Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit. There's a quiet minute coming, the walk to the car, the kettle, the queue, the shower, the last stretch before sleep, and before it arrives you've put something in it. A podcast, the radio, a screen, an audiobook. You'd have to think hard to name the last time you had ten minutes with nothing on, and if you sat in one now you'd feel a restlessness within the first minute and reach for something to end it.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that the habit makes sense from the inside. The fill is pleasant, some of it is worth hearing, and the quiet is uncomfortable in a way that's been measured. The second is that the discomfort is a fact about the first few minutes and not a verdict on quiet, that boredom is a signal with a job and the fill silences it without doing the job, and that there are things which only happen in a mind with nothing put into it. Ideas finishing. The day being sorted. Noticing where you are. Those are the things that go missing, and they've been going missing for a while. The third is practical. One stretch of your day is quiet. Gaps under five minutes stay empty. Everything else you put on, you choose, and you listen to it. Chapters 19 to 22 cover how.

This book doesn't ask you to give up podcasts, radio or television, to meditate, or to sit in silence for an hour. It asks you to stop filling every minute by default, and to find out what arrives in the ones you leave.

Three cautions.

If quiet brings not restlessness but dread, or racing thoughts, or thoughts that frighten you, that isn't the itch this book describes and the book isn't the answer. Talk to a GP, or in England refer yourself to NHS talking therapies. The fill may have been doing a job for you that needs a better tool.

If you have tinnitus, sound in the background is part of how many people manage it, and nothing here asks you to remove it. The NHS has guidance on tinnitus and it's the guidance to follow, not this book.

And if the reason every minute is filled is that the unfilled ones have been low for a fortnight or more, that's a change in your health. See a GP.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.