MM_Aug2026 - E2 What Your Silence Could Cost You_Staying quiet has a price_even when nothing looks like it's missing_Audio
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[00:00:00] Dr. Julia Bowlin: The real cost of not speaking up isn't really about the specific conversations that don't happen. It's about what silence quietly starts to mean over time if it never gets corrected. When something goes unsaid enough times, the mind doesn't just file it away as unsaid. It starts to draw a conclusion from it
[00:00:30] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Hi there, I'm Dr. Julia Bowlin, and you're listening to Mindset Medicine. This is your weekly dose of personal awareness medicine. So take one deep breath and let this episode meet you where you are. We're still inside August month's theme, which is about voice and what it costs to keep it small. Last episode, we talked about frequency, the idea that there might be a version of us that got turned down early, maybe quietly, in a room [00:01:00] that needed it that way, and how that turned down frequency can end up running the show for years without ever being noticed as a settling instead of part of our personality.
[00:01:12] Dr. Julia Bowlin: This time, we're staying with that same frequency conversation, but we're gonna ask a different question. Not where it came from, what it might actually be costing us this whole time while it's been running low. And here's the thing about frequency that's been turned down for so long, the cost of that doesn't tend to arrive all at once.
[00:01:34] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's not one bill, one done and done. It's more like a subscription that's kinda small, automatic, easy to stop noticing entirely, precisely because no one single charge ever feels big enough to catch. So today isn't about the moment the frequency got lowered in our voice. It's about what might accumulate quietly every time we're [00:02:00] turning down our voice so that our frequency of our loudness, the silence, gets chosen instead of the true voice that's going on in our head and that needs to be expressed.
[00:02:13] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Here's one place this might show up first, a relationship that quietly cools off without having a clear moment to point to. I wanna give you an example. I had a friend from college whose calls when she'd call me on the phone, they had a shape to them. They'd always start friendly, normal catching up, normal conversation, and then almost every time, she'd steer the conversation towards a medical question, whether it was hers or a family member's.
[00:02:42] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And it came to feel less like something that just happened and more like a pattern that I could predict even before it arrived. And it wasn't a doctor she was calling. She was calling a friend, and that's not a small distinction. Giving medical advice outside of an actual clinical [00:03:00] relationship isn't just exhausting, it carries real professional and legal exposure that has nothing to do with friendship at all.
[00:03:07] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And here's the part that was harder for me to admit to myself I didn't actually mind helping her. That was never the problem. The problem was that the pattern itself started to suggest that something underneath was a quiet, uncomfortable question of whether our friendship was ever really about me or whether it was about what I happened to be doing for a living.
[00:03:32] Dr. Julia Bowlin: That's a different kind of hurt than being doubted. Being doubted stings, yes, but wondering if you're valued for your role instead of yourself is something else entirely. And then on top of that, the moment I did answer, I gave her my medical advice, she'd question it or deny it or tell me she didn't believe me.
[00:03:53] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And here's the thing, all three things were happening all at once, being called for credential [00:04:00] rather than our friendship, giving the help I did anyway because I cared, and then having what I said in that role waved off like a guess. Now, decades later, we had reignited that friendship, but I had to do something I hadn't done the first time around.
[00:04:17] Dr. Julia Bowlin: I had to create an actual boundary. That wasn't a clean, confident moment for me either. It came with real fear. I had fear of losing her, fear that naming my discomfort out loud would somehow prove I wasn't a good enough friend to just let it go But the alternative, staying quiet, was already costing something.
[00:04:40] Dr. Julia Bowlin: That negative feeling wasn't staying contained to the medical advice conversations. It was starting to color how I felt picking up the phone at all. Even on good days, when the phone rang and I saw it was her, I knew it was just a medical question, and I would be burnt out, right? So I didn't wanna pick up the [00:05:00] phone.
[00:05:00] Dr. Julia Bowlin: So it was leaching into our relationship. She now respects the boundary mostly, and what surprised me was the relief I had underneath it all. Not just the relief that the specific problem stopped, but the relief that I hadn't lost my friend by saying something true. She's someone who showed up for me during very deep, genuine, difficult stretches in my life recently, and that matters enormously for me.
[00:05:27] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Our friendship didn't break. It just finally got to be honest. And this might also show up somewhere in other places that might be more physical. We might feel a tightness that shows up before the conversation even happens, or a kind of tiredness or exhaustion that doesn't quite match the number of hours we slept the night before, because keeping something at a lower frequency, not speaking or holding our voice, takes energy, even when it doesn't look like effort from the outside.[00:06:00]
[00:06:00] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And that kind of pattern doesn't usually stay contained into one relationships, everybody. Once a frequency gets turned down in one place, it tends to get applied everywhere else that's similar, and it shows up, I'm telling you. It might be a coworker who only reaches out when they need something, or a family member who calls always follow a same predictable shape like mine, or a client relationship that quietly started to feel one-sided and just didn't feel comfortable.
[00:06:30] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And here's what can make it so hard to name. It rarely looks like exploitation from the outside. It often looks like we're being generous or the reliable person or the person anybody can call. Which means the actual discomfort underneath, the wondering whether this is about me or about what I can provide, often gets mistaken for ingratitude or oversensitivity instead of being recognized as something [00:07:00] worth paying attention to.
[00:07:02] Dr. Julia Bowlin: There's often a boundary sitting somewhere just out of reach in these situations, not spoken yet, but felt in the core. A version of I'd love to just be your friend on this call. That stays at a lower frequency instead of getting said at the real one, right? And the longer the boundary stays unspoken, the more it can quietly reshape how someone feels about an entire relationship, not just because of one bad conversation, but because of all the accumulated moments where the true frequency, the real honest conversations never got a chance to be heard.
[00:07:42] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Here's a different way to hold this. The real cost of not speaking up isn't really about the specific conversations that don't happen. It's about what silence quietly starts to mean over time if it never gets corrected. [00:08:00] When something goes unsaid enough times, the mind doesn't just file it away as unsaid.
[00:08:06] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It starts to draw a conclusion from it. Usually something like this must not be worth saying or saying it will cost me more than staying quiet does. And once the mind draws that conclusion, it doesn't stay confined to one relationship or one topic. It becomes a rule applied automatically long after the situation that created that rule is gone.
[00:08:32] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Here's what a boundary can actually prove. Once it finally gets said out loud, that rule was wrong. Saying the true thing, "I'd love to just be your friend on this," didn't cost the friendship. It protected it for me. The relief that shows up afterwards isn't just relief that an annoying pattern stopped.
[00:08:54] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's the relief that the old belief, this will cost me something I can't afford to [00:09:00] lose, turns out to not actually be true. And sometimes the opposite happens. The relationship gets to be more honest, not less intact. Sometimes we have to give up some things to be honest, right? So the invitation here isn't to say every unspoken thing in your head out loud all at once.
[00:09:21] Dr. Julia Bowlin: No, I'm not saying that. It's smaller than that. It's just noticing what belief has quietly formed over the years that might be staying quiet in a particular situation or relationship, and asking whether that belief has actually been tested or do we just make an assumption about that belief? So I'd like to pause here for a second, because you've heard me say this before, because what's happening here isn't random.
[00:09:51] Dr. Julia Bowlin: If there's a version of assigning meaning to silence, deciding without ever testing it What staying [00:10:00] quiet says or costs, that's not overthinking. It's one of the most normal thing a brain does, and here's why. The brain doesn't like unanswered questions. When something is unclear or unknown, the brain doesn't just leave it blank.
[00:10:15] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It fills in the blank automatically, almost instantly, usually without anyone even noticing it's happening. And once the blank gets filled in, it doesn't feel like a guess anymore. It feels like something that's just true. That's the part worth slowing down on right now. Not that the brain fills in blanks, but that it stops feeling like it's filling in a blank at all.
[00:10:40] Dr. Julia Bowlin: I'm gonna give you some examples here, okay? Here's the mechanism in plain terms. There are two different things that can happen here, and they're easy to mix it up. The first one is what I call pure guess. We fill in a blank when there's actually no information at all. Someone doesn't text back for two days, [00:11:00] we build a story around why with zero facts to go on.
[00:11:05] Dr. Julia Bowlin: That's an assumption. It's made of nothing but imagination, and we dress it up to look like knowledge in our heads The second mechanism is different. It's something that actually really happens. It's a real conversation, a real silence, or a real moment, and then a meaning gets attached to that real thing.
[00:11:27] Dr. Julia Bowlin: That's not the same as making something out of thin air. No, the event is real, but the meaning attached to it is still just one possible interpretation, not the only one available. Two different people can live through the same exact real moment and walk away having assigned to it completely different meanings.
[00:11:48] Dr. Julia Bowlin: So both of these, guessing or just attaching a meaning to something that's real, that's your perspective, can get treated by the brain [00:12:00] as if it's a formed, settled fact instead of a guess or an interpretation. And that's what meaning assignment is. It's not lying to ourselves. It's just the brain doing what it always does with uncertainty, trying to resolve it quickly and then forgetting it was ever unresolved in the first place.
[00:12:21] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It basically confabulates, which is what we're trying to tell AI to never do for us, right? We don't want our brain to confabulate, but our brain will fill in the gaps. All right, here's an example. I think of a colleague who mentioned a friend had stopped texting back as quickly as she used to, and within a day, this colleague created an entire story.
[00:12:42] Dr. Julia Bowlin: She built it because she felt she needed to do something. She felt maybe she said something wrong, that their relationship was cooling. Here's what's worth noticing about this one specifically. There wasn't really anything to interpret. There was just an absence of a [00:13:00] text. No text is not a real moment with content in it.
[00:13:04] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's a gap. I'll say that again. When this person did not text back, no content, it was a gap. So she attached a meaning, right? That wasn't really true, right? It was an invention. She filled in emptiness. So she thought, "Maybe they don't like me anymore. Maybe the relationship's cooling off." But weeks later, it turned out that the friend had been dealing with a family emergency and hadn't been reaching out to anybody.
[00:13:33] Dr. Julia Bowlin: The gap was real. The friend didn't call, text back. But the story she built to explain it away had been entirely invented, and we do this stuff all the time. So if there's a gap somewhere, a silence, an unanswered text, or a boundary that hasn't been tested or explained, it's worth asking which kind of thing is actually happening here.
[00:13:58] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Is this an empty [00:14:00] space that's getting filled in by a pure guess? Or is this a real moment that really happened where a meaning, we gave it a meaning, got attached to it And maybe we just gave that meaning one option, one perspective, and not all of the possibilities. Either way, the story that shows up first isn't automatically the true one.
[00:14:24] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's the first one the brain reached for based upon our past. So maybe this information this week is just a small thing. The next time a conclusion in your head shows up about what someone else's silence means or what speaking up might cost you, there's room to ask two simple questions. The first, is there actually something real here or just a gap I'm filling in?
[00:14:53] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And the second, if something really did happen, is the meaning that I've attached to it the only [00:15:00] one that fits or just the one that showed up first, and do I need to reevaluate? This isn't necessarily the truth. It's a meaning the mind assigned either to a gap or to something real, because unresolved things are uncomfortable to leave open.
[00:15:19] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And once it's visible as a guess or as an interpretation instead of a fact, it's already having less power to run the show unquestioned. So I ask you to pause and ask yourself, "Is this a guess, or am I just filling in information?" Because this is where personal awareness medicine comes in, not as a way to stop assigning meaning altogether, because that's not really possible.
[00:15:43] Dr. Julia Bowlin: The brain is always going to fill in the blanks, and it's always gonna attach meanings to things. The shift is in what happens after the meaning shows up. Normally, once a meaning gets assigned, "She doesn't really value me," or, "She just values what I can do for [00:16:00] her," or the inner conversation in our brain, it starts to settle.
[00:16:04] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Our brain starts to believe it, case closed. But there's a different question available, not, "What does this mean?" But, "Is this the only meaning available, or is it just the first one my brain reached for and filled the gap in?" Because it's an important distinction, though. That question is not the same as talking yourself out of a feeling.
[00:16:27] Dr. Julia Bowlin: The feeling that showed up, whether it's hurt, resentment, discomfort, that's real, and it doesn't need to be argued away or replaced with something more upbeat. You don't have to force yourself into positivity, okay? Because, you know, we can try to be positive, just think positive, but we also don't want to ignore true experiences of feelings.
[00:16:47] Dr. Julia Bowlin: They're there for a reason. That's not what I'm saying. This is something quieter. The feeling gets to stay exactly as it was, fully validated, while the explanation attached to it, the [00:17:00] specific story about what happened, gets a little more room to be questioned. The hurt can become completely legitimate, right?
[00:17:10] Dr. Julia Bowlin: At the same time that the story explaining the hurt might be incomplete or even wrong. How often have you had hurt feelings and find out that the reason it happened was completely different than what you thought? Your feelings were real, but what led to them might have been ina-inaccurate. Those two things are not into competition with each other.
[00:17:31] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Feeling something fully and holding its explanation loosely can happen at the same time. We can feel but not hold on to the explanation really tightly. So here's the place I want you to sit for a second if it's useful. Maybe it's a friend who hasn't called back. And there's already a story forming around what that means.
[00:17:52] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Maybe it's a coworker whose tone in an email or even out of her voice felt a little off, and by the [00:18:00] second time you thought about it, you had a whole narrative in your head about what she must be thinking. Or maybe it's something closer to home, a pattern in a relationship that's been quietly interpreted one way for years without ever actually being asked about it out loud.
[00:18:17] Dr. Julia Bowlin: None of it needs to be solved right now. The question is just this: Is the meaning I've attached to this the only one available, or just the first one that showed up? No pressure to answer it out loud, not even today. I just want you to sit with this a little bit. And before we move into today's unicity moment, let me explain what it is.
[00:18:39] Dr. Julia Bowlin: A few times in each episode, we pause for little things that are different. Might be a guided experience or a coaching moment just to let things settle in. So before I do this, I want you to think about a few things. What we're about to do is, is a guided experience. It's just an invitation to slow down and turn inward.
[00:18:59] Dr. Julia Bowlin: You're [00:19:00] always in control. You can open your eyes at any time. You can adjust your position. You can simply listen without participating. There's nothing you have to do. Just receive what's useful and leave the rest. And if you're driving or operating machinery, please do not close your eyes during this section.
[00:19:17] Dr. Julia Bowlin: You're welcome to listen and stay present with the road or whatever you're working on at this time. So wherever this finds you, there's an invitation, not a requirement, to get a little more still. Maybe the eyes are comfortable closing. Maybe they stay open, resting in a spot just with a gentle gaze, a soft gaze.
[00:19:37] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Either way works. And there's an invitation to let your attention to travel. Slowly, starting wherever it feels natural, just noticing maybe your feet, the weight of them, noticing whatever they're resting against, whatever it is, without needing to change. And then [00:20:00] just let your attention slowly drift upwards, very unhurried.
[00:20:05] Dr. Julia Bowlin: The legs, however they're positioned, just being aware of your legs. Maybe there's a tingle there, maybe a gentle ache. Now, let's pay attention to our hands wherever they're resting. No pattern to follow, no order is right. We're just noticing, moving up through the body from the hands to the shoulders, just like we would if we're moving from a room to room in our house.
[00:20:36] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Just slowly noticing our limbs, our legs, our arms. No rushing from one place to the next.
[00:20:49] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And perhaps there's a staircase that wants to appear. Narrow, maybe made of wood, worn wood, smooth from [00:21:00] years of touch and years of feet. Maybe it's stone. Whatever feels right There might be some sounds as you take a step down, a creak or a scrape, or maybe nothing at all. With each step, there might be a small change in the air, a little cooler, and there's this particular type of quiet that exists somewhere as we go deeper away from everything happening upstairs, just a quiet, comfortable, soft, delicious calm as we go down steps.
[00:21:42] Dr. Julia Bowlin: We take several steps down slowly and intently. We don't need to count them, just a sense that we're moving slowly down the steps, further away from the noise of the day, one unhurried step at a time[00:22:00]
[00:22:03] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And at the bottom of the steps, there's a small room, very plain and unfinished, a kind of a room that exists underneath the house that's safe, it's dry. And on one wall, there's a board, and on the board there's covered by small sticky notes. Some are yellow, some are blue, a few maybe a deep dusty red. And they're not organized in any particular way.
[00:22:35] Dr. Julia Bowlin: They're just slapped up there, pinned up there, close together. Some are overlapping others, and each one holds a sentence, a conclusion drawn about someone or a conclusion drawn about something, something at some point in the life we've made. We've stuck them up there. [00:23:00] Maybe it's about somebody who didn't text back or somebody who lost interest in our relationships
[00:23:10] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Maybe it's a belief that people only invite me when they need something or talk to me when they want something. Or maybe people got quiet around me because they were judging us. Or a family member only calls during crisis, never just to talk and be supportive. And here's why we're looking at this board.
[00:23:35] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Not to prove that any of the notes are wrong, not to rip them up or down, or to even replace them with something more comfortable. It's just to see them clearly for a second as just notes, as things that gotten written and pinned up at some point, usually quickly, usually without much evidence, because a blank space is [00:24:00] harder to leave alone than a guess is.
[00:24:04] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And I'd like for you to reach for one note, any one of them, just whatever your hand finds first, whatever color catches your attention, and take it down off the board and just hold it, noticing the handwriting on it, the actual shape of the letters Hurried? Or were they written with careful penning? And notice the color of the paper in your hand.
[00:24:36] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Read whatever it says There's a strange kind of relief available here just in holding it as a note in someone's handwriting on a small piece of paper instead of a fact that is carved into the wall itself. It was written, which means it's the kind of thing that could also be [00:25:00] unwritten or rewritten or simply set down for now without needing to answer or replace it.
[00:25:09] Dr. Julia Bowlin: There's no requirement to put it back on the board tonight or today. It can just stay in your hand. It's just being looked at, really looked at, maybe for the first time since it went up on the board And whatever shows up on that board, one note, several notes, or a whole cluttered wall of them, or nothing in particular, there's room to just let it be for now without needing to sort it into any kind of organization.
[00:25:39] Dr. Julia Bowlin: We don't have to keep it or discard it. Just let it be for now And there might be a small thought worth carrying forward from here. The next time a conclusion arrives quickly about someone's silence or someone's tone or someone's absence, [00:26:00] there might be a flicker of that board down in that quiet room underground.
[00:26:05] Dr. Julia Bowlin: A reminder that a note just went up. Not a fact, a note. Nothing has to be done with that reminder. It might just pass through the way footsteps pass through an empty hallway. There and then gone.
[00:26:25] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And let's just take a gentle breath in. And slowly, when you're ready I offer an invitation to head back towards the stairs. There's no rush, and we'll take one step up, and slowly then another, the air changing as the room below gets farther away. It's not gone, it's just further down. It's available to return to another time if it's useful.
[00:26:58] Dr. Julia Bowlin: With each step up, [00:27:00] an awareness of our breathing returns. A little deeper now, a little easier, and the body still exactly where it's been the whole time. The weight of our body, the surface underneath us, the room upstairs coming back into focus, and the sounds nearby, whatever's close, we just start to hear them again.
[00:27:27] Dr. Julia Bowlin: There's no rush. This is a choice, the same as everything here always was, and it can happen at the pace that feels right, coming more and more present in the room. Maybe stretching and moving your arms, opening your eyes gently and softening the gaze. Because whatever we noticed on that board down those steps, one note or several, or just quiet in the room downstairs, none [00:28:00] of it has to be resolved today.
[00:28:02] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Some things get to stay as just notes for the while, unfinished, untorn, just seen. And being seen even without being solved is sometimes just the whole point. And if there's one thing worth carrying out with today, it's this. The stories attached to someone else's silence or someone else's absence or someone else's intentions aren't automatically the true ones.
[00:28:32] Dr. Julia Bowlin: They're just the first notes that got written by us, by our brain, in moments that felt too uncertain to leave blank. And those notes can be taken down, read clearly, and set down again without needing a perfect replacement for any of them right away. Next time, in the next episode in the series Speaking Without Armor, we are going to look at what happens on the other side of [00:29:00] all of this, what it actually looks like to say the true thing without bracing for a fight.
[00:29:07] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And if any part of this episode met you somewhere real, I'd love to hear about it. You can always find me at juliabolinmd.com or on any of my socials linked in the show notes. There's also a couple books in the show notes that I recommend. Thank you so much for spending time with me. Until next time, may you be happy, be healthy, and be fulfilled.
[00:29:37] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Thank you for listening to Mindset Medicine with your host, Dr. Julia Bowlin. To learn more about Mindset Medicine, go to www.juliabowlinmd.com and connect with Dr. Julia to find out how our team can help you today. Join us again next week for more expert tips, tools, and strategies to become healthier, wealthier, and wiser in your personal [00:30:00] and professional life.
