Noise isn’t just kids yelling or traffic outside. Not in today’s world, especially. Noise is anything that repeatedly commands your attention before you have chosen to give it.
Think about the sheer amount of noise your brain has to process each day. How many notifications appear on your phone screen? How many pieces of content do you consume, and how many of them are advertisements? Then, beyond our attention-goblin devices, there is social noise. Workplace urgency. Relationship conflict. Other people’s expectations, emotional states, opinions, and criticisms taking up space in our minds alongside our own.
When everyone else’s input reaches us before our own experience does, it becomes harder to tell the difference between what we think and what we have absorbed. Can you hear your own voice over all that noise? Can you hear your own needs?
When something becomes constant, we often stop recognizing it as noise at all.
The easiest noise for me to recognize was digital. Unlike a kid saying “Mom” a million times, our devices have learned how to make their interruptions feel desirable. A notification might be a message, a like, an update, or something genuinely important. We don’t know until we check, and that possibility makes the interruption difficult to ignore. Even an irrelevant notification has succeeded once it has pulled our attention away from whatever we were doing.
Digital noise can fill nearly every unclaimed moment before we have the chance to notice what is happening within or around us.
This came to the forefront of my attention, like many of the tech habits I eventually had to consider for myself, while I was working for a Big Phone Company™, selling phones in a storefront. I hated the job, but it became the catalyst for changing my relationship with my own technology use.
Day after day, people came in with broken phones – or no phone at all – and became frantic over their busted devices. Of course, some ran businesses, cared for family members, or had other legitimate reasons they urgently needed a working phone. I tried to be as empathetic as I could, regardless of the reason. Phones have become part of the infrastructure of our lives, and losing access to one can cause real problems.
What stayed with me, though, was the energy I felt from so many of those interactions: the panic, agitation, and growing sense that nothing could continue until the device was working again. Watching that dependence firsthand forced me to examine my own. Coupled with what I had already been wrestling with for most of my life – the demand to remain productive, reachable, and responsive under capitalism – I knew something in my own life had to give.
So I started small. I turned off notifications for almost everything except the apps where people were directly trying to reach me… a few messenger services, Snapchat, and phone calls. Email notifications became minimal. Calendar alerts, banking apps, and a few other important adult-life notifications remained at my discretion. My insurance company wasn’t trying to convince me to spend more time on its app, after all.
Before I had deleted a single app, my screen time took a huge hit. Without every app announcing itself throughout the day, my attention simply returned to my phone less often.
Turning off my notifications didn’t eliminate the noise from my life. It only softened the loudest layer. Once it did, I could hear the forms of noise that didn’t arrive with a buzz – other people’s expectations, moods, opinions, and manufactured urgency.
With even a little more say over my own attention, I had more space to examine how I was using it. I noticed how often I consumed content reflexively and absorbed other people’s opinions before forming my own. I noticed that I had less tolerance for sitting with my emotions. I noticed that I could hardly watch a full-length movie without reaching for my phone or playing a video game on a second screen.
That noticing helped me understand the difference between intentional engagement and reflexive consumption. I could select a YouTube video from my subscriptions because it was something I genuinely wanted to watch, or I could let the algorithm continue feeding me whatever was most likely to hold my attention – and potentially affect my emotions – without ever deciding whether I wanted that input in the first place.
The difference wasn’t necessarily the platform or even the content. It was whether I was choosing what I wanted from the experience or allowing the next thing to choose for me.
Once I could recognize that pattern online, I began noticing where it appeared elsewhere in my life.
How often had I been expected to treat a family member’s anxiety as everyone’s emergency?
How often had a friend or partner’s mood determined the atmosphere of an entire event or household?
When was I going to draw the line between my life outside of work and the urgency Big Phone Company™ wanted me to carry home after I had moved beyond selling phones on the floor?
None of these forms of noise came with a notification banner. They were quieter, more familiar, and much easier to mistake for the natural cost of caring about people, being responsible, or simply participating in life. But they could still reach me before my own experience did. Someone else’s anxiety could become my priority before I had checked in with myself. Someone else’s mood could determine mine before I had noticed how I felt. A company’s urgency could occupy my evening before I had decided whether it deserved access to me.
These are only a few of the quieter forms of noise that can wear us down over time. That wear can look like irritability over minor things, mental clutter, difficulty making decisions, automatically reaching for stimulation, or realizing that you have no idea what you need. Sometimes the clearest sign that the noise has become too much is that there is no unclaimed space left in which to hear yourself.
The noise itself isn’t always unpleasant. It can be entertaining, familiar, useful, or even loving, and still leave little room for our own experience. A friend may genuinely need support. A family member’s feelings may matter to us. Our work may come with real responsibilities. Technology can connect us to people and ideas we deeply value.
The aim of noticing the noise isn’t to label every demand as an intrusion or insist that we cut it out entirely. It is to recognize what has been receiving uninterrupted access to us. Only then can we decide what deserves our attention, what can wait, and what may never have been ours to carry in the first place.
To begin making room to hear yourself again, ask:
What has become so constant in your life that you no longer recognize it as noise?
