Craving Peace and Quiet And The Master Key to Finding Silence

Craving peace and quiet is a perfectly normal reaction of body and mind to the modern lifestyle.

And not finding peace and quiet in your daily life can be the root cause of many issues affecting both your body and your mind. Hence, having silence and sufficient downtime is essential, and often the key to a remarkable improvement in your life.

However, there are commonly three significant reasons in your life and environment that have you craving peace and quiet.

Three Reasons for Craving Peace and Quiet

The first reason is personal disposition. For example, introverts and highly sensitive persons need more quiet time. We all have an optimal level of stimulation in our lives that we better not overstretch. We can learn from experience, introspection, and personality testing how much stimulation and quietness we need in our lives. Our disposition conditions the following reason.

A second reason lies in our overall lifestyle. Our lifestyle consists of many elements, as it is the expression of how we live. How much do you sleep? What kind of work do you do? How much downtime do you get? And what are your leisure time activities?

Lifestyle is complicated, and is your answer to the age-old philosophical question – How to live best? Now, answering that question takes a lifetime. What is relevant here is if your lifestyle is in line with your disposition and does your lifestyle account for your personal need for rest and silence. Yes, intensely craving peace and quiet to the point that it feels painful may be an indication that your lifestyle lacks alignment with your disposition.

Even an extrovert experience seeker has a limit of positive stress. Beyond this level, a feeling of restlessness and overall noise cut deep into the quality of life.

And thirdly, there is noise pollution, which can be unsettling regardless of personal disposition and lifestyle. Excessive noise causes discomfort and illness. Your temperament and lifestyle have to lead to your current living environment. If you are subject to excessive noise in your living environment, some technologies can help, but ever so often, moving to a different neighborhood may be the only solution.

Where to Start Finding More Silence in Your Life?

Personal disposition, lifestyle, and noise pollution interfere with each other. That is, these three elements can worsen each other to a toxic mix. And if you feel pain, you have to start somewhere. Changing everything at once in life never works.

Of course, every little element can help. Using noise reduction headphones or getting more sleep will have positive effects. But to substantially change the quality of your life and having the peace and quiet that you so desire requires a strategic approach.

And there is one element that is the master key for cutting out the noise in your life for good.

But before we get to the master key, let’s look at one more important condition: The current state of our world.

The Question of Our Times is How Much More Can You Take?

We live in an age of accelerated change. The constant flow of information we have to handle is an outrageous multiple to what people absorbed at the beginning of the modern period. Let alone compared to what our hunter-gatherer ancestors when our evolution molded us into the social animals we are to this day.

There is a physical mismatch between the lives we live today, and during the time we evolved. Daniel Lieberman impressively described what he calls ‘mismatch diseases’ in his book ‘The Story of the Human Body – Evolution, Health, and Disease.’  Mismatch diseases are lifestyle acquired diseases like obesity, diabetes two, and cardiovascular diseases. Many suffer from these civilization diseases due to excessive and inadequate diet as well as a lack of movement.

The same holds for our minds. After hunting and gathering, our ancestors had a lot of downtimes. They were in and with nature. In contrast, in our world, we have constant information overflow and overbearing stimulation from our environment. Couple this continuous noise with the widespread fear of missing out (FOMO), and you have the perfect storm of stress and feeling overwhelmed.

Craving peace and quiet is an all but natural reaction to excessive noise in our lives. It is a need that we cannot ignore for long before we feel severely stressed, burnt out, or depressed.

If You Are Craving Peace and Quiet, Turn the World on Its Head and Live Inside Out

It is time to get to our master key.

But first, we need to acknowledge that most of us take our multimedia-driven world overflowing with news as given. What we perceive and accept as reality is primarily based on mass media and the news. And we are prone to assume this reality as the consensus script for our lives.

As a result, many people’s lives tend to be externally driven by society’s expectations, ideals, and success narrative.

The early 19th-century philosopher Hegel spoke in this context of the Zeitgeist, which translates to ‘the spirit of the times.’ This spirit of the times has grown much more powerful since then and wields its powers unto our lives.

Resisting the Zeitgeist is not a ride in the park. But it is, of course, a possibility. Living inside out is the answer of the self-driven individual to a mass-culture that ironically tells us to be an individualist.

Being able to live from the inside to the outside requires the master key – a deepfelt reason why and what for you live. Living inside out involves purpose.

Craving Peace and Quiet? Reduce to the Essentials of Your Purpose

A purpose is your ‘why’ in life. Being aware of why you make your choices in life will help you keep your eyes on the goal during difficult times.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche aptly said, ‘He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.’

If you frequently engage in activities that don’t support your purpose, you are creating unnecessary noise in your life.  The more you cut out everything that does not serve your goal, the more space for relaxation and silence you will have.

Reducing Your Inner Noise Helps You Deal with External Noise Pollution

Dealing with external noise pollution is, at times, close to impossible. What are you going to do about motorcycle morons blasting whole cities with their angry noises? Exactly. You can use noise reduction earbuds or noise-canceling headphones to lessen the impact. Yet, the external stimulus remains.

But you can create the inner silence and space to better deal with the noise annoyances in your environment. When you are in alignment with your purpose, you waste less energy on unproductive activities.

And you automatically select news and information that are useful for you. The fear of missing out has a lessoned grip on you. When we have reduced the internal noise is reduced, we are in a much better position to deal with the external noise that we cannot control.

Knowing what you are doing makes a living in an overcommunicated information society great. If you do not understand what you are doing, life can be challenging and extremely noisy. There will be plenty of inner noise as the angst cycle of the news and media drive your life. And that is a real pity as unnecessary information overload holds no relevance for your life.