Our Minds Can't Sit Still Anymore

carving out a better life by dealing with our allergy to silence

Audio voiceover available here for paid subs!

Millennial Pause, Gen Z Shake, and Influencer Accent

In the academic linguist Adam Aleksic’s Algospeak, he offers an overview of what makes for a successful Tik Tok and IG reel, dumbed down for short-form video ascetics like myself. One tip is cutting “the millennial pause”—the few seconds of dead air at the start of a video before someone starts talking:

Conversely, younger creators do the “Gen Z shake,” where their phones shake because they set it down after hitting record, fabricating a sense of urgency.

Interestingly, many tips for boosting exposure on short-form video platforms run in this same vein.

For another example, take the “influencer accent.” You’d recognize it if you heard it—initially popularized by “famous for being famous” celebs like Paris Hilton and the Kardashians. The trick is to inflect the end of every sentence upward, almost like you’re pointing it with a question mark, so that your words sound like one long, never-ending paragraph.

It boosts engagement by cutting out quiet pauses and making it seem like you’re perpetually in the middle of a thought. The inflections subtly grip a viewer into hanging onto your every word. Male content creators do something similar, but their strategy is more about talking faster—as seen in Mr. Beast’s progression from talking at 120 words per minute when he started making videos to his average of 175 WPM nowadays.

There’s obviously way more to it, but lots of virality tips basically boil down to: do whatever you can to cut out every possible millisecond of silence.

But maybe the most interesting part is what Aleksic says those milliseconds of silence actually do. When a user hears silence, they’re reminded for a split second that they’re a person staring at a phone.

In other words, those gaps and spaces when our content isn’t stimulating our brain are precisely where we remember that we’re human beings.

And for this exact same reason, I’d argue that we literally need those moments. They teach us that we’re not just brains on a stick amusing, scrolling, and vegging¹ ourselves to death. Silence—or just the lack of stimulation—reminds us that we’re embodied souls aching for something deeper than dopamine.

Now, this observation has been made to the point that it’s almost gotten cliché. But the solutions are typically: trade the smartphone for dumbphone, delete social media, cancel Netflix, etc. All that’ll definitely help—but it doesn’t really touch the deeper problem.

Life-hacking our surroundings is a good start; but personally, I’m learning that I also have to deal with the issue underlying the issue: my craving for stimulation, disdain for boredom, and discomfort with silence.

Distraction-maxxing and Social Acceleration

Maybe the most relatable feature of modern life is distraction. T.S. Eliot famously wrote that we’re “distracted from distractions by distraction.”²

On average, we watch 5,000 films in our lifetime. We read 700 books (probably at least double that for Substackers). We listen to 1.3 million songs.³ We watch roughly 78,000 hours of television. Based on projections, most of us reading this will spend around 130,000 hours scrolling on our phones. You can do your own screen time calculator here:

As humans, we’re obsessed with things that stimulate our imaginations. And we’ve been consuming more and more and more every coming year.

Which isn’t all that surprising. The sociologist Hartmut Rosa says we live in an age of “social acceleration.”⁴ Basically, the rate at which the world is advancing—in terms of tech, transportation, social trends—is so rapid that it’s making us all frenetic, restless, and fatigued.

Even though tech advancements seem to offer more freedom via promises of more time to spare, their rapidity actually causes us to feel increasingly caged and rushed. Researchers note that regardless of how much time we actually have, more and more people are suffering from a cognitive disorder called “chronic time pressure.” It’s exactly what it sounds like: feeling rushed and crunched for time for no tangible reason.⁵ As Henri Nouwen put it, “Indeed, it seems like we no longer have any time—but time has us.”⁶

So why do we keep up with the frenetic pace, noise, and distraction? In author Leighton Ford’s assessment, “Often we keep ourselves busy and distracted because we fear that if we slow down, we may look inside and find nothing there.”⁷ One study even showed that when subjects are told they can either sit in silence or administer electric shocks to themselves, many chose the shocks.⁸

Which is a little sad, because scientists have noticed that silence is wildly good for us.

Science on Silence

Even though electrical shocks can feel preferable to silence, researchers have found that silence promotes (1) relaxation, (2) creativity, and (3) information processing.

1. Relaxation

If you’re stressed, sometimes the initial impulse is to drown out the stress in more noise. But unfortunately, adding more noise usually just prolongs stress.

In a follow up to the electrical shock study, researchers had students sit in a quiet room alone without the option to shock themselves. Afterwards, they found that the exercise unanimously decreased their baseline stress levels.⁹ Interestingly, silence is even more calming than relaxing music.¹⁰ So even though it feels uncomfortable at first, it genuinely (and eventually) chips away at anxieties.

2. Creativity

It also makes us more creative.¹¹ One of my favorite directors, David Lynch, said that whenever he’s stumped on how to keep writing a script, he just sit backs in his chair with his hands folded, stares, breathes, and commits to staying there until an idea arises that unclogs the writer’s block.

The writer Nicholas Carr explains how this works:

When people aren’t being bombarded by external stimuli, their brains can, in effect, relax. They no longer have to tax their working memories by processing a stream of bottom-up distractions. The resulting state of contemplativeness strengthens their ability to control their mind.¹²

3. Information Processing

Silence is the perfect frequency for processing information, problem-solving, and deep thinking.

When I get in the car, my immediate reaction is typically Apple Music or calling someone to get some background chatter going. But whenever I wait a second, I’ll notice some unprocessed stuff in me: some sin I haven’t repented from yet, some fight that I don’t feel right about, some emotional disappointment or jealousy or resentment that I’ve tried to shove down rather than deal with. Sitting in silence allows it to bubble to the surface so that God can sterilize its infection and kickstart the healing process.

All to say: something about the way God designed our minds and bodies makes it so that silence is like cherry-flavored medicine—it might make us gag on the way down but inevitably tunes up our immune system.

But sadly, our world today is increasingly cutting out spaces that are free from noise—churches included.

The Necessity of Tiny Cracks of Inactivity

The journalist Andrew Sullivan said that modern life fills in each and every “tiny crack of inactivity” with some distraction: a text message, a new show, another email.

Sullivan’s solution is kind of funny: find spaces where you can feel bored.

And his recommendation for finding a space that’s conducive to boredom is even funnier: go to church—so long as it’s a quiet one.

He’s got a point. Churches are one of the last phone-discouraged public spaces where you can just sit with your thoughts—the things stirring around your consciousness, your paranoias, the self-reflection you’ve been putting off. While it’s not necessarily the most captivating marketing point (“Come on in! We’re boring and quiet!”), shared silence and slowness really is uniquely restorative.

Unfortunately, today, many churches create more distractions than they free us from, which is a big part of Sullivan’s critique:

If churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation. Christian leaders seem to think that they need more distraction to counter the distraction. Their services have degenerated into emotional spasms, their spaces drowned with light and noise and locked shut throughout the day, when their darkness and silence might actually draw those whose minds and souls have grown web-weary.¹³

Again, he’s not wrong. As the church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch has noted, ecclesial quiet has been on the decline since the Reformation era; from that point onward, attention increasingly shifted toward the pulpit.¹⁴ Many churches slowly became more oriented toward the expression of onstage opinion than quiet formation.

So for many congregations—and apologies for cosplaying the Grinch whining about Whoville here—everything became “noise, noise, noise.” Like Tik Tokers filling in cracks of inactivity, it’s like we try to fill in every possible moment of dead air to retain engagement.

And if these complaints come across too curmudgeonly, I should note a few wonderful cloud of witnesses in my corner:

• Augustine lamented the presence of stringed instruments in church, thinking it only added distraction to praying—a practice he already found challenging to stay on track with.

• Aquinas thought similarly, declaring that instrumental music was simply “amiable pleasures that divert the faithful.”

• Bernard of Clairvaux followed suit, but upped the ante by critiquing building size, statues, and paintings. His point was basically: “ornament distracts from prayer.”¹⁵

Now, if you go to a loud church, please don’t leave, criticize, or resent it. I proudly attend a loud church. However, I’ve just made sure to carve out more silence in my free time and small group.

Thankfully, in recent years—in reaction to increased busyness and noise—silence is making a comeback. This renewed interest is thanks to spiritual formation writers like Dallas Willard, Henri Nouwen, Ruth Haley Barton, James K.A. Smith, and Richard Foster.¹⁶ Silence is a perfect medium for formation: it sets our souls up like a stone to God’s sculptor: exposed for the sake of getting honed, carved, shaped.¹⁷

Fish Need Water, Christians Need Silence

Maybe you’re thinking: well quiet and stillness might work for some people, but everytime I try to get quiet, the movie on the inside of my brain starts spazzing through hundreds of clips per millisecond, so silence can’t be all that helpful for me.

It’s a fair point; but I’d also suggest that those random distractions are almost certainly a good thing. There’s a solid chance that they’re exactly what God’s trying to put in your mind.

In The Screwtape Letters, the chief demon tells his apprentice to encourage the human to get frustrated with the distractions that come his way during silent prayer time:

When this, or any other distraction, crosses his mind you ought to encourage him to thrust it away by sheer will power and to try to continue the normal prayer as if nothing had happened; once he accepts the distraction as his present problem and lays that before the Enemy and makes it the main theme of his prayers and his endeavours, then, so far from doing good, you have done harm. Anything, even a sin, which has the total effect of moving him close up to the Enemy, makes against us in the long run.¹⁸

This is why even though my ADHD makes silently sitting still each morning difficult, I don’t want to give up on it. And honestly, it’s the point where most of my days peak. Those rapid-fire distractions are often exactly what we’re supposed to take captive.

However: plenty of times, they’re not—as when I spent 20 minutes of a recent morning prayer time mentally debating which Saved by the Bell character was the show’s moral backbone.¹⁹ But, generally speaking, most distractions that come our way in quiet prayer are precisely what the Spirit is leading us to lay before God.

And as you lay down more of your thoughts, worries, and concerns, it’s like taking an additional brick down, piece by piece, of the wall obstructing you from seeing God, allowing your mind freedom to glorify God and enjoy Him more clearly.

Like the Thomistic philosopher Josef Pieper (pronounced “peeper”), of Hot Pieper Summer fame (still pronounced “peeper”) put it, “Only one who is silent is listening.”²⁰ All good thinking, all good speech, all wisdom is downstream of a posture of silence.

And so are good relationships.

Silence is often considered the universal sign of awkwardness. But in reality, it’s the universal sign of intimacy.

For example, when you first start dating someone, the quiet is unbearable—your social-thermometer fires up along with questions about whether you’re compatible. But as time goes on, you find that comfortable silence is the only way a relationship can progress. If you’re not comfortable in shared silence, then you’re not comfortable with them in general—you don’t really, truly, deeply, know them. “The most defective human relationship is precisely one in which the silence of attention is absent.”²¹

Same thing goes with our relationship to God. When we start praying, it’s a lot of rambling on and on about every little thing. But as we continue praying, we say less because we know God sees our heart more.

Crazily enough, neuroscientists studying silent prayer have noticed that it activates regions of the brain that register relational attachment—suggesting that people really do experience a felt relationship with God in prayer.²² As such, perhaps one of the most joyful things we can do at any given moment is cut out distraction and connect with God; sitting with Him; loving Him; being loved by Him.

Anti-Stimulation Summer

Now I’d like to note: I’m not a spiritual director, pastor, priest, or someone I’m campaigning others to look up to. I’m a layman—the most laymen of laymen.²³ So this is more me comparing notes than prescribing things.

A few months ago, I noticed I was spending way too much time online—checking notifications, posting, sharing, scrolling, and layering distractions (i.e., playing music while having conversations while jotting down notes while eating milk chocolate almonds). Reaching into my pocket became an automatic reaction to tiny cracks of inactivity. And this was even after I’d already been through all the life-hacking: grayscaling the phone, setting time limits, shutting the phone off once a week for sabbath, etc.

So rather than pile on new life hacks, I’m trying to train myself to desire that stuff less by using up more free moments to sit, reflect, think, pray, or just sit with God. This includes reclaiming more car rides, commutes, and other checkpoints throughout my day (Substack’s “schedule notes” feature has been a life-saver in this regard).

For me, there are two levels of silence. The first is way less drastic and ascetic; I basically just consider it “daydreaming with God.” Daydreaming is a lost art—it’s remarkably good for us. The silence from no music or podcasts drive is where 90% of my ideas come from (and where 100% of the ideas that turn out to be any good come from).

But then there are some stretches of my day (like a 20-minute stretch in the morning and another few minutes before bed) where the silence is more deliberative, contemplative, and meditative. Usually it’s coupled with some Scripture and lectio divina. This is the second level of silence—sitting still, minimal movements, focused on a single prayer or biblical passage.

All this said: we don’t need silence because a monastic lifestyle or mysticism is the goal; we need it because silence disrupts us from the nagging impulse for stimulation. And once our brains are detoxed from craving more and more stimulation, we’re more open and available to give and receive love—and love is and always will be the real goal.

Lastly, a line from the poet Christian Wiman has really resonated with me lately: I want to become “more fluent in silence.”²⁴

Eventually, the silence that many of us experience as hell can become heaven to a tortured mind. We become fluent in silence because we notice God there. And wherever we’re more available to God is where I’d prefer to be.

1

2. T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in The Four Quartets.

3. Daisy Faircourt, Art Cure: The Science of How Art Saves Lives (New York: Celadon Books, 2025), 5-6.

4. Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

5. Denovan A, Dagnall N, Drinkwater K, Escolà-Gascón Á., “Evaluating the Psychometric Properties of the Chronic Time Pressure Inventory Using Rasch Analysis,” Peer J 7 no. 11 (2023) e15218.

6. Henri Nouwen, Spiritual Formation: Following the Movements of the Spirit (New York: HarperOne, 2010), Ch. 1.

7. Leighton Ford, The Attentive Life: Discerning God’s Presence in All Things (Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2008) 12.

8. Timothy D. Wilson et al., ”Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind,” Science 345 (2014): 75-77.

9. Eric Pfiefer, Nikolas Geyer, Frank Storch, and Marc Wittmann, ”“Just Think”—Students Feel Significantly More Relaxed, Less Aroused, and in a Better Mood after a Period of Silence Alone in a Room,” Psych 1, no. 1 (2019): 343-352.

10. L. Bernardi, C. Porta, and P. Sleight,”Cardiovascular, Cerebrovascular, and Respiratory Changes Induced by Different Types of Music in Musicians and Non-Musicians: The Importance of Silence,” Heart (British Cardiac Society) 92 no. 4 (2006): 445–452.

11. This is discussed in Maggie Dent, Saving Our Children from Our Chaotic World: Teaching Children the Magic of Silence and Stillness (New York: Pennington, 2017).

12. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing Our Brains (New York: W. W. & Norton, 2020), 219.

13. Andrew Sullivan, “I Used to Be a Human Being,” Intelligencer, September 18, 2016, https://www.usna.edu/CoreEthics/Essays/Sullivan_-_I_used_to_be_a_human_being.pdf.

14. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History (New York: Viking, 2013).

15. Augustine, Confessions, X, 33; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II a. 91 q. 2; St. Bernard, Apologia ad Guillelmum, chapter 12, (PL, 182, cols. 914-16). This paragraph is a riff on “Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages” by Umberto Eco.

16. I think John Mark Comer’s new book is going to be in this vein as well. So get ready for Gen Z and young Millenial silence revival.

17. Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, trans. John J. Delaney (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 25-26.

18. C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter 27.

19. I’m open to debate, but realistically: Kelly, Lisa, and Jesse in that order.

20. Josef Pieper, A Brief Introduction to the Virtues of the Human Heart (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1989), 12-16.

21. Cardinal Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2017), 81.

22. I’m egregiously simplifying the terminology involved in this process. For the full thing, academic lingo and all, see Raymond L. Neubauer, “Prayer as an Interpersonal Rela-tionship: A Neuroimaging Study,” Religion, Brain & Behavior 4, no. 2 (2014): 92-103; Uffe Schjoedt et al., “Highly Religious Participants Recruit Areas of Social Cognition in Personal Prayer,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience no. 2 (2009): 199-207.

23. I was reading one of C.S. Lewis’ letters this past week and he described himself as ”the most laymen of laymen” and I thought it was hilarious and relatable.

24. Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 49.