The Noise

I woke up again last night at 2am. Not because of anything — just wide awake, brain fully switched on, running through everything. The Radiance Room I still needed to build. The calls to Mum and Dad I hadn't quite managed to make during the day. The next time I could organise to take my grandson out. The end-of-financial-year work for my clients, still sitting unfinished.

None of it was urgent. All of it was loud.

That's the Noise.

It's not one big thing. It's never one big thing. It's the accumulation of a thousand small ones — every notification, every expectation, every "just a quick favour," every person who assumes you're available because you always have been.

And here's the part I want to be honest about — the Noise isn't all bad. Some of it is love. It's caring about your kids, your parents, your grandkids, your friends. It's wanting to show up well at work, keep your hobbies alive, stay connected to people you love. The Noise is challenging and good, tangled up together, which is exactly why it's so hard to switch off. You can't just mute the parts that matter to you.

I've got a theory. There's an expectation now that we can be contacted 24/7 — thanks to smartphones, thanks to social media. But it simply isn't possible, or even reasonable. Our poor human bodies and minds can't keep up with that pace. The weight of it all becomes overwhelming once you start tallying it up — what we need to do, what we could do to help the people we love, what we feel obligated to do, even the things we're quietly resentful of.

Life wasn't always like this. The modern smartphone has only been part of our lives since 2007 — but they've reshaped our lives completely, and they're a huge part of the Noise. Texts landing at 2am. Emails from work on our days off. All of it chipping away at the "down time" we used to take for granted. In our grandparents' day, when you walked out the door on a Friday afternoon, that was it until Monday morning. Plans were made properly, with people, in advance — and then you actually got to switch off.

So what does protecting a pocket of quiet actually look like? It's smaller than people think. It's leaving the phone in another room while you have your morning coffee. It's not replying to the family group chat the second it pings, because it'll still be there in an hour. It's telling your kids you'll call them back after dinner, not mid-bite. It's one evening a week with no notifications, no scrolling, no catching up — just you, doing absolutely nothing that anyone asked of you.

But somewhere in the middle of being needed by everyone, all the time, we stop hearing ourselves. And for me, it shows up right there at 2am, when the world's quiet enough that my brain finally has room to run through everything it didn't get to during the day.

Here's what I'm learning: the Noise doesn't go away because you get better at multitasking. It goes away when you start protecting small pockets of quiet — on purpose, without guilt, without needing to explain yourself to anyone.

So today, I want to ask you: what's the Noise sound like for you? And what's one piece of it — even a small one — you could turn down this week?