Photo credit: Paul Mison licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Joel Pavelski, GQ, writes about his experience doing a month-long sound fast. Pavelski recognized that he was “suffocating [himself] with sound,” by constantly wearing headphones to listen to music, podcasts, or YouTube videos. He realized that his sound over-saturation was making him “forgetful, distracted, and overwhelmed.” And then, Pavelski, writes, he hit his saturation point:
In March, I finally reached true sensory overload. I met a friend at Midtown bar, where we planned to work on our respective book proposals. The place was packed, and I couldn’t hear myself think over the clamor: people around us were laughing, waitresses were slinging dishes and drinks, a playlist of loud top 40 hits competed with a televised basketball game for the patrons’ attention. I put in my headphones and queued up a podcast and tried to focus, thinking I could retreat to my (even louder) safe place. But after a few minutes, I felt so overstimulated that my body started to tremble. My heart started to race and my breath came in short gulps. My fingers felt tingly. I thought I was about to pass out.
What follows is Pavelski’s experiment with no podcasts, no listening to music, no extraneous noise other than the “natural” noise of New York City. And what he found was that when he took time to just sit and take the world in without distraction his brain “felt blissful and busy, lighting up with challenges to solve, reframing and reorganizing possibilities.”
Click the link to read the whole thing. It’s well worth your time.
Originally posted at Silencity.com.
