Bring the noise: has technology made us scared of silence?
To that extent, Larry D. Rosen’s excellent advice on how teachers can address student social media anxiety – such as by introducing one-minute technology breaks – shouldn’t be confused with issues surrounding the same students’ need for background noise.
With obvious exceptions, mum and dad also inherited this need for background noise: “My grandparents have the television on practically all the time in the background”, observes one student.
It is not surprising then when another writes, “the television was switched on by my parents earlier in the morning for the news and left on … even when no-one was watching”.
For all but one of the 580 students, television and radio was in the home prior to their birth. For most students, the family home also had at least one computer before they were born. Indeed, this year we had our first student that can’t remember her family’s first mobile phone.
Beginning at infancy, the constant media soundscape has provided the background noise either side of bassinet, kindergarten, school and university. It is little wonder many of my students feel agitated and ill-at-ease when there is not at least one portal providing background noise.
Such background noise speaks to Bill McKibben’s observations of the Third Parent.
More often than not, a student’s third parent (whether that be analogue or digital media) speaks to them more often than their biological parents. As one participant noted, “the noise of the TV and the communication on Facebook helps me feel more in touch with people”.
By and large my students report they can’t function in silence. As one explained, “I actually began doing this assignment in the library and had to return to my room minutes later to get my iPod as I found the library was so quiet that I couldn’t concentrate properly!”
It’s not just the silence of a library that students report as disturbing. Having gone home to the farm, one student observed how she found it hard to walk down to the dam without an iPod.
When the students were provided with the tools to reflect on their media consumption they began to recognise the nature of background noise. Having filled in their spreadsheets, they were asked to spend one hour walking, sitting and/or reading in a quiet place. This is the moment in the assignment when students tend to discover their relationship with silence:
“The lack of noise made me uncomfortable, it actually seemed foreboding”, observed one student. Another said “perhaps, because media consistently surrounds us today, we have a fear of peace and quiet”.
Could it be that it’s the background noise and not the discrete content of each media portal that creates the perception of well-being my students write about?
Either way, it’s clear that students (and doubtless many others) have become accustomed to the background noise that’s become such a feature of modern life.
So what about you: are you scared of silence?
I am.
SEDATEPHOBIA
The fear of silence, sometimes described as sedatephobia (sedatus is ‘calmed’ in Latin), is becoming more prevalent as the world grows noisier. We are accustomed to a background buzz – the burble of digitised music and chatter. Silence can feel unsettling, even unbearable. Some of us panic when we try to sleep in a noiseless room. Others are set on edge by the peace of a country lane.
In 2012 Bruce Fell, a lecturer at Charles Sturt University in Australia, reported that many of his students struggled to tolerate silence. Over six years, he had asked 580 of them to complete questionnaires on the subject.
One wrote: ‘I actually began doing this assignment in the library and had to return to my room minutes later to get my iPod as I found the library was so quiet that I couldn’t concentrate properly!’ Fell believed that many of them had been conditioned by the constant noise of televisions in their childhood homes, and that new technologies had made it all the easier to shut out the quiet. An undergraduate told him that when she returned to her family farm, she found it hard to walk down to a nearby dam without listening to music on her headphones. Fell asked the students to spend an hour either reading, walking, or just sitting in silence. Most of them found this difficult. ‘The lack of noise made me uncomfortable,’ said one. ‘It actually seemed foreboding.’ For this student, silence was an ominous pause, a state of suspense, a prelude to danger.
MONOPHOBIA
Monophobia, or the fear of being alone, was identified as a specific phobia in 1880 by George Miller Beard. In 1897 Granville Stanley Hall diagnosed the condition in a woman who loathed being at home by herself. Everything felt gloomy and awful, she reported, the silence of her farmhouse broken only by the loud ticking of a clock. ‘It felt as if everybody was dead,’ she said.‘I would sing and do the most unusual things, watch the clock, the approach of night, dread every preposterous accident, seek companionship with the animals in the barn, and even with the flowers in the garden.’
Fears of ISOLATION and abandonment emerge in monophobia (a dread of being alone), nomophobia (a fear of being without a phone), sedatephobia (fear of silence)
PERSONALITY AND TEMPERAMENT
Extroverts, more than introverts, find that monotony, repetition, and understimulation produce discomfort, restlessness and a lack of perseverance in solving boring frustrating problems. In one simple study, students were given a difficult jigsaw puzzle to put together. The students who quit scored higher on extroversion In general, extroverts have a significantly higher need for external stimulation as measured by an individual’s need for challenge, excitement, and variety. For the same reason, they also tend to score higher on the Boredom Proneness Scale.
People who have a high need to seek sensation and novelty are more likely to get bored. We have seen this already in reference to extreme sports.
Analysis of this test in different groups of people shows that boredom may be a function of five factors. The first is the “need for external stimulation”: excitement, challenge, and often change in activities such as channel-hopping or Web-surfing, or the adrenaline rush of extreme sports. Marvin Zuckerman originally described sensation seeking as a personality trait where there is a “need for varied, novel, and complex sensations and experiences and the willingness to take physical and social risks for the sake of such experience.” Zuckerman also distinguishes curiosity from sensation seeking.
The third factor is the “affective response,” a person’s emotional reaction to boredom. One person may become irritated and restless; another will remain calm and patient. Think of the different ways in which people react to waiting in a long line at the checkout counter, for example. Another student wrote on my survey, “ I get very bored with long-term babysitting. Everyday having to be with the same children and playing their favorite game. It gets very boring always having to focus on pleasing them.” I mentioned earlier other research which found that people who are focused on pleasing themselves probably experience greater boredom than those who focus more often on meeting the needs of others.
The fourth factor, “perception of time,” relates to a person’s organization and use of time, and perception of the passage of time. The subjective sense of boredom is closely correlated with a sense of time passing very slowly and there being “nothing to do,” nothing that arouses sufficient interest. Those who never feel they have enough time to do all they have to do in life rarely experience boredom. As we say, “How time flies when you are having fun!”
Though we are tempted by the ever-present, seductive quick fix, most of us have discovered that lasting solutions to the serious problems of life usually take patience and require evaluation of some foundational principles and themes. In dealing with boredom we need to consider the importance of leisure.
CULTIVATING TRUE LEISURE
There is a time to be lazy, a time to slow down, a time to play, a time to reflect on the world around us and the world inside us. Often we are afraid to be still because the endless distractions of entertainment keep us from having to face fundamental questions about our existence and about our deeper anxieties, insecurities, and fears. We are literally running from ourselves. Josef Pieper wrote a book some years ago called Leisure: The Basis of Culture. The jacket of the current edition carries this affirmation:
This book issues a startling warning: Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture—and ourselves.”
Pieper argues that leisure is not just distraction and entertainment but a time of withdrawal from the ordinary routines to renew our priorities and our perspective on life. Without it we will not see reality truly. Similarly, writer and lecturer Os Guinness distinguishes sloth
from idling, a state of carefree lingering that can be admirable, as in friends lingering over a meal or lovers whiling away hours in delighted enjoyment.
In W. H. Davies’s lines, “What is this life, if full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare?” Or as George MacDonald argued, “Work is not always required ... There is such a thing as sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.”
In this fast-paced culture we find it hard to slow down and be still. Even our leisure times often get packed with endless activities. “Perhaps you can judge the inner health of a land by the capacity of its people to do nothing,” wrote Sebastian de Grazia in 1962, “to lie abed musing, to amble about aimlessly, to sit having a coffee—because whoever can do nothing, letting one's thoughts go where they may, must be at peace with oneself.”
We need to take time for our minds and bodies to re-create and recover from being driven so hard. This also allows time for a renewal of perspective.
The human mind is like a motion-activated camera that operates on a hair-trigger, darting around to capture any sudden movement. Scratch your arm and - swoosh - your attention is immediately drawn to the spot. Hear a loud sound outside and — swoosh — your focus swivels to the window. Your pet jumps up on the table and — swoosh — your eyes flash over to the disobedient beast. Our attention is drawn to stimuli that our brain, generally without much conscious thought, has decided are novel or salient — things we feel we need to check out urgently. This reflexive and intuitive mechanism has served us very well throughout our evolutionary history, keeping us alert to the dangers of the snake that suddenly rears out of the bushes or the crumbling path on the cliff edge. Or a surprise attack in war. Unfortunately, though, it means that we tend to categorise familiar phenomena as boring. They certainly don’t get the heart pumping and grab our attention in the same way as flashing lights and loud noises do. And yet, if you force yourself to focus on these ‘duller’ phenomena, your mind will discover the gems that lie beneath the surface, and come to appreciate their significance and meaning. You just need to stop it swivelling around like an adrenaline junkie in search of the next fix.
Esta necesidad de llenar nuestro tiempo y este miedo a no hacer nada, puede ser una señal que indica que estamos evitando estar a solas con nuestros pensamientos. Y es que, cuando nos mantenemos ocupadas con tareas, no tenemos tiempo para pararnos a escuchar nuestros pensamientos. Además, la tecnología actual y la concepción de persona exitosa que se tiene actualmente, hace mucho más sencillo que no paremos.
Una técnica poco adaptativa para lidiar con nuestras emociones
La realidad es que todo el mundo tiene emociones, pensamientos, miedos y angustias que nos hacen sentir mal, nos preocupan y nos agobian. Por desgracia, no siempre se nos enseña a lidiar bien con ellos y cada uno de nosotros desarrollamos diferentes técnicas.
En muchos casos, estas técnicas no son del todo adaptativas: la necesidad excesiva de control, la pasivo-agresividad, la negación o la represión son algunas de ellas. En el caso de las personas que llenan su tiempo constantemente, la evitación es la técnica que estarían utilizando.
El problema es que las emociones siempre acaban saliendo a flote y si las intentamos tapar de manera poco adaptativa, es más que probable que cuando aparezcan sea de una manera que no podamos controlar, como en forma de ansiedad, por ejemplo.
Para algunas personas, esta necesidad de estar constantemente ocupado puede acabar suponiendo un problema de salud. En parte, porque intentar tapar nuestros pensamientos y miedos no va a hacer que desaparezcan. Por ello, la única solución real que tenemos es parar. Y es que, en ocasiones, ser capaces de parar a tiempo y dedicarnos un rato a nosotras mismas es nuestra gran victoria. https://www.trendencias.com/psicologia-1/cuando-fue-ultima-vez-que-estuviste-solas-contigo-desconecta-pruebalo-te-va-sentar-genial
Es importante que nos demos el tiempo de escuchar esos pensamientos que tanto miedo nos dan y de aprender a conocernos y a saber qué es eso que estamos queriendo evitar y tapar. En ocasiones podremos hacerlo solas y, en otras, necesitaremos la ayuda de un profesional que nos ofrezca herramientas más adaptativas para tratar con todas nuestras emociones: las consideradas buenas y las consideradas malas.
Piensa en alguna de las cosas que haces que no te hagan sentir especialmente bien y "tira" de ella: ¿te lleva hasta el miedo a quedarte solo? Si es así, es el momento de cuestionar ese miedo.
La soledad no es nada malo, de hecho aquellos que saben estar a solas, los que disfrutan de la soledad, suelen tener, paradójicamente, más y mejores relaciones sociales.
Nos cuesta concentrarnos en una sola cosa, ver una película sin mirar ni una vez las redes sociales, estar en una conversación con alguien y no comprobar si nos han escrito... Buscamos inmediatez, información, contacto y conexión constantes.
#thaasophobia
The boredom associated with being left alone, or not having much to do, is a reason why people eat too much chocolate, drink too much alcohol, write too many posts on LinkedIn (guilty!) and watch too many funny cat videos. Naturally, in the wake of Corona, there are viral videos showing people going crazy with their own company or that of their family. Thaasophobia is the fear of idleness. It can lead to anxiety, but also riches. Micro-moments of boredom are one reason why Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and Jeff Bezos are billionaires.
But boredom avoidance platforms like Facebook and TikTok and Instagram come at a cost. Boredom is a function of attention and the more we satisfy our desire to be distracted the less we simply look around and observe the world around us.
We like ‘doing’ or what might nowadays be referred to as being ‘message-orientated’ because this removes the necessity of being with oneself. It also covers up any fears we may have of feeling alone. Being busy is directly correlated with boredom, but also with a desire to absent oneself from oneself, to not fully inhabit the present.
Much of the current research on boredom focusses on situational or state boredom. Fahlman et al. (2013) outlined five different elements to situational boredom that have garnered significant interests: one of which is slow passage of time.
In situational boredom there is common experience of time moving slowly. People oftenreport a distorted sense of how much time has passed on a given activity (Danckert and Allman, 2005). If time flies when you are having fun, then time drags when you are bored. Individuals are more likely to focus on temporal information (i.e., stare at the clock) when they are not meaningfully engaged in an activity (Chaston and Kingstone, 2004). This practice likely adds to the experience of boredom.
-Danckert, J. A., and Allman, A. A. (2005). Time Flies When You’re Having Fun: Temporal Estimation and the Experience of Boredom. Brain Cognition, 59, 236–245.
-Chaston, A., and Kingstone, A. (2004). Time Estimation: The Effect of Cortically Mediated Attention. Brain and Cognition, 55(2), 286–289.
The first category is what I will term as general boredom; this is brought about by the lack of immediate stimulus, think of waiting in a doctor’s office in an age before the smartphone where you might find yourself looking at the wall for twenty minutes. This type is highly situation and necessarily transient. While elimination of this type of boredom would certainly be desired in the moment, it is not necessary in terms of the greater contest of life; it is by no means permanent. In today’s world there is incredible potential to occupy our time, nigh unlimited truth be told. Situational boredom can be solved by looking up the news or reading a free copy of “The Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle” on a Kindle app.
What about TOO MUCH EXCITEMENT IS POISONOUS?
The unprejudiced observer finds it hard to understand why these people should set such store by consistency of thought and action. Because oysters are occasionally pleasant, it does not follow that one should make of oysters one’s exclusive diet. Nor should one take castor oil every day because castor oil is occasionally good for one. Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Consistent intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make, gradually, for individual death. And individual death, when the slow murder has been consummated, is finally social death. So that the social utility of pure intellectualism and pure spirituality is only apparent and temporary.
Aldous Huxley, "Wordsworth in the Tropics" #enneatype7 #thaasophobia
The human mind is both complex and precarious as it never remains in the same state. Being busy a person can keep themself obsessed with some work; during work the mind often digresses somewhere . However , the mind becomes devilish when one is without any work. One resists boredom, sense of sin and unwanted feeling in state of jobless or deprivation of activity. If such hollowness continues for a long time one faces boredom.
There are two types of boredom namely one of which is situational boredom.
2) Situational boredom: this boredom is common that every normal human can perceive. It takes its essence from situation. We are situationally bored when we want to escape some unfavourable situation that makes us bored.
Components of situational boredom are: 1) monotony . 2) lack of concentration 3) waiting. 4 solitude.
These four components are causes of situational boredom.
Importance of boredom:
To be bored is necessary for not only creativity but also for avoidance of some feeling . It follows that humans will constantly try to bring new ways of excitements and changes to invade boredom .The outcome of boredom thus leads to success.
On the other hand , humans kill their inner world and extirpate their ways of happiness by much involvement in work; some freedom from work is vital to extinguish negativity of work so as to attain spirituality. Unending involvement with work destroys the essence of existence as we feel no boredom and find no way to bring a feeling of novelty and creativity. Too much excitement is poisonous.
Boredom is the main cause of every evil and misfortune that has occurred in the human history. Nevertheless, boredom is also the main cause of masterpieces in literature ,science, art...
What about TOO MUCH EXCITEMENT IS POISONOUS?
The first category is what I will term as general boredom; this is brought about by the lack of immediate stimulus, think of waiting in a doctor’s office in an age before the smartphone where you might find yourself looking at the wall for twenty minutes. This type is highly situation and necessarily transient. While elimination of this type of boredom would certainly be desired in the moment, it is not necessary in terms of the greater contest of life; it is by no means permanent. In today’s world there is incredible potential to occupy our time, nigh unlimited truth be told. Situational boredom can be solved by looking up the news or reading a free copy of “The Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle” on a Kindle app.
Much of the current research on boredom focusses on situational or state boredom. Fahlman et al. (2013) outlined five different elements to situational boredom that have garnered significant interests: one of which is slow passage of time.
In situational boredom there is common experience of time moving slowly. People often report a distorted sense of how much time has passed on a given activity (Danckert and Allman, 2005). If time flies when you are having fun, then time drags when you are bored. Individuals are more likely to focus on temporal information (i.e., stare at the clock) when they are not meaningfully engaged in an activity (Chaston and Kingstone, 2004). This practice likely adds to the experience of boredom.
-Danckert, J. A., and Allman, A. A. (2005). Time Flies When You’re Having Fun: Temporal Estimation and the Experience of Boredom. Brain Cognition, 59, 236–245.
-Chaston, A., and Kingstone, A. (2004). Time Estimation: The Effect of Cortically Mediated Attention. Brain and Cognition, 55(2), 286–289.
Like line 36, lines 37-38, ‘Joy’s cheerful madness does perplex/ Or sorrow’s other
madness vex’, in addition to personification, have two interpretations:
EMOTION IS INSANITY and EMOTION IS ILLNESS. Each of JOY and SORROW, which are antonyms, is understood in terms of madness and disease, in the same breath. Each of perplex and vex denotes the fact that the body gets perplexed as well as vexed when the soul is joyful as well as sorrowful.
According to Kövecses’ (1990, p. 167) idea, this can be conceived in terms of EMOTIONAL DISTURBANCE IS PHYSICAL DISTURBANCE metaphor.
In this same stanza, specifically in line 32, we say that the body accuses the soul of its being the body’s teacher of emotions (viz., hope, love, joy) which are considered as incurable diseases. Lines 39-40 reinforce the fact that the knowledge the soul forcefully teaches the body allows the body to forget.
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