Day 33: Am I Addicted to Noise?

In August I journaled about being addicted to noise.

My phone time was absurd. Around 10 to 11 hours!

Now I have it under 6 hours.

Which is still too much, but I’m celebrating the progress made.

After journaling about being addicted to noise I remembered, verbatim, a poem I wrote my sophomore year about silence. Back then silence was a looming and dark space where the most hurtful words replayed in my mind on a loop.

So what did I do? Prevented silence as much as possible. Music was always on. Or the TV. Or I was with my bff shooting the shit.

Silence would creep in and those words would be ready! The second the noise stopped.

It’s no wonder that as things evolved with technology and the mini computers in our pockets that silence would disappear. Even when the device wasn’t on, I would be so overstimulated from the pixels, sounds, visuals, etc that my brain wouldn’t go into the silence.

It actually couldn’t get into that same silence again because I’d spent so many years healing from the dark loop that played in my adolescence.

My kids healed me from the dark silence. Teaching them how to learn helped me to learn. It showed me why my environment was so important to learning.

Being away from comparison, competition, and criticism. Surrounded by love, adoration, and timelessness.

At some point I no longer feared silence because in the fleeting moments I did have it, I felt full and adequate.

But then the silence stopped. When did it fade away?

Maybe it was when I started my first company and had a world of information at my finger tips. Learning was fun. And had a direct impact on my professional life.

Or when the kids went to school.

Social media? Podcasts? Audio books?

Who knows…

Over the past couple years I started to get very concerned about my memory. Was it perimenopause, alcohol consumption, diet, stress from the job, screen time? Likely all of the above played a part in it.

It wasn’t until I challenged myself with that question “Am I addicted to noise?” that I got serious about monitoring and altering my behavior.