Sleep Music Has Become A Popular Relaxation Tool Here's Why

Your mind can’t help but follow along, and lyrics can be mentally stimulating. You want to give those cognitive centers of your brain a rest, not light them up. When we find ways to relieve stress and improve mood, sleep almost always improves. Music, with its ability to activate and influence the emotional and memory centers of our brain, can help.

Classical music is often used in the studies I’ve cited here and is a popular choice for bedtime listening. Another indirect benefit of listening to music may have for sleep? Physical pain and discomfort are common obstacles to sleeping well.

Whilst supporting the anecdotal idea that a key reason to select music for sleep is to aid relaxation, the survey identified for the first time a larger collection of motivators for using music when sleep is disturbed. The use of music as a distractor was a prominent theme, with distraction against thoughts a frequent comment that would benefit from further research. Negative thoughts are one of the main contributors to sleep loss in people with insomnia and distraction of these thoughts was one of the main reasons reported for the use of music throughout the survey. It also reduces cortisol, a hormone that stimulates alertness and also stress, according to numerous studies.

Chill-out music can be a mix of genres, including blues, jazz, and pop. The main idea behind these tunes is to generate an ambient environment in which you don’t overthink or dwell on the memories of the day. The response to sound highly varies with people, in both the waking and sleeping lives. Like sight and smell, the sound is connected to memory and can stimulate both positive and negative emotions. People exposed to pink noise during sleep spend more time in deep, slow-wave sleep, according to a study published in The Journal of Theoretical Biology. For many, the rhythmic crashing of water onto sand and rock can be quite calming.

Now they were using our meditations,” Smith concluded, and so the company began commissioning what it calls “stories” — breathy, soothing, grown-up bedtime tales with a feather bed of tinkling music beneath the murmured words. Another criteria for music to help you sleep is for there to be a lack of repetition. When you listen to music, your brain tries to find a repetitive melody, trying to predict a tempo and pattern.

Negative If these thoughts were negative, worrisome, or stressful in nature they were placed in this level 3 theme. Thoughts Similarly, this theme was utilized when the person used the term ‘thoughts’ or its synonyms as the experience they wish to block. Silence This theme points to the use of music to fill a void Meditation of external sound. All participants provided specific online consent for their participation and had the right to withdraw at any time with no penalty.

However, the use of a white noise machine could help keep them relaxed and mask any noisy distractions that may wake them, potentially helping them sleep longer. A 2011 study found that listening to music reduced levels of the stress hormone cortisol in patients undergoing surgery. Life’s worries can have a tendency to creep up at the most inopportune times, including bedtime. Tense thoughts can keep you up all hours of the night, and one of the ways music can help you sleep is by alleviating stress and allowing you to drift off to sleep.

I encourage my patients to flip on some relaxing music for the last 30 or 45 minutes of their Power Down Hour. This became a particular favorite, so much so that it became, and remains, known in our family as “the nap music,” which we spun both at night and during afternoon nap sessions. Nearly two decades later, the loops still have a lulling, meditative quality. Not much happens as far as melody or dynamics — the changes in tone and mood are slow and sometimes imperceptible. But put one on in a dark room and an hour passes in an instant.

Every study we found claimed that “calming”, “classical”, “relaxing”, or “soothing” music was the best music to listen to at bedtime. If Mozart was good for kids, I figured by extension, Bach — the grand architect of classical music, whose compositions always struck me as masterworks of both the mathematics and artistry of music — might be even better. My Sonos is programmed with 10 hours of various water sounds — soft, rolling waves; thunderous rainstorms; steady sprinkles against a windowpane — that can pour out of my bedroom speakers at the touch of a button.

High-tempo music may pump you up and get you ready for the day, while soothing, meditative music may mellow you out and help you fall asleep. Music has a powerful and profound effect on the body and mind, influencing our breathing and heart rate and even triggering the release of hormones and boosting the brain’s cognitive and emotional areas. If you want to listen to music as you fall asleep, that’s fine. But don’t rely on headphones or earbuds, which can make sleep uncomfortable and damage your ear canal. Everyone is different, but I recommend to my patients they opt for music without words, at bedtime.