I stopped listening to podcasts for a month and this is what happened.

I'm so brave.

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50% of adults now listen to podcasts. Which is incredible. As what are the other half doing when walking, driving, bathing, cooking, cleaning etc. etc.? I’m listening to a podcast anytime I’m not watching TV, asleep or with others. And it’s only a matter of time before the ‘not with others’ rule starts to slip.

And then I took a whole month off. As I really wanted to see how my brain functioned without this constant noise and how I coped and if I changed and some other stuff which is also not true. What actually happened was that one headphone ear broke and I got sick of this mono experience.

This is how all my headphones die. The left ear thing goes. No idea why. I’m starting to worry my left ear is a murderer. And these are wired headphones. I can’t get AirPods, as several years ago I read about someone losing them and then finding one in the street, but when they picked it up, it turned out to be a clove of garlic and for some reason that really put me off.

I’d only had these headphones for a year. They were Apple ones and so expensive and I couldn’t bring myself to buy new ones. So I thought - I’ll just live without them. And then I thought - I wonder if I could live without podcasts. Let’s see. As this is the kind of crazy challenge I set myself, while other people do easier stuff like Tough Mudder, Ultra Marathons or giving up prescription painkillers.

I should have done it for charity. Is it too late to ask for sponsorship?

It had been a long time since I’ve gone without the voices in my ears. I’ve been listening to podcasts for two decades. The Ricky Gervais Show was my first. But I’ve also been part of a podcast, continuously since 2005, when the radio show I worked on was the first to be packaged up into daily on-demand content. This was only one year after the word ‘podcast’ was coined by a Guardian journalist.

They’ve only existed since 2003, meaning there are people walking around with full-time jobs who have never known the terrible dark time when the only voices you could listen to were on the radio or your own thoughts.

So I was worried about going cold turkey. My mouse often hovered over cheap headphones on Amazon like a recently clean heroin addict would be eyeing up the Bacofoil. (I imagine.)

As how will I drown out my own inner voice, which never shuts up? How will I suffocate it with more interesting ones that aren’t reminding me of something embarrassing I did thirty years ago or berating me for never emptying the crumb tray of the toaster? How am I supposed to walk the dog with just my own thoughts burning in my mind?

And what if it dulls me? Surely all the information I’m absorbing from my podcasts makes me dazzling in conversation. And not just saying a lot, “Oh, I heard something about that once. I can’t remember what though, sorry.”

But is it changing us in a bad way? It’s only in the last ten years that the popularity of podcasts has surged and for many, our brains never get a chance to breathe. Do brains need to breathe?

So I bravely did the four weeks and this is what happened.

It was quite nice at first when I took the dog for a walk. I felt really present in nature. I heard the birds and noticed the gentle breeze. But when I say ‘at first’, I mean for the first ten minutes. Because, I’m sorry, no bird song, not even the nightingale’s, can compete with Danny Dyer being interviewed by Louis Theroux.

It was so boring. I got sick of myself. I craved listening to funny and clever people.

But I’ve forced myself to consider the upsides and here they are:

Maybe it was nice that my hearing got a break. Although I’m not sure hearing works like that, with a little break being a reset. That hearing ship has long since sailed, leaving me with nothing but thoughts of whether ear trumpets are still an option.

While it was boring walking the dog, I didn’t have to deal with that awkward situation when your dog greets another and the owner says something to you and you’re not sure whether to take your headphones off. Because if you do, it might look like you’re committing to more conversation than they were expecting. And if you don’t, you can’t really hear them.

When the month was up, I had a surplus of episodes to catch up on. That was nice. As the downside of a lot of podcast listening is that you’re always running out of good stuff.

I got to do more daydreaming and daydreaming is good for you.

And I had more ideas in my free brain time. I solved a few problems, including one big one. I’ve decided that when one ear of my next headphones dies, I’ll get a headphone splitter and plug in two half-working sets. To make one full working set. This will make me look a bit like Medusa but with headphone wires instead of snakes. And I’m not sure that’s a great look. But it will mean I’ll never have to endure a podcast-free walk ever again.

Tell me…

- Any podcast recommendations, please! My surplus will run out soon.