How does excessive noise affect health?

Benefits of moments of silence

Nadia Pinho, music therapist and psychoeducation at Holiste Psiquiatria, in El Salvador (BA), recalls that even as the pace of life becomes increasingly faster, it is necessary to give space to connect with the inner voice. Unfortunately, the modern age is so noisy that silence ends up becoming a source of distress for many people.

For journalist Petria Chavez, author of Listen to Your Silence: How the Art of Listening Makes Us Better, More Present, and More Interesting People (Editora Planeta), silence can be uncomfortable because it puts us in touch with inner noise. We’re trying to anesthetize. “When we listen to ourselves, we realize our mistakes, our gaps, our contradictions. We realize how weak we are, how fragile life is, and how far we are from achieving what we really want – because we don’t even know the exact path,” he says.

According to her, silence shows us that there is a mind that also needs to be organized, but it dominates us even today. But, if we can barely organize our external lives, how can we dive into the challenge of organizing our internal lives? When we silence the outside noise, all of this comes to the surface and we often feel helpless and alone, which scares some people so much. He adds: “We should use silence as an opportunity to see ourselves as human beings, so that we can listen to others more qualitatively, because we know how to listen to ourselves first.”

To do this, you need to do daily training. Start paying attention to the sounds around us, as soon as we wake up. Then meditate. Sit still every day just to observe. The advice is: start with two, three, four minutes, but keep going. “The results start arriving quickly, it brings a new quality of being in the world, the simple fact of being able to pay more attention to what is happening to us inside and outside. It is a training in mindfulness,” recommends Petria.