Silence is never silent; it is behavior and like all other behavior, has meaning—Psychiatrist Irvin Yalom

Every day we are met with a cacophony of noise; whether we are negotiating the hustles of the day, interacting with people, immersed in traffic, being blitzed by endless advertising and social media, engaging the internet, television, or news, or dealing with family or friends, the effect of noise can be exhausting. Noise predominates our environment. It can be a beautiful symphony of sounds and meaningful to our lives.

But there is another aspect of noise that can instigate stress and create harsh reactive internal states within us.

Our voice can be a contributing element to the world of noise. I am referring to those person-to-person interactions that one might consider agonistic or threatening, such as an offending remark, familial disagreement, or a negative communication of some kind. Activating aggressive rhetoric is what I might refer to as unsympathetic psychological noise. It is produced by people and then perceived, encoded, decoded, and responded to by our nervous system, and so we are activated by such noise (Kou et al., 2020).

However, this post is not about noise, but rather its inverse, and the power of strategic silence, or silence that is intentional and serves a purposeful function.

As a teacher, I have often deployed strategic silence in my classes. It is what some refer to as the "10-second rule." In a classroom, asking a question of students might initially generate a sea of expressionless faces and non-replies. But if I wait, it either serves to allow students to consider the question more thoroughly, or is experienced as a mild discomfort that usually generates a response that gets us talking. As a business leader, I have used it constructively to demonstrate active listening with employees. As a therapist, silence expressed may be deeply profound, such as providing space for clients as they relate troubling experiences from their lives. As a parent, silence may be even more comforting than words when our children simply need us to sit with them in reflection of their experiences or issues. Silence can also allow us "mental room" to reflect more deeply before addressing questions too quickly, or allow us to demonstrate empathy, or convey a powerful emotion that we simply do not have the words for at the moment. Silence is a useful experiential medium that can speak louder than........

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