Why It Feels Safer to Stay Busy Than Sit With Your Own Thoughts
- Joanna Baars
- Jul 3
- 11 min read
When Constant Mental Noise Meets Uncomfortable Silence
If you are someone whose mind feels like it is always switched on, you will probably know exactly how exhausting that can be. It is like your brain has no off switch. Always thinking, analysing, remembering, planning, rehashing, scanning. Whether it is filled with useful things or just endless noise, it feels like there is never a moment of quiet. It becomes the background hum of everyday life, so familiar that you almost forget there is another way to exist.
Until, one day, you stop. Maybe you choose to rest, maybe you try meditation, or maybe you just hit a point of emotional burnout where your mind finally goes quiet. And instead of peace, instead of the relief you imagined stillness might bring, what shows up is this strange, uncomfortable emptiness. It does not feel restful. It feels hollow. It feels unsettling. And often it feels worse than the noise. This is where a lot of people get confused or even frustrated with themselves. You might have longed for silence. You might have believed that if only you could quiet your mind, you would feel better. But when it happens, instead of relief, it can trigger this restless, agitated feeling. It is not soothing. It is itchy. Unbearable even. You might find yourself suddenly reaching for anything to fill the space again without even thinking about it. Scrolling your phone, turning on music, tidying things, checking emails, texting someone. Anything to get away from the emptiness that has now arrived.
It is easy to assume that this is just boredom. But what is often happening runs much deeper than that. The mind, especially when it has spent years or even a lifetime in a state of constant stimulation, does not actually register silence as safe. If your nervous system has learned to feel safest when it is busy, achieving, fixing or scanning, then stillness feels like a threat. Your body does not yet know how to recognise calm without interpreting it as vulnerability. And this is not about willpower or discipline. It is not a character flaw that your brain kicks and screams when things go quiet. It is a survival response. It makes complete sense. If your internal world has not felt like a safe place to land for a long time, of course your mind would rather keep moving. Of course distraction feels safer than stillness. Of course the moment you stop doing, your brain panics and starts hunting for something, anything, to latch onto.
This is where so many people end up caught in a loop without even knowing what the loop is. They go back to filling the space, thinking it is just boredom or restlessness. But what it often really is, is the discomfort of facing what lives in the quiet. And this is a place where a lot of people either freeze, check out completely or immediately flood themselves with stimulation again. Because the idea of just being left alone with their own mind feels intolerable.
The thing is, this is not unusual. It is more common than people think, especially for anyone living with ADHD, chronic stress or a nervous system shaped by trauma or overwhelm. When your mind has never been taught how to rest without stimulation, silence feels less like peace and more like a kind of internal alarm. And what happens next, when left alone with this emptiness, often looks like the brain scrambling to fill that space with whatever feels most intense, most distracting or most numbing.
Why Silence Feels So Uncomfortable
When the brain is always busy, noisy, and switched on, silence can feel strange. It sounds like it should be a relief. A peaceful moment. A rest. But for so many people, the reality is that when the noise stops, something else rises up instead. And it often does not feel good. It feels unsettling. Awkward. Even slightly panicky. The space that is left behind does not always feel like calm. Sometimes it feels like emptiness, boredom, or even dread.
The thing is, this is not because you are broken or bad at relaxing. It is not because you are doing mindfulness or rest wrong. It is because your nervous system and your brain have been trained to believe that being busy, stimulated, or distracted is safe. For some people, this started in childhood. Maybe you grew up in a home where being still meant being criticised or being left alone with big feelings that no one helped you process. Maybe downtime was seen as laziness or as an opportunity for negative emotions to creep in. Maybe constant activity was your way of managing stress, chaos, or overwhelm. Somewhere along the way, your mind learned that being in motion meant being okay.
Whereas, silence becomes associated with discomfort, not peace. This is because when the external noise goes quiet, the internal noise gets louder. The thoughts that have been pushed down for days, weeks, or even years start to bubble up. The feelings that were too overwhelming at the time now have a chance to surface. And honestly, sometimes the mind does not even let them fully rise. Instead, it throws up a wall of emptiness. A strange sense of nothingness. Like a blank screen. Not peaceful, but vacant. This is the nervous system going into freeze mode. It is not that there are no thoughts. It is that the system has temporarily shut the door to them because it feels too risky to open it.
This is why so many people immediately look for something to do. Something to think about. Something to scroll. It is not laziness or poor attention. It is an automatic safety response. If silence feels like a threat, the brain will do everything it can to escape it. And it does this not because it is trying to be difficult, but because it believes that stillness is dangerous. That without the buffer of stimulation or distraction, something painful might catch up. And for many people, that fear is not irrational. It is based on real experiences. Experiences where being still meant feeling invisible, unsafe, unloved, or overwhelmed. So the brain does what it knows. It protects. It guards. It avoids. The difficulty is that this avoidance becomes its own kind of trap. Because if the nervous system never learns that stillness can be safe, then it will always default to distraction. The idea of just sitting with yourself becomes almost impossible. The mind either fills the gap with constant thinking or, when thinking is switched off, it goes blank in a way that feels hollow rather than restful. This can be particularly confusing for anyone who has been told that mindfulness, meditation, or quiet time is the key to feeling better. You try it, and instead of feeling better, it feels worse. You are left wondering why something that seems to help others makes you feel more agitated, more restless, or just... flat.
What is actually happening is that the silence is not empty at all. It is full of everything that has been avoided. Every unmet need. Every feeling of loneliness, shame, sadness, frustration or unworthiness that was never held, seen, or soothed. The silence becomes like a mirror, but instead of reflecting peace, it reflects what has been buried.
And this is why your brain tries so hard to escape it. Because being left alone with those feelings is overwhelming. Especially if you were never taught how to hold them. Especially if, for years, your coping mechanism has been to stay busy, think faster, move faster, do more, distract harder. So the moment the distractions drop away, the mind either throws up obsessive thoughts to fill the space or falls into shutdown. Not because you are broken. Not because you cannot handle life. But because no one ever showed you how to safely sit with what lives in that quiet.
Obsessive Thoughts and Dopamine-Seeking: The Brain’s Way of Coping
So, what actually happens when the mind is left with uncomfortable silence? Why does it not just stay quiet? Why do obsessive thoughts rush in the moment the usual distractions fade away? The answer lies partly in how the brain tries to cope with discomfort and partly in how it is wired to seek safety through stimulation.
When the brain is suddenly left without its usual noise, it does not always move into peaceful reflection. Instead, it scrambles to fill that empty space with anything that feels intense enough to generate a sense of focus, stimulation, or relief. This is where obsessive thoughts show up. You might notice your brain suddenly fixating on fantasies, cravings, problems to solve, regrets, conversations that happened days ago, or even intrusive or repetitive thinking about things like sex, relationships, food, or shopping. It can feel like your mind grabs the loudest, most stimulating thing it can find and will not let go. This is not random. It is your brain trying to self-soothe. When the nervous system does not know how to regulate itself through calm, it flips into dopamine-seeking mode. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter linked to motivation, reward, and pleasure. In simple terms, dopamine is the brain’s way of getting relief, stimulation, or focus. When your mind is overstimulated all the time and then suddenly faces silence, the drop in stimulation can feel like freefall. It is uncomfortable. Sometimes even unbearable.
This is where the loop begins. Your brain looks for something, anything, that gives a quick dopamine hit. For a lot of people, that becomes intrusive sexual thoughts, fantasising, compulsively checking messages, craving attention, thinking about food, or mentally obsessing over relationships or what others think of you. For some, it might spiral into hyper-fixating on productivity or problems. For others, it turns toward distraction like scrolling, binge-watching, or overconsuming content.
Sexual thoughts are particularly common in this loop, especially for those who struggle with feeling invisible or unimportant. Why? Because sexuality ties directly into feelings of desirability, significance, and connection. It is a potent source of dopamine. The fantasy of being wanted, seen, or connected is a fast-track route to feeling a temporary sense of mattering. And whilst there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a healthy sexual imagination, it becomes a coping mechanism when it is used to avoid feelings of emptiness, loneliness, or disconnection from the self.
It is not that the brain is broken. It is doing what it knows how to do. This is the nervous system trying to regulate itself the only way it has learned to. It throws whatever it can into the silence to avoid the discomfort that lives there. Whether that is hypersexual thinking, food cravings, relationship obsessions, compulsive productivity, or doom scrolling, it is all the same core issue. The brain is trying to feel safe. The problem is, these kinds of obsessive thoughts and dopamine-seeking behaviours only soothe for a moment. The relief is real, but it is temporary. Once the distraction wears off, the emptiness returns. And because the real root (the disconnection from self, the inability to tolerate quiet, or the unresolved emotions sitting under the surface) has not been addressed, the cycle starts all over again.
What often gets misunderstood here is that this behaviour is not about weakness or failure. It is not about being bad at focusing or bad at being alone. It is the completely logical response of a brain that never learned how to feel safe in silence. A brain that learned somewhere along the way that being busy, distracted, or mentally stimulated was the only way to survive emotional discomfort.
The obsessive thoughts are not the real problem. They are the symptom. They are the surface-level attempt to solve something much deeper. Something that was never supposed to be solved by noise, distraction, or constant stimulation. It was supposed to be solved by learning how to be with yourself. By learning how to listen. By learning that stillness can be safe.
Healing the Need for Constant Noise
If you are reading this and recognising yourself in this pattern, you are not alone. That feeling of being trapped in your own mind, always needing stimulation, always needing the next thing to distract you, is exhausting. It can make you feel like your brain is broken or that something is deeply wrong with you. But the truth is, there is nothing wrong with you. Your brain has simply been running a survival strategy that made sense for a long time. It is not a flaw. It is protection. It is the only way your nervous system knew how to cope with the discomfort of silence, boredom or being left with the parts of yourself that felt too overwhelming to face.
The good news is, this pattern is not permanent. You can absolutely learn how to shift it. You can teach your nervous system that it is safe to be still. Safe to be quiet. Safe to be with yourself. But it is important to say this honestly, it does not happen overnight. If your whole life has been about filling space, avoiding emptiness or drowning out discomfort with noise, distraction or obsessive thinking, then learning to sit with yourself again has to be done gently. It is not about forcing yourself into stillness. It is about slowly rebuilding trust with your own mind and body.
The very first step is understanding that the discomfort is not a sign you are doing something wrong. It is actually a sign that your nervous system is waking up to something unfamiliar. Stillness feels unsafe not because it is dangerous, but because it is unfamiliar. Your body does not yet associate it with safety, peace or rest. It only knows how to feel regulated when something is filling the space. So when the noise stops, the nervous system rings the alarm. That alarm is not truth. It is habit. It is a learned pattern.
So, how do we begin to heal it? It starts in small doses. You do not have to sit in complete silence for an hour. You do not have to meditate like a monk. You start by creating tiny moments of space where you simply notice what is there without rushing to fix it or fill it. That might look like sitting with your eyes closed for thirty seconds and simply noticing the tension in your body. It might look like pausing after turning off the TV and before picking up your phone, just to notice what feelings come up. It might be lying in bed before you fall asleep and instead of scrolling, just noticing your breath for a moment. These are micro-moments of building safety with yourself. What you are teaching your nervous system is this: I can be with me. I can sit with me. I am safe to be with me. And over time, that starts to change everything.
For some people, especially those who experience that blank, shut-down feeling when trying to connect with themselves, it can help to approach this gently through creative or sensory practices. Sometimes journaling helps unlock what feels locked. Sometimes it is movement, like stretching, walking or even dancing to one song alone in your room. Sometimes it is using sound, like calming music, or using the rhythm of your breath to help signal safety to the body.
The goal is not to force your brain into being quiet. The goal is to show your brain that quiet is not dangerous. That being with yourself does not mean punishment, emptiness or overwhelm. It means connection. It means coming back to the parts of yourself that were never meant to be ignored or drowned out by noise. Those parts have been waiting for you. They have always been there, quietly hoping you would turn toward them instead of away. And yes, this takes time. It is completely normal to bump into resistance, boredom, discomfort or even fear. That is not failure. That is your nervous system learning. That is your brain rewiring. Every small moment that you choose to stay with yourself rather than run from yourself matters. Every pause, every breath, every second of noticing instead of numbing is a step toward healing.
You might notice over time that the urge to constantly seek stimulation gets a little quieter. The obsessive thoughts start to lose some of their grip. The need for distraction softens. And in its place, something else grows. A feeling of home within yourself. A sense of safety that is not dependent on the outside world. A relationship with yourself that feels steady, kind and real. This is the work of healing. It is not about fixing yourself. It is about remembering yourself. You were never broken. You were just busy surviving in the best way you knew how. And now, you are learning how to do something different. Something softer. Something that leads you back to you.
If something here resonated with you, I’d love to hear it.
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Joanna Baars is a psychotherapist and writer based in London. Her work explores how we can learn to understand ourselves, in a complex world. Find out more...
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