In 2023, I spent 137,976 minutes listening to music, according to Apple Music, and I unabashedly shared that fact with anyone who cared to listen. That’s more than a quarter of a year.
For the worried reader, I want to make it clear that I wasn’t spending that time focused entirely on listening to my favorite albums. Instead, music was my companion in an ongoing war against silence.
Most students are all too familiar with this battle. Over six years, Charles Sturt University lecturer Bruce Fell studied 580 undergraduate students and concluded that students have learned to fear silence. At the same time, the average person spent 64,584 minutes in 2023 consuming music, the most in history. Our discomfort with silence and growing love for music has led us to fill any crevice of silence with a myriad of tunes.
Despite this, I’m on track to barely reach 50,000 minutes this year, a 63.8% decrease. What changed? I learned about the consequences of excessive music consumption, which can lead to mental overstimulation and diminish opportunities for self-reflection and mindfulness.
We often use music as a backdrop for our daily activities. I racked up those minutes using music to dust away the silence common to studying for exams, walking to class or doing chores. Chemistry sophomore Kyunghoon Cho uses music in a similar way.
“I feel like it’s become mandatory for me to listen to music while walking,” Cho said. “It just helps pass time.”
However, that never-ending stream of music prevents you from processing important thoughts that might be floating around in the back of your head. Unconscious processing, the brain’s ability to work through thoughts and problems in the background, thrives in moments of silence.
In those moments away from music’s constant stimulus, the brain wanders, connects ideas and solves problems. It’s no coincidence that some of our most creative or insightful thoughts occur when we’re not actively focused on finding them.
“(Music) can increase focus, but when you’re always in that state, then you’re not allowing yourself the downtime and silence where you might do more unconscious processing, memory consolidation,” said Calvin Tower, a research fellow in the Finding Focus Lab at UT.
Additionally, in the pursuit of filling the silence, we lose important opportunities for mindfulness, which is the practice of intentionally focusing attention on the present moment. Being grounded in the present has been shown to improve one’s well-being, as well as one’s physical and mental health.
Yet, when our ears are constantly filled with music, we squander moments of mindfulness.
“(It’s hard to) sit with yourself and process what is going on in your life, what it is that you want or how you actually feel because you’re constantly in consumption mode,” Tower said.
I’m not arguing that you should immediately cancel your Spotify subscription and foster a monk-like silence, which would ignore the well-researched benefits of listening to music, such as elevating mood or improving focus. However, like most things, there needs to be balance.
Finding time to pause your music can give your brain a chance to reap the benefits of silence and mindfulness. For me, I’ve found it helpful to keep my AirPods in my pockets as I walk across campus.
I love music, but I’ve learned to find solace in silence. While it might not sound as powerful as it is, silence gives us the space we need to grow and thrive as students.
Kota is a computer science and business senior from Galveston, Texas.
