and more space to reflect. So it really trickles throughout the culture.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
What I mean by that is that there's something inherently close to sharing silence. There's something that creates an intimacy in that space. And of course, when we think about rituals and ceremonies, often those moments of shared silence, they feel pretty transformational. It's a little hard to explain. It's a little bit in the realm of the ineffable.
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The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
But what I notice in those shared moments of like a wedding or even a funeral or something, when there's just some silence where the collective is holding that silence together, it's not just the poignancy or the importance of that moment, the sacredness of that moment is shared. And I feel like we come out different people with a different sense of connection.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
Yeah, it's an old technology. This is not a new hack. We've been doing this for a long time. And our argument is really just we need to bring a little bit more space in for more silence. We've swung a little too far in one direction. Let's swing it back.
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The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
One way we know that is we look to emergency sirens. So in the past hundred years, those sirens have gotten six times louder in order to cut through the noise around us. The estimates that 65% of the population, about 450 million people, live with decibel levels that are harmful to their health.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
Oh, thanks, Mike.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
Hey, thanks for having me, Mike.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
Oh, that's a great question. Well, on one level, it really is the absence of noise. And we look at it coming, the noise coming to us through our ears and through our screens in many cases, and also the noise that's just generated by our own darn minds.
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The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
But as we explore this question, the deepest silences when we asked all those interesting people, neuroscientists, politicians, artists, poets, a man incarcerated on death row, all kinds of people, we asked them that question and they pointed us
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
towards a deep internal silence so it's not necessarily just about what's happening outside of us although that's also a lovely type of silence but a silence internal that brings about a type of presence where we believe there can be healing and enjoyment and connection and all kinds of things and you believe that because why because you want to believe that or you have real evidence to believe that
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
Meg Christen coined the phrase women's music, but she would have liked to say it was lesbian music.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
it's not so much that we're researchers studying that but what we are doing in our work in the world is for example i work with a lot of scientists and engineers who are trying to get harmful toxic chemicals out of our products and out of our environment and they were coming at these issues these you know really complex and intractable issues in a certain way in the four walls of their offices and under fluorescent lighting and all these things but we took them out into the redwoods and really contemplating these issues
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
with big open space and open calendars and no Wi-Fi. And they really came to some novel thinking, breakthrough thinking. So really time and time and again, I am seeing the results of people tapping into silence, connecting with one another in a different way to come through that breakthrough thinking.
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The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
Yeah, the taxonomy of noise we take on in this, and we could take on visual and things like that, but we kept it to auditory noise, that which happens in our ears and the decibel levels, which has been exponentially on the rise, in case you're wondering, and the research really does bear that out.
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The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
Yeah, sure.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
Yeah, it feels like it's getting louder and it really is getting louder. So one way we know that is we look to emergency sirens as a proxy indicator for the surrounding environments, because of course they need to cut through the din in order to get our attention.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
So in the past hundred years, to your point, it's been gradual, but those sirens have gotten six times louder in order to cut through the noise around us. And we do a better job measuring decibel levels in Europe overall than we do in the United States.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
But the estimates from the World Health Organization is that 65% of the population, about 450 million people, live with decibel levels that are harmful to their health. So on that auditory level, it is definitely getting louder. But we also thought it was important to look at information. So
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The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
In 2010, the past CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, estimated that every two days we listen to as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization to 2003. So we are taking in the study show about five times as much information as we did just a generation ago. So there's just this overwhelming amount of information being generated and that we're trying to take in on a day-to-day basis.
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The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
And that, we believe, actually increases our internal chatter, our internal noise. So Ethan Cross, a professor at the University of Michigan, estimates that we listen to something like 320 State of the Union addresses of internal compressed speech every day.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
So our concern is with all this auditory, informational, and internal noise that we're really not able to tune into what is most important to us in our lives, our relationships, our work, and our purpose for being here.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
We know this through different studies which look at not just the harm that comes to us in the ears, you know, certainly hearing loss is a serious issue that can lead to isolation and things, but it actually is also tied to cardiovascular disease, to diabetes, to loss of sleep and all of the downstream effects of loss of sleep as well. So there's a lot of science coming out.
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The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
Initially, we looked at silence as more of a control variable. So the other side of that is the benefits of silence. So it used to be that silence was sort of where we considered a baseline to return to.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
But now it's actually showing in all these studies where they look at different inputs, say, like pup sounds, or music, classical music, or silence as a control variable, or so on, that silence actually leads to growth of neurons in the brain in the hippocampus in the area associated with memory.
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The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
Yeah, I had that experience also walking into my brother's sound studio, and I noticed it wasn't just like what was happening in my ears, but what it was happening in my nervous system. I just felt calmer. So it is a delicious experience to try to seek out if you can. Not all of us have a sound studio or an anechoic chamber available to us, but those who have really report to
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
That being an extraordinary experience of sound being so different. The refracted sounds are being absorbed in those rooms. That's why it's so different.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
Yeah, there's a great story of John Cage, the famous composer walking into an anechoic chamber. He was very excited about silence as a musician. He certainly understood the importance of silence, the silence between the notes that makes music what it is.
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The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
So he walked into this anechoic chamber in Harvard University, and when he got in there, he heard two sounds, a high-pitched sound and a low-pitched whooshing. And so we stepped outside again after a while and asked the engineer, well, wait a minute, that room wasn't silent at all. I heard this high pitch. I heard this low pitch. And the engineer said, ah, the high is your nervous system.
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The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
And the low is your blood in circulation. So we asked this question, is there even really a thing as silence as pure silence in a world that is vibrating and whooshing and whirling? And, and the answer is probably not, but there is an experience of silence, an experience of our attention, being able to put it where we want it, where we intend it.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
Well, you're right in that when we're talking about noise, we're talking about unwanted distractions. So that is different from sound or certainly music and things like that. It's also different on the informational level from data, which is neutral. We like data. Or internally, it's also different from thought, which we also enjoy. So the distinction is that unwanted distraction.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
Well, we wrote this book not for the people who can run off to retreats for six months at a time. We really wrote this book for people looking for silence in their noise-soaked homes. full lives. And we argue that you can find those micro moments and those micro moments for finding quiet can make a big difference.
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The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
So that can be even when you find yourself stuck in a long line unexpectedly, or maybe you're commuting and your radio or podcast goes out, that you could actually welcome that silence, sink into it. And take advantage of that unstructured time and that open space to just not have information again coming in to you all the time, but to just appreciate the openness of that.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising Power of Silence & How to Overcome Your Cravings - SYSK Choice
no one's really doing that study. And so we say, like, do the study yourself. Notice what really the difference is. So the signals in the body that tell us that we are saturated by noise are different for each one of us. But I'll tell you mine, for example. I notice a clenching in my jaw when I'm feeling saturated by noise.