Sweet Dreams: Sounds to Help You Sleep

Sound Correlation to Sleep

Subtle and harsh sounds play a significant role in sleep quality. Environmental noises, such as road traffic can cause a fragmented night’s sleep while the sound of leaves brushing against each other can add a calming effect to your sleep. Pediatric sleep consultant Jennifer Schindele explains how sound can affect the sleep cycle:

“Finding a good sound machine that offers white noise or gentle rain as sound options can help improve anyone’s sleep. I often learn that the parents of the children I work with begin to use white noise in their bedrooms to help improve the quality of their sleep.”

Sound can potentially influence your sleep in both positive and negative ways. It is not possible that one cannot recall a time when a certain sound either woke you up or made it hard to catch some Z’s.

5 Sounds That Can Help You Fall Asleep

Have you ever been forced to select a favorite color when choosing a purse or dress? You can now select from a variety of noise colors too:

1. White Noise, Pink Noise, Brown/Red Noise, and Green Noise

White Noise

White noise has been a part of our lives even before the colors of noise were discovered. White noise is the constant background noise like the hissing sounds of a TV, a fan, or an air conditioning unit. This noise medium is perfect for light sleepers as they can stay asleep for a longer period without worrying about what is happening in the room.

Pink Noise

Like white noise, it’s a steady softer background noise with deeper sounds and lower sound waves. It has a lower pitch which makes it more gentle and has a much more calming effect. Pink noise includes flat sounds like soft rain pattering on the roof or waves on a beach.

Pink noise is commonly used in sleep therapy as research conducted in 2012, shows the brain waves of 40 sleeping individuals that listened to pink noise had less complex brain waves and lesser response to sleep disruptions.

Brown Noise

This noise is deeper than white and pink noise and is also sometimes known as red noise. It supports uninterrupted deep sleep that can enhance your productivity by improving your thinking skills. Brown noise has a rich sound like that of a roaring waterfall, strong winds, or a rumble of a subway train underground.

Green Noise

This is a new addition to colors of noise and is certainly gaining popularity around social media. It could act as a calming background noise buffer that nullifies the impact of any extreme bass. Green noise for sleep is like being in the arms of nature, feeling soft breezes through a forest or the chirping of birds in a meadow.

Research is being conducted to provide evidence that green noise benefits can soothe symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and anxiety.

2. Meditation Sounds

Sleep deprivation can lead to many wrongs in life, errors at work, mental pressure, health issues, and the list could go on. To fix the impairments, increased and quality sleep is needed for which being in the present moment is key. To attain the presence of mind, meditation is the way to go.

Meditation helps clear the thoughts that tend to hit stronger when you go to bed with zero distractions. It acts like a sleep aid that concurrently rests the mind and the body. Meditation before you sleep is not simply breathing exercises but an art that needs to be learned. This can be done at home using meditation apps to begin your practice. 

3. ASMR

ASMR simply stands for “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response”. It is described as a tingly sensation that one might feel when they watch stimulating videos or trigger audio. ASMR is more like an experience where sensations are felt throughout the body, across the skull, down the spine through the arms and feet. It enriches a person’s body with a feeling of relaxation, calmness, and sleepiness.

For different people, different triggers can cause this experience. One might be more responsive to whispering audio while the other one might experience ASMR while tapping, massaging, illusional haircut video, or applying makeup to the face. In some cases, one might respond negatively to an ASMR as it is not for all and can lead to extreme aversion for some.

ASMR is easily accessible on YouTube, Instagram, or other platforms.

4. Sleep Stories

Since childhood, our parents or grandparents would read us bedtime stories and no doubt they did help us sleep. You could say Sleep Stories is just an adult version of it, where bedtime tales are constructed carefully according to your liking and narrated in a soothing voice within audio to transition it as your go-to sleep tool.

It allows listeners to refocus their minds and relax. Sleep Stories can quiet outside distractions and help you doze off.

5. Music

Who doesn’t like listening to music, it’s always about the right kind of music for the right kind of place. Calming, classical instrumental tunes are proven to help relax the mind and improve sleep quality by lowering cortisol levels. This helps to calm your nervous system and slow down your breathing patterns over time.

 You can give it a try for yourself, play one of these songs tonight when you go to bed, these are our personal favorites!

• “Gravity” by John Mayer – Slow song

• “Let It Be” by Beatless – Simple Rhythm

Final Words

Being sleep-deprived can be exhausting. We hope that our blog might have helped you understand the dynamics behind sound’s association with sleep. After all a good night’s sleep is a matter of relaxing your mind and body which affects your well-being. If you are looking for a solution to your sleep problems, try one of our recommendations and give us your feedback.

Key takeaways

• White noise is the most popular type of color noise. It has been around for a long time even before ‘colors of noise’ was a thing.

• Pink noise is the one to filter out waste of the surroundings to help you sleep for a longer duration.

• Green noise is the new noise that is coming under the limelight and attracting people towards it.

• Meditation before sleep can help shut down stronger thoughts that hinder your sleep cycle.

• ASMR sounds not only help you relax and calm your mind but provide a whole experience to your body that may feel like a massage to many.

• Listening to calming classical music before bed can slow down heart rate and reduce the time taken to go to sleep.