Hello.

Hello and welcome to another Voice Notes episode of the Jesus and ADHD podcast.

My name is Rachel Grit, and if you have never heard my voice before, I am a Jesus lover and an ADHDer and I help women with chaotic brains seek, find and live the abundant life Jesus offers.

And these episodes are specifically designed to be like getting a voice memo from a friend.

That is the vibe here.

That is the tone here.

I am literally just recording this on my phone and I don't edit them at all before I upload them.

But I want to talk about today is intentional silence.

Because that's something that's been on my heart this week and I've been practicing it this week and honestly it's made a huge difference.

So I wanted to share about it.

So if you have been around for really any of my content.

A common theme that keeps coming up that God keeps kind of putting on my heart is the idea of noise.

Specifically, he keeps bringing up the phrase, cut the noise, follow my voice, which is kind of rhymey and fun, but there, there is a really helpful and solid truth hidden in that fun little phrase.

So we experience so much noise on a daily basis.

There is constantly just so much chaos in our lives.

And I like to liken it to being in a really noisy restaurant, right?

So like when you're meeting with a friend and you're in a really noisy restaurant, it's insanely difficult to have like a deep, heart to heart, intimate conversation, right?

Like, especially if you're in like a nightclub type environment, like we've all been there, right?

Where you're like, what?

Wait, I can't hear you.

What?

And eventually you just like awkwardly nod and you're like, yeah, and you didn't actually hear what the other person said.

So no matter how many times you end up going to that noisy environment with your friend, if you're not able to actually have that conversation due to the levels of noise in the environment, you're not going to grow closer with your friends, your relationship is not going to deepen.

And in fact, it might do more harm than good to keep spending that very shallow time together.

And so the concept of noise just keeps coming up and keeps coming up and keeps coming up.

For me, and so something that came up for me this week during my quiet time was the concept of intentional silence.

So actually taking time to strip away all of those stimuli and just sit in some silence.

So for me, how this kind of shows in my day to day life is I am constantly listening to something.

Usually it's like YouTube videos.

I really.

Okay, this is kind of embarrassing.

I really like drama videos on YouTube.

Whether that's like, here's the latest beef with this influencer versus this influencer, which, like, I don't follow reality tv.

I don't really follow influencers.

But for some reason, I think it's probably because of how much chaos and drama there is in my life.

Hearing about other people's drama makes me feel, like, better or helps me, like, take the pressure off of my own drama.

Ditto for, like, true crime.

There was a period of time in my life, and this is a little bit dark, but where I was, like, genuinely afraid for my life and true crime.

I just, I really love true crime.

I enjoy listening to it.

I find it fascinating.

I feel like it kind of helps me have a more balanced view of the world and safety because I tend to just, like, want to trust everybody.

But true crime has kind of helped me, like, put my guard up a little bit more.

But so there's.

For me, it's videos.

I. I listen to videos a lot.

Like, I. I listen to some podcasts, but most of the time it's like a YouTube video.

And a lot of times it's like a very silly, fluffy video.

And sometimes that can even help me, like, get up out of bed in the morning and get moving if I'm having a hard time is like, okay, well, I can listen to something while I do the thing that feels really hard.

So it's been beneficial, it's been helpful.

And sometimes, like, a lot of the times, even the stuff that I'm listening to is helpful, whether that' podcast on business or, you know, whatever the case may be.

Well, as human beings tend to do, it can get taken to an extreme, and I can tend to take it to an extreme.

And I, I realized, God brought up to me this week in my quiet time, that I don't really have any pockets of silence.

It's like, I compulsively avoid silence.

And it just.

It feels empty to me.

It feels uncomfortable to me.

But earlier this week, in my quiet time, God was like, hey, I want you to spend some time in intentional silence.

And so I've been working on that this week.

I've been doing that this week.

I have been shooting for about an hour of intentional silence a day.

Probably realistically, it's more like 30 to 45 minutes.

But what that's looking like for me right now is if I'm on a drive.

I drive a lot.

I have three kids on two different custody schedules.

My little guy Sunny is mine from a previous marriage and I have my oldest two are my husband's from a previous marriage.

And I am our designated driver.

And so I am constantly like running kids to school and doing pickup and drop off and like all of these different things.

And so I'm in the car a lot and most of the time that time is filled with a video or a podcast, which I want to be clear, I'm not watching videos while I'm driving.

It's like I will turn a video on and then I will like flip my phone over and then drive.

So just to be so clear, um, but what that's looking one way that that's showing up for me right now.

This idea of intentional silence is, okay, I will get in the car.

Like I dropped my, my older two kiddos off my step kiddos off to school on Thursday morning and the 30 minute drive back to my house, I just didn't turn anything on or if I'm cooking dinner, that's a time where I'll often listen to something and I really, I love cooking and I love just like turning something fluffy and silly on or like an aud or something on.

And just cooking like that is something I really enjoy.

I've started to just, okay, I'm gonna intentionally take this time and just not listen to anything.

Sometimes I'll have an intention of prayer, but for the most part it truly just is.

Okay, I am going to take a break from stimuli right now.

And so for my husband that this is going to look different for different people, right?

So my husband doesn't really care about auditory stimuli.

He doesn't really care about like listening to things.

This guy, he just sits and works in silence all day and I'm like, how do you not just like, listen to music and like, what are you doing?

He is the love of my life.

I love that man more than I love myself.

Like, he is, he is incredible.

But I'm like, babe, you're a little bit of a psycho.

Like, what do you mean?

You're just like sitting there in silence.

But for him, visual stimuli is a really big thing.

So he's constantly like playing Roblox games on his phone because like the flashing lights and da da.

He has ADHD as well.

He also has brain cancer.

He got a little scoop taken out of his brain.

He's fine.

He is stable.

We're in like the monitoring phase.

His type of cancer doesn't go into remission and will likely recur at some point.

We are praying against that in the name of Jesus, we are pleading the blood of Jesus all over my husband's frontal lobe.

But so he.

You know, he has some brain challenges as well.

And so for him, when I was telling him about this, I'm like, yes, I'm doing this, like, intentional silence.

And.

And I'm just, like, sitting in silence.

And he kind of is like, okay, well, I do that all the time.

But for him, it's visual stimuli that really get him, that really draw him in.

I couldn't really care less about visual stimuli.

And so if this is something that you're like, ooh, you know what?

I am constantly surrounded by noise.

Whether that's literal, like physical going in your ears noise, or mental noise or visual noise, whatever the case may be, you can adapt it to what your needs are, what kind of tends to show up for you, what space gets taken up most for you.

And I have been doing this for about the past week, and I genuinely.

It's kind of one of those things where you're like, okay, I'll do this because God's asking me to, but I really don't want to.

And it's probably not going to make a difference.

And this is so uncomfortable.

Like, it was almost literally physically uncomfortable for me when I started this.

And the difference that it has made in a week is astounding.

It was incredibly uncomfortable the first probably couple minutes, I would say.

And the actual initiation of doing it, like, the making the decision of, yes, right now I am going to do this thing intentionally, in silence, or with a lack of stimuli.

Stimuli, stimulus, whatever.

I think you can probably track with what I'm saying.

I can be a little bit of a grammar nerd and be really hard on myself when my grammar is not perfect.

So I often find myself correcting myself.

And that is a whole complex that I need to work through in therapy, which I'm actively looking for a new therapist right now, which is super fun.

I loved.

Loved my last therapist, but I kind of felt like we got as far as we could.

I'm a. I'm a special case.

I am very good at, like, intellectualizing my feelings and almost like performing therapy.

And so I really want to try somatic therapy.

So that's what I'm looking for right now, and I am fully off track, so I'm gonna reel myself back in here.

So it was.

It was really difficult the first couple of days, particularly that initiation.

Like, I would say, the first couple of times I did it, the first couple minutes were really uncomfortable.

Where it was like, oh, like, oh, I'm so bored.

Like, I just want to listen to something.

Like.

But then towards the end of the session, and I didn't do an hour all at once, I would do like, like this 15 minute task.

You know what?

I'm just gonna do this in silence.

Or normally I listen to something in the shower.

So.

Okay.

While I'm taking my 10 minute shower.

Oh, I'm just gonna.

I'm just gonna sit in silence for this or, oh, for this drive.

I'm not gonna listen to something.

It was not like, okay, I'm setting a timer.

Here we go.

And so the.

The first couple minutes of.

The first couple times I did it were difficult.

And the first couple times, that task initiation, that kind of like, making the decision to do it felt like a difficult decision.

But today I literally just pulled up to my house right now from going to pick up a prescription because your girl woke up with pink eye, which is freaking fantastic.

I'm supposed to pick up my kid today.

And so now I have to be very, very careful not to spread the pink eye because school and all the things.

But on the way to the pharmacy, I just was in silence and I pulled up to a stoplight, and I'm looking at, like, the leaves are starting to change right now, and it's just incredibly beautiful.

And I was like, you know what?

I could go for a little bit of autumn breeze.

And I cracked my window.

And immediately the sound of the peepers just filled my ears.

And it like the, like.

Like the little tree frogs, you know, they're peepers.

And it just.

It washed over me.

And I don't know why.

It struck me like, I have a little pond in my backyard.

I hear peepers all the dang time.

There was just something about this moment of sitting in my car.

My brain was relatively quiet and this beautiful breeze and the trees are starting to change.

And then just the sound of the peepers, like that moment, that little snapshot in time, just felt like a gift.

And I know for a fact if I had been listening to something, I never would have rolled my windows down because that would have been loud.

It would have made it hard to hear.

I wouldn't even have thought about that because I would have been distracted by what I was listening to.

And it was just this moment of like, wow.

This tiny little obedience that I am performing right now, this tiny little obedience that I am.

I am working to incorporate in my day, just gave me this, like, beautiful gift.

And now I want to be clear, this is.

I Am by no means like, no, I don't listen to anything and wow, my brain is so clear.

Like no, this is very much a like teeny tiny action step.

I am very much a teeny tiny action step kind of a person.

And all of my content is based around, for the most part is based around what is the smallest way we can make this actionable and sustainable.

Not even thinking about building onto it.

What is the teeniest, tiniest thing we can do.

And this one has been so incredibly rewarding which I was absolutely not expecting whatsoever I did not expect.

I very much was like, okay, this is just going to be like me giving this gift of my obedience to God and like doing this because God is asking me to.

And yeah, it has been really rewarding.

And two, just kind of how I feel like my, my brain, the setup in my brain, the noise in my brain and maybe I don't know that anxiety level is the right word.

Maybe just like the frantic pace in my brain.

That is why I like to constantly listen to something.

It's like listening to other people's voices is.

Talk about things that are not super consequential.

Helps me just pause my own thoughts.

For example, I listen to the office going to bed every night and I cannot, I've been doing this for years.

I cannot even tell you how many times I have gone through the office because a lot of times at night my brain just spins.

And so hearing other voices in a non exciting way helps me kind of turn my brain off.

And so during the day I had been kind of applying that same concept where like I just constantly feel, feel overwhelmed.

There's constantly things to do.

My husband has two different cancers that he's monitoring right now.

He, he's not in active treatment right now.

Both of them are in the monitoring phase.

I know they're not related.

It's kind of a funny story.

His family just like gets cancer.

So he's had two cancers.

Now he's about to turn 35 that are completely unrelated.

And so there's all of this that goes with that.

There's scans, there's medication, there's all of this three kids on two different custody schedules and managing those co parenting relationships and, and you know, the, the aftermath of divor that there's constantly stuff with my work, with his work with our kids, with our relationship with the world at large turning on the news is so incredibly stressful and just I feel like I'm constantly being bombarded with all the injustice in the world and the anxieties of this changing world that we live in and just wrestling with the tension of what God intended and intends for this world to be in humanity to be versus what it is and how we can make a difference.

And it all gets really heavy and loud.

And turning something on, listening to something was a way to kind of pause that.

But then as soon as that noise was done, the rest of the world, the rest of the noise started up again.

So it was a very temporary pause and didn't actually result in relief.

And so I was really skeptical and really nervous going into this of, okay, I'm just gonna have to confront the chaos that is my brain processing the world.

I got tested for autism last year, and basically what came back was like, yep, you have a lot of symptoms of autism, but you have so much trauma, it's hard for us to tell.

So we're not actually going to give you the diagnosis because your brain takes in information way faster than it can process information.

So there you go.

There is that information that you have now.

And it gave me no actual answers and was incredibly frustrating.

But I take in copious amounts of information all the time.

That's just how my brain works.

And so I was so, so, so nervous going into this.

Of, okay, I'm just gonna have to trust God that I'm not gonna feel insanely overwhelmed by not getting a break.

And when I tell you the level of general noise, the level of general, like almost franticness, chaos, overwhelm, has actually decreased.

It's almost like having these moments, having these minutes of intentional silence and that act of laying it down to God, of surrendering it, of.

Of being obedient, has allowed my brain to kind of like defrag a little bit, to kind of process a little bit better.

Which looking back at it now, it's like, oh, well, duh.

Like your brain needs a break so that it can process everything.

But just seeing how that has played out this week has been.

Been really cool.

So I would love to challenge you to try some intentional silence this week.

Even starting with just five minutes or one task that you're going to do, or one instance where you would turn to something that is comforting for you, that is kind of noise canceling for you.

Kind of like if you put on noise canceling headphones in that restaurant, right, like, yeah, the room is going to feel quieter all of a sudden, but you, you're.

You're going to be able to hear your friend even less than if you had the noise canceling headphones off.

So what are those kind of noise canceling headphones that you kind of put on your brain.

And what is just one short task, one short instance that you could do in silence or without background noise or without some sort of like visual stimulus, whatever that kind of crutch or thing that you keep returning to is, is this week even just for one day, what is one thing that you can do in silence on a semi regular basis?

And then try that.

And I would love to hear what you come up with and how it impacts you and your experiences with it.

My email is rachelachelgrit.com I read and respond to every single email that I get.

Unless you're trying to sell me something, please don't try to sell me something.

But no one's actually tried to do that in this particular email inbox yet, which I greatly appreciate.

But yeah.

So I would love to hear if you give this a try or if you have thoughts about this.

Yeah, my email inbox is always open.

And thank you for joining me for this voice Note episode of the Jesus and ADHD podcast.

I will see you in the next one.

Oh, oh, before I forget, I also created a free resource to help you find, identify and make a teeny tiny plan to eliminate sources of noise in your life.

So you can go to rachelgrit.com noise journal and that is a free journal that helps with that.

There is a little bundle of upgrades if you need more support.

There's like a video walkthrough, there is an audio walkthrough.

There's a couple different resources to make the actual implementation easier.

If you want that little upgrade as well that is available to you.

But again, that's rachelgrit.com noisejournal I would love to hear from you or if you have questions you want me to answer or topics you want me to cover.

Rachelachelgrit.com okay, now my official outro.

Thank you so much for spending this time with me.

I will see you in the next one.

Bye.