According to my Spotify Wrapped last year, I listened to music for 104,762 minutes in 2025. That equates to about 4.8 hours of music every day. Second only to my phone, my headphones are the device I use most often in daily life. I wear them on the train, in shops, on walks, at the gym, while getting ready at home, while I cook, even to play rain sounds as I try to fall asleep.

Just like pretty much everyone else, my New Year’s resolutions for 2026 were to reduce my screen time, to be more present and intentional about the way I consume media, and to physically and metaphorically touch grass – it’s the year of analogue, after all. Six months in, I’d managed to lower my screen time by an hour or two per day, delete TikTok from my phone, and become more conscious of my consumption – except when it came to music. I continued to shuffle mindlessly through my liked songs – whether to muffle the screeching train tracks of the Victoria Line, fill the silence, or drown out my own thoughts. I was “doom-listening”, if you will.

So, in a renewed effort to fulfil my resolution, I decided to lean into the discomfort and give up my headphones for an entire month. I allowed myself to listen to music through a speaker, but only when I wasn’t alone.

The first week was fairly brutal. Going to the gym without headphones was close to unbearable. My earliest and most obvious observation was that I was one of, if not the only, person who wasn’t glued to a phone or wearing headphones during my commute. I felt a little directionless and exposed, sitting there with nothing to occupy me, while everyone else seemed to be absorbed in their devices, books or conversations.

I was using music as background noise to help me distract from negative emotions, and to avoid addressing boredom and the monotony I was feeling in my everyday life.

After a week or two, however, I began to leave the house having forgotten about my headphones altogether. The discomfort of being without them was beginning to fade, and I felt more present while moving through the world. I started noticing the everyday sounds I had previously filtered out: the laughter of conversations spilling onto the street, the hum of passing cars. I became more approachable too: several people asked me for directions or whether we were at the right bus stop, and I found myself having more fleeting conversations with strangers. 

After some time, walking around the city without headphones felt surprisingly grounding. According to Dr Francesco Aletta, associate professor in Building Physics and Soundscape at UCL, that sense of connection begins with “situational awareness. Environmental awareness is pretty much what kept us alive as a species on the planet.”

At home, though, being alone in silence was much more difficult at first. Everyday rituals like getting ready, cooking and falling asleep felt much less fun, magical and interesting. I had to sit with thoughts and old feelings that would resurface, without my usual escape route.

I quickly began to realise that most of the time I wasn’t listening to music intentionally. I was using it as background noise to distract myself from negative emotions and avoid confronting boredom or the monotony of everyday life.

I thought that by removing my headphones, I would feel less anxious in public, or feel closer to strangers around me, making my commute feel less isolating.

As the month came to an end, silence started to feel less daunting. I took up journaling and learned to enjoy my morning routine with only the sounds outside my window, or the kettle as my flatmate brews her coffee.  According to Dr. Michael Bull, emeritus professor of Sound Studies at the University of Sussex, “Looking at silence as a positive allows for you to tune into yourself and the world in a way that isn’t dependent on something else.” More than anything, I started to experience silence not as an absence of something, but as something worth enjoying in its own right.

I really believed this month without headphones would ‘cure’ me. I thought that by removing my headphones, I would feel less anxious in public and closer to strangers around me, making my commute feel less isolating. But as Dr Aletta put it, “[Wearing or not wearing your headphones] doesn’t get rid of the material infrastructure of the city. Its crowdedness, its noise, its traffic, its partial indifference, remains the same.” Living without headphones meant accepting that I couldn’t control any of these things, nor could I force a sense of belonging. The city didn’t become quieter or more comfortable, but I did become more aware of myself within it. 

After a month, I put my headphones back on. Having gone without them, though, I no longer feel like I need them for everything. I don’t wear them to commute (most of the time), but I do still like wearing them to drown out the extractor fan, for example. More importantly, I learned that I could let the city be noisy, let a journey be boring and let silence exist without immediately trying to fill it.