Stopping For 10 Minutes is a Good Thing!
Stopping for 10 Minutes is a good thing!
By Stefan Chmelik
“All of humanity’s problems stem from [man’s] inability to sit quietly in a room alone’
Blaise Pascal, 17th Century scientist and pioneer of what we now call computing.
At Peace - an NSDR Soundscape - a holiday gift for all Sensaters
Out now in the Space & Time theme.
Why is it so important to close our eyes and ears?
If you want to really rest and sleep deeply, this is what your body needs, this is what neuroscience tells us.
If you do one thing, do one thing at a time, properly. Human beings have a deep and profound neurological need for periods of no light and natural sound. This need goes back thousands of years and is programmed into our cells and nervous systems, before artificial light and ‘grind culture’ became the norm. Research shows modern humans work longer hours than Mediaeval peasants!
Until recently, in developmental terms, all light was red, from fires, candles, lamps, non-LED bulbs, and of course from the sun; and sound was mostly from nature. We used to live with darkness and silence as a friend, and had to moderate our work and rest hours accordingly.
Our minds and bodies have simply not had time to adapt to the sheer volume of light and noise present in the modern environment. We are seeing the impact of this in stress, anxiety, sleep disturbance and, what are now common health issues. Less light and noise is therefore a biological necessity, and should be a human right. This means that your self-care routine should really include a daily period of no light and natural sounds. You can reintroduce these periods of quiet and reduced light gently, and your body will recognise them and act in kind. This is easy to do, and the time invested - just 10 minutes- will repay itself many times over in productivity and happiness.
The Sensate Signature Soundscapes start with just 10-minute sessions for this reason. You can close your eyes and drown out the world around you with headphones for a short period so that your brain can stop the onslaught of photons for a while. Leaving your body to feel and hear the kind of natural sounds and sensations that are recognised as safe and relaxing.
‘Silence is the absence of noise, not the absence of sound.’ -Gordon Hempton
This comes down to our deep cellular relationship with nature and the environment. Not so long ago, humans were able to tell when a threat was nearby just by hearing the kind of singing the birds and the trees were making. If the birds were relaxed and happy, so were we.
Biophilia - the role of nature
E.O. Wilson, pioneer of evolutionary biology, was the originator of the Biophilia Hypothesis: The idea that we have evolved to be drawn to nature, and living things, such as the sound of birds, of water, the sight of foliage and the like. In Walden, Henry Thoreau chooses to spend two years living solo in nature, simply and ‘intentionally’. Through this he argues that spending enough of the right type of time immersed in nature, or the sounds of nature, to the point where the boundaries between you and the natural world begin and end blur, is essential to the development of elevated human awareness and consciousness.
One of the reasons I think so many people are suffering from stress is not that they are doing stressful things, but that they allow so little time for silence and taking a pause. What most of us can re-frame about relaxing and trying to meditate is the idea that this must involve 'clearing the mind'. In reality, there is no such thing as total silence or space in the universe - everything hums and is alive with something. Being content is less about striving for emptiness, and more about turning down the intensity so we can experience the more subtle.
Some concepts you may not know the name for:
- Psithurism - the sound of wind whispering through trees.
- Susurration - whispering vibration
- Pluviophile - one who is fascinated by and finds peace in rain
Let me bring back a quote from earlier:
‘Silence is the absence of noise not the absence of sound.’ - Gordon Hempton
This quote reminds us that not all sound is noise. Many people rely on some kind of noise at night to get to sleep at all, like the coloured noise of the TV, radio or a fan whirring. Sound can be helpful, just like a little amount of light at night can be comforting, because prolonged periods of total darkness or pure silence can be scary, leaving our minds wandering to thoughts of danger.
We weren’t built to live like this
We all want to do more, to be more productive, but multi-tasking is a myth. It is a story we tell ourselves so we can try and do more than one thing at a time. We often do these things often badly because part of that story is that there is too much to do and we need to achieve more and be more productive. It’s a very powerful story. Even I am kidding myself that I am ‘multi-tasking’ while writing this article with an audiobook playing as I write and research. The irony is too much for me and now I have turned it off.
Let me share Lisa’s story, as it is a good illustration of my point and perhaps one you might recognise:
I listened to Lisa as she spoke of planning to come to a local environmental meeting next week if she was not too tired. She quickly pointed out that she might attend anyway even though she would be unable to help with anything, at least until the new year. At the same time Lisa is covering maternity leave where she was signed-off a year ago due to stress and anxiety. Lisa spoke in sadness about her brother living in another country, the tiny amount of holiday allocation he receives, the expectation that it won’t actually be taken, and of people living in terror of losing their job and their health insurance cover, so they don’t complain about the lack of work breaks. Lisa describes her maternity cover as a ‘safety net’ (the perfect term to use, as trauma is driven by feeling unsafe), but acknowledging that she and her husband didn’t actually need the money to be able to manage. Her husband and friends have already told her she shouldn’t have taken this job, so why does she feel compelled?
Tricia Hersey’s book Rest is Resistance (a much needed account of the true cost of ‘grind culture’, and who really pays for it), and how generational trauma impacts to this day on the lives of black Americans. In fact, trauma is now known to pass down genetically for seven generations and there is no population or community on the planet over the last seven or fewer generations who have not been directly affected by war, invasion, genocide, slavery, colonization, famine, disaster. Many people are therefore unaware of their generational trauma, and are left to think of their feelings of anxiety, overwhelm, disassociation, addiction and poor wellbeing as being something ‘wrong’ with them, rather than as an outcome of global events and the simple message, ‘it didn’t start with you’. Grief and anxiety are now an almost universal feeling experienced by the global population (although not all would identify them as such).
The human brain is only about a million years old. Industrialisation happened around four generations ago and the digital/information age is happening right under our feet. We feel overwhelmed, unsafe and that things are out of control, because they are. Human adaptation cannot adjust to the pace of exponential technological change. The response of our brilliant nervous system, and the responses inherited from previous generations, is to raise the alarm that this cannot go on. This is making us feel anxious, overwhelmed and out of control, and we can’t even sleep deeply.
The solution? Deep rest that our nervous system will recognise and process as deep rest, rather than trying to ‘do more things’. Stopping for 10 minutes!
Contrary to popular belief, peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head. In a loud world, silence sells and a think tank in Finland saw that it was possible to quite literally make something out of nothing. Finland also invests in the idea of the four-day work week, which is gaining international traction as something that can benefit workers without harming productivity.
‘Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care that can be inflicted on the sick or well’ - Florence Nightingale, British nurse and social reformer.
The noise is now so loud that we don’t consciously notice it, just like people who live next to railway tracks get used to the sound of trains, but the neurological damage is no less real.
‘You don’t have to go to the forest. You can live with people, you can walk with others, and you can still enjoy silence and solitude.’
In his book Silence, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh talks about deep listening as a form of silence. ‘Silence is like the quiet periods in music. Without the silence, the spaces, the resting notes, there is no music. They define and make it.’
Thich Nhat Hanh teaches: ‘As more people grow irritated, outraged and frightened by the world outside; the climate crisis; uprisings of racism and hate; global pandemics and rampant misinformation; we need a daily refuge where we can recover and rejuvenate. We need more than ever a way to silence our noisy mind and go beyond our shadowy thoughts, in this way aligning with something deeper than the day’s headlines. But meditation is not only for ourselves. Our sitting practices prepare us to serve the common good with a clear mind and open heart because we're all interconnected. When we act from a silent centre we reduce the chaos and the noise rather than add to it’.
Why Sensate works so well:
The design of Sensate and its use-case is very specific, and is our main point of differentiation in a market where there are many solutions for ‘stress’ and ‘sleep’:
Sensate is:
- Designed by an expert clinician for the real problems of real people;
- Solves the biological need for silence and space;
- Neurology shows that profound deep rest and reset only happens with closed eyes and ears;
- Sensate provides true Nervous System Training to improve Vagal Nerve Tone - not only for sleep…
- 10 minutes a day is worth an hour of extra rest;
- Special design makes Sensate super easy and so enjoyable you actually look forward to it!;
- Genuine deep rest is a human right;
- In a world of toxic productivity, rest is a revolutionary act;
- Sensate helps you do less and achieve more
- Non-invasive, incredibly safe, does not use conductive gel, electrical or magnetic stimulation.
(Read here How Sensate works.)
Nina Kraus (professor at Northwestern University) investigates the neural encoding of speech and music and its plasticity. Her mission is “Finding a window into sound processing in the brain.", which she describes in great detail in her marvellous book Of Sound Mind.
‘My mission is to Understand and enable sound processing in the body. That is, to deepen our understanding and utility of the other half of sound perception that takes place through the body via vibration receptors, rather than auditory channels. Vibration was our first sense, and is the most deeply hardwired response in the body, going back hundreds of millions of years. Sound is the only sense we can't turn "off" so it can 'speak' to our Autonomic Nervous System more immediately and profoundly than anything else available at this time’
Along a similar vein, Zoe Cormier says ‘Music was humanity's first love’. The body-mind responds to music when it does not respond to words, ‘we sang before we spoke’, and human beings are the only animal that can keep a beat!.
The SoundBody - The Marvel of Bone Conduction
The other half of sound perception, according to my hypothesis, is sensed by specialist cells in the body, many of which are responsible for sense of touch and perception of vibration. I discuss some of the amazing internal body senses in this article. Because our body and the nervous system that regulates it, including the longest cranial nerve in the body, the Vagus Nerve, are massively older than our astonishing human brains, most of how we feel (as opposed to what we think), is governed by activity below the brain stem. So it’s easy to see how the feeling of sound in the body would have an impact on our sense of personal wellbeing. This is what determines how well we feel in ourselves. In other words, even though it has been shown conclusively that sound and music have a dramatic effect on what we feel, aural soundwaves are only half the story. Experiencing soundwaves through both the ears and the body dramatically enhances the impact and outcome.
The body doesn’t have eardrums to perceive compressed airwaves, but we have exquisitely evolved over millions of years to sense vibration as frequency change encoded within our cells. Humans are structured as water-rich connective tissue (fascia) wrapped around a hollow skeleton protecting a chest with hollow organs that contain a lot of air space. This set-up is the perfect medium to propagate low frequency soundwaves to the deep interior of the body, where they have a profound impact on the body senses that determine how we feel, through complex feedback mechanisms developed over thousands of years. Without bone conduction into the connective tissue, hollow skeletal bones and air spaces in the thorax, the impact of sound is hugely reduced. You already know this to be true. Think of a speaker cabinet. The speaker itself may generate the sound, but without the lovely resonance produced by the resonance created in the air within the cabinet, the sound is thin and lacks impact.
Audible music is now more universal than it has ever before in history. We have only been recording music for around 100 yrs, but animals have been making sound forever. Birds and lizards have either a cyrinx or resonating small space. Sound is also the only external sense you can't turn off. ‘We don't have ear lids’, says Sensate guest artist Tom Middleton, just like we can’t turn off our sense of touch or vibration.
How the light gets in
A few scant photons can reach as far as 1,000 feet below sea level, with the animals at these depths specially adapted and evolved for the conditions, indeed deep sea fish have the best dark vision on the planet.
Humans filter out half of the photons before they hit the back of the eye, as we want sharp, high quality vision, as day walkers, so remove the photons that bounce around and would make vision more peripheral. There is an assumption that human night vision is poor compared to the likes of owls or deep sea fish, but really very few people in the modern world experience pure scotopic vision (scotopia, vision of the eye under low-light conditions), as we are seldom or ever in properly dark conditions. We shrink from the shadows, we hold them at bay with street lamps, we buy nightlights to console fearful children. It takes about 40 minutes for the human eye to fully adapt to pure scotopia, everything appearing in a less detailed black and white version. We evolved cones to see complex multi-colored light in detail, rods give us the ability to see shapes in the darkness, or distant stars in the sky. Owls, in comparison, are astonishingly well adapted to the scotopic environment. They have huge eyes, so big that they cannot rotate them and have developed long necks (hidden under all those feathers) to be able to rotate the head instead, almost to 360 degrees. Owls are supernaturally silent – experiments have filmed them swooping over a row of feathers and microphones – not only is there no sound, but the feathers do not even move.
Vibration perception would have been our first sense. Neuroscientist Seth Horowitz observes: ‘There are plenty of blind animals; there are plenty of animals with a very limited sense of smell; some animals have very limited touch perception and some a limited sense of taste. But one thing you never find is deaf animals. Sound is simply vibration and is anywhere there is energy and matter, which on our planet is everywhere.’ The ability to hear is universal and is the only sense that is always on. (remember Tom Middleton: ‘We don’t have ear lids’).
Humans report extraordinary experiences from within anechoic chambers (rooms specially designed to be entirely silent). Composer John Cage famously experienced a high and low noise when in one of the very first anechoic chambers. When he asked the engineer what he was hearing, he was told the high pitch of his nervous system and the low pitch of his blood circulation.
We can hear zero decibels, an air pressure wave that moves the ear drum by only 0.00000001 mm. “There is no such thing as silence” said Cage, and went on to compose his most famous piece, ‘4’33’, a pianist sitting at a piano (or indeed an entire orchestra) not playing anything for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.
The Importance of the Sensate Method (AKA the Use-Case)
We could have made using Sensate less than 10 minute sessions and so that you could use it with your eyes open while doing something else. But we would have been short changing you (see the myth of ‘multi tasking’ above). Stanford Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology Andrew Huberman confirms the importance of closing your eyes when you need to switch off your mind. Sensate creates special Soundscapes composed using neuroacoustic techniques that synchronise with the tactile vibrations from the Sensate pebble that you listen to using headphones, which create harmonious sound.
People wanting to bend or break our use-case is perhaps the biggest issue we have to contend with. The very condition we are helping people combat is the ‘busyness disease’, which is a kind of competitive mass reflex that stops us from having enough space or time in one’s life to be able to become aware of the real world around us rather than the one we manufacture in our heads.
The Sensate Method (AKA Use-Case) is sacred. It is based on a vast bank of empirical and experimental data and is very reliably effective, in virtually all people if followed correctly.
By following the Method, we train our Bodymind (which is the sense data coming in and the analysis of this from our neurological systems) to be capable of moving further and further beyond the mundane constraints of linear cause and effect time, and into a more flexible relationship with - Space, Stillness and Silence:
(Note that space is not just three-dimensional; Stillness does not require the absence of movement; and Silence doesn’t mean there is no sound)
Later this week we are releasing a ten-minute specific track for all of our users in our Space & Time category. An NSDR Soundscape.
Sensately Yours,
Stefan
Stefan Chmelik is co-founder of and inventor of the Sensate stress reduction system, which is based on his over three decades of clinical experience working with anxiety, stress and trauma.
Articles page HERE
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https://www.getsensate.com/blogs/news/how-to-come-to-your-senses
https://www.getsensate.com/blogs/news/how-sensate-works
https://www.getsensate.com/blogs/news/water
References:
Tricia Hersey’s book Rest is Resistance: a much needed account of the true cost of ‘grind culture’, and who really pays for it; and how generational trauma impacts, to this day, on the lives of black Americans.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/creativity-without-borders/201405/the-myth-of-multitasking
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/need-noise-for-sleep-health_l_67222a16e4b03a564e7cdeb9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R_6f0lGRVw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden
https://allthatsinteresting.com/medieval-peasants-vacation-more
Nina Kraus’ Book Of Sound Mind: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545075/of-sound-mind/
https://www.sciencefocus.com/nature/music-to-their-ears-3-animals-that-can-groove-to-the-beat
Info on the full range of human senses.
Seth Horowitz, The Universal Sense – How Hearing Shapes the Mind
Photo Credit: Igor Sporynin, Unsplash