The Struggle With Silence

The struggle is not actually a "struggle"

It’s almost instinct now: the moment things get quiet, we reach for something, music, a podcast, a video, a scroll, anything to fill the space. Silence, once normal, now feels strange, even uncomfortable, like an empty room we don’t know how to occupy.

Most of us don’t reach for noise to avoid something dramatic. It’s not about trauma or deep fears. It’s simply that stillness feels foreign. We’ve trained our brains to expect constant input, constant motion, constant stimulation. Even small pauses, a few seconds at a red light, waiting for a friend, walking to the mailbox, become moments we rush to fill. We don’t know what to do with ourselves if there’s nothing to consume immediately.

The discomfort of silence comes not from the quiet itself, but from what it reveals. When the world stops, the mind gets louder. Thoughts we usually skim over come into focus. Feelings we’ve been too busy to notice tap on our shoulders. Questions we don’t have answers to rise up. And because we’re not used to seeing these things, it feels like an invasion rather than a chance to pause.

And yet, if we can tolerate even a few seconds of stillness, silence can be surprisingly gentle. It can be a pause that allows the mind to rest, a space where we remember what it’s like to breathe without distraction. In that quiet, we might hear our own thoughts clearly for the first time in hours, or notice little details we’d otherwise miss, the hum of the refrigerator, the shifting light through a window, our own heartbeat.

Most of us aren’t actively avoiding quiet. We’ve just forgotten how to sit with it, how to let it be a friend rather than a threat. Learning to tolerate silence is like building a muscle: awkward and uncomfortable at first, but with practice, it becomes a space of clarity, creativity, and calm.

Maybe the first step is noticing how strange stillness feels now and permitting ourselves to stay there a little longer than usual. Not to fill it, not to fix it, not to escape,

but simply to exist within it.

Because the quiet doesn’t demand anything from us. It just waits, patiently, for us to remember how to listen.