White noise as sleep aid may do more harm than good, say scientists
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
But, especially in the city, the alternative is usually just patches of semi-silence interrupted by loud or sharp things. Dogs barking, a police siren, the neighbor coming home at 3am, your partner flushing the toilet, inexplicable noises that start and then stop before you realize why you're up.
I listen to white noise like a fan because it smooths over those noises. I'd pick dead silence if I could.
Earplugs succeed at exactly one task: attenuating dangerous sound levels down to comfortable ones. The don't reduce the amount of information. A 30dB conversation is exactly as distracting as a 60dB conversation. I also have custom fitted IEMs that provide similar attenuation. These are equally useless when disconnected. You still need masking sound. You just need less of it.
In a quiet environment, earplugs amplify the sounds of my own body. I hear my heart beating. I hear fluid sloshing around. I hear very prominent vibrations from anywhere my head is shifting relative to the pillow. I'd have to work pretty hard to design a more unsettling sleep-deprivation apparatus than earplugs.
None of this is remotely as useful as an actually quiet room with a box fan running.
I often sleep with Ohropax foam earplugs. They eliminate the high frequencies like sirens. They reduce the mid-range and low frequencies, too. Conversation becomes muffled quiet mumbling. Noises can transmit through the frame of the frame of the building, my bed frame, my mattress, my pillow, and my head. Luckily, such noises are rare in my building. I'm not distracted by my body's internal sounds.
I tried many many kinds of earplugs. The Ohropax ones work the best for me. I can wear them for 2-3 sleep cycles (3-4.5 hours) before my ears hurt, but only if I insert them far enough into my ears. For smaller ears, Mack's Dreamgirl earplugs are good.
https://www.amazon.com/Ohropax-Soft-Foam-Ear-Plugs/dp/B000V3...
https://www.amazon.com/Macks-Dreamgirl-Soft-Foam-Earplugs/dp...
You are very lucky.
They are molded to my exact ears. I have tried several other ear plugs, and none of them come close to the level of isolation, including normal custom IEM's. Sometimes things are a little too loud (e.g. neighbors that won't quit on 4th of july at 2am), so adding white noise helps smooth things over.
I will say that I can very clearly hear my breathing with these in, as well as my heart beat sometimes. It's sometimes that bothered me for a couple of nights, but now it's quite comforting.
Ears don't like having shit stuffed into them for prolonged periods of time. I've noticed it with headphones, earbuds, earplugs, etc.
I solved the problem with pliable silicone "putty" earplugs. They provide the closest to dead silence I've found.
The earplugs attenuate sound by 50% is my guess, making inaudible all but the loudest ambulance sirens and shoes dropped to the floor in the unit above.
Ear plugs have never been enough for me. Also - if it gets too quiet then my tinnitus starts going. Thus, like OP, I use a fan. Bothers my partner but she's gotten used to it. She can't stand the part where I like having it pointed at me too (I'm not very good at regulating body temperature at night without one).
I had issues personally just with headphones and work from home subsitution with white noise (unfortunately others of my household are hard of hearing and loud) worked well for me.
Nope. Here's what dingle3 is complaining about. After 8 paragraphs on white noise and its affects on sleep, the last scientist they quotes this in paragraph 8:
> Prof Christian Cajochen, who heads the Centre for Chronobiology at the University of Basel in Switzerland, said: “I think the better [forms of] continuous white noise mask highly intermittent background noise, which is why it is recommended for nightshift workers who often need to sleep during the day in a ‘noisy’ environment. There I can see a benefit, but not when sleeping in a relatively quiet environment. Any acoustic stimulus being continuous or not has the potential to interrupt the sleep process.”
they have one more paragraph, a single sentence long, where that scientist says that he'd rather recommend mindfulness apps that are based on good evidence from research, and names on particular app as an example.
> He added: “I would rather recommend mindfulness apps like Sleepio, since they are based on good evidence coming from research in sleep medicine, particularly cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia.”
That's the entire mention of mindfulness apps in the article.
native advertising is real, and subtlety is key sometimes. if this was not sponsored by the app mentioned in the last paragraph, i'd be very surprised.
Nowhere in it does it substantiate the claim in the title. The best you get is this speculation from a "scientist" presenting no evidence:
You probably want to have a period where the auditory system can wind down, regenerate and prepare for the next wake period.
Something like 30% of people suffer from tinnitus. Falling asleep with a loud ringing is hard, and for those suffering it's not like we get an auditory break anyway.
I wonder, can others not hear their pulse through their pillow when in a dead quiet room? It's very annoying and I have to fall asleep on my back if a room is that quiet.
That’s called pulsatile tinnitus. I used to hear silence, then after a jaw injury I started hearing my pulse and eventually ringing.
But no normally you wouldn’t.
https://jsdentallab.com/collections/guards
makes pricey but very effective and comfortable mouthpieces for wearing at night while sleeping and/or during the day. They look exactly like the ones some NFL players use. I love mine. If I'd used one before discovering them three years ago at age 69, I wouldn't now be getting a mouthful of astronomically expensive ($6k apiece for extraction/bone graft/Ti screw placement/tooth) dental implants.
My qualification: retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist
I clench, didn’t know about it for years and so didn’t have a mouth guard. Have a bunch of cracks in my molars now. My dentist always used to say these sort of cracks were the biggest problem in adult dentistry.
The solution is to get a mouth guard. Bottom guard type seems preferable. This will prevent future cracks, protect your gums, and protect the jaw joint. Unfortunately it doesn’t solve the problem, but no one seems to have figured that out yet.
You can also use a Sleepguard device to measure clenching activity. A bit clunky, but it has been very useful for me in figuring out triggers for worse clenching and confirming I do it.
My clenching started after that same jaw injury, I think. Or wisdom teeth extraction.
Someone else recommended off the shelf guards. I would suggest a custom splint from a dentist. If the splint is misaligned you can clench unevenly and cause jaw structure changes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/well/live/dentists-tooth-...
If you or anyone reading this any possibility of cardiac issues (high blood pressure, clogged arteries), it would be worth mentioning at your next checkup.
Mine was pretty clearly linked to an injury that eventually caused other tinnitus so I assumed the causes were similar. Note that per the link below pulsatile tinnitus can be quite benign, but is does have some causes worth excluding.
And why is that, since the causes are so varied and often specific?
May I gently suggest that it sounds like you're papering over the real problem?
Are there any solutions that can account for noise on a varied schedule?
I was initially concerned as we're building a sleep wearable that uses sound to alter your sleep state. I thought...crap, is there evidence what we are doing is harmful? We're consulting with neurologists, so I would have been surprised, as they have brought up some potential issues we need to test for with what we are doing.
Here's very early evidence of the positive effect our technology is having. This is early evidence of auditory stimulation having positive effect on sleep. https://imgur.com/z4vqS3w This is from my Oura tracker (so we have a 3rd party monitoring) and over 8 nights. Yes, there is potential placebo effect here, and the first 4 nights I slept better than I usually do. We are preparing for a more robust study.
If you're keen to find out more about what we're building, check out https://soundmind.co and sign-up to get on the waitlist.
I'll be writing a blog post of our early findings shortly.
The only downside is that it’s hard to find noise cancelling headphones that are comfortable to wear while sleeping, if you sleep on your side. Big market opportunity here!
One of the main annoying noises I have to deal with is the constant hum/rumble from a ventilation fan on the roof of my building. Seems like exactly the sort of problem that a noise-cancelling speaker could solve.
Sort of into the noise cancelling thing, and a side sleeper, so I agree with you there’s not a great set of options.
I own last 3 generations of Sony full size noise cancelling head phones, Sony’s latest wireless noise cancelling, Apple’s AirPods Pro, two prior generations of Bose QuietComfort, and last two generations each of the in-ear wired noise cancelling earbuds from Bose and Sony. I go try out new models from other manufacturers, and am not finding anything compelling outside of the two well known brands and the AirPods Pro.
The only ones among all these I’ve found useful for sleeping in a bed are the Bose Sleepbuds (v1, I don’t have v2). For the sleepbuds, the reviews go into sleepability:
https://newatlas.com/wearables/bose-sleepbuds-ii/
That said, the most effective I’ve found for sleeping on a plane are the semi-wireless behind neck / in ear headphones from Sony (prior WI1000X/N seem better than newer WI1000XM2 when playing music or white noise) using their foam gel ear inserts. (In fact, for using any of the earbud models on planes, if they don’t have it already, I do replace rubber ear inserts with memory foam type ear inserts.)
But none of the active models work for me for bed because I’m a side sleeper and even then, all night battery without wires is another deal breaker.
Only the Bose Sleepbuds were all-night comfortable, but careful selection from among available sounds turned out to shut out the world to a degree that I stopped using them on travel out of concern I might not hear something that should wake me. In other words, the sound perception dampening was too good.
That’s not true. While it won’t completely cancel sharp, sudden, very loud sounds, it will significant reduce their intensity.
It’s easy to miss someone talking to you, or knocking on your door, for example, when wearing NC headphones.
The Sony headphone software has settings to adjust the intensity of blocking for different kinds of sounds (such as voices, or traffic sounds).
Switched to bose QC20 and... they're generally great ... except... don't sleep in them! They'll break. Often. I've switched to cheap earbuds from the dollar store tied to a white noise app. The $5 earbuds may break every 1-3 months, I just get more.
The 'sleep buds' look nice, but would be hard to justify another ~$300 at this point.
I did have older/cheaper Sony ANC headphones previously which broke at the hinges, but these seem unbreakable (touch wood).
The title of the article seems to be inaccurate in that it is discussing other sounds, _not_ “true” white noise, as doing potential harm. Or at least that was the sense I got from the few paragraphs I read before the site locked me out of the article...
BTW the biggest win in getting a good sleep for me has been making sure my bedroom is properly ventilated, so that I have low levels of CO2. Since I started doing that, my sleeping issues have been reduced to practically nothing - i.e. I almost never wake up feeling drowsy, which was something that happened to me a couple days a month before I started monitoring CO2.
It’s still all a preliminary field however.
Open a door and open a window. Pretty much nothing else does it, though an air exchanger in a home ventilation system can help.
This of course can get complicated by light (the door), sound (door and window), pollution (window) and heat/cold (window). So your local setup may vary.
In my own case the big challenge is winter. But usually just a small crack is enough to lower co2 a fair bit during the cold season.
Yep - I open a window in another room of my apartment, and the brownian motion air exchange (as both rooms have no doors) is enough to keep CO2 at around 600 ppm through the night. Without it, it'd probably shoot to over 2000 ppm over the night.
As someone with seasonal allergies, I've often been surprised at how serenely I'd sleep with a window open.
Is it normal to not do any kind of statistics? Can you even draw any conclusions by just counting the number or studies as if they were all created equal?