Transcript
Can white noise help you fall asleep or stay asleep? Or is it just another scam to sell you expensive apps and devices? This study tested it on New Yorkers who are complaining of insomnia due to loud environmental noise, which living in New York I can totally sympathize with. Welcome back to 30 studies to change your life. Sleep week. Last time we covered the many mechanisms by which sound can affect sleep. But when it comes to pure noise, the main way it does it is there's something called auditory masking. Your brain is most likely to get startled awake by a sudden change in the existing sound. less of a change from baseline. It masks it. It's easier for you to hear this than it is to hear this.
So, the study was three weeks where participants used sleep trackers, kept sleep diaries, and measure the ambient sound levels. The first week established the baseline, then the second week they put a noise machine six feet from people's beds. And for the third, they went back to no noise to see if the effect of the noise the previous week persisted at all. The result was improvements in both objective and subjective measures, with the noise helping people fall asleep faster and wake up a bit less at night. Interestingly, the time they spent awake at night, stayed lower even the week after they stopped using the noise machines, indicating that that previous week may have trained the brain to be a bit less sensitive to noise overall. This was a small study, but there are others with similar findings. Comment below if you want to hear next about the difference between white, pink, and brown noise, the effect of music, or the effect of audiobooks, and how I use them.
Additional notes
Caption: Replying to @Ryan unlike many fields of science, this is one where testing on yourself is absolutely thr best way to figure out what works for you! In a later vid ill cover some strategies for how to best run said tests in a more scientific fashion 🤓 #science #sleepscience #whitenoise #brownnoise #sciencetok