Penn Medicine researchers find that earplugs work better in protecting sleep from traffic noise, challenging the widespread use of ambient sound machines and apps marketed as sleep aids:
Pink noise—a continuous sound spread across a wide range of frequencies often used to promote sleep—may reduce restorative REM sleep and interfere with sleep recovery. In contrast, earplugs were found to be significantly more effective in protecting sleep against traffic noise, according to a new study published in the journal Sleep from the Perelman School of Medicine.
The findings challenge the widespread use of ambient sound machines and apps marketed as sleep aids.
"REM sleep is important for memory consolidation, emotional regulation and brain development, so our findings suggest that playing pink noise and other types of broadband noise during sleep could be harmful—especially for children whose brains are still developing and who spend much more time in REM sleep than adults," says study lead author Mathias Basner, professor of sleep and chronobiology in psychiatry.
In a sleep laboratory during eight-hour sleep opportunities over seven consecutive nights, the participants' exposure to aircraft noise—compared to none—was associated with about 23 fewer minutes per night spent in N3, the deepest sleep stage. Earplugs prevented this drop in deep sleep to a large extent. Pink noise alone at 50 decibels (often compared to the sound of a "moderate rainfall") was associated with a nearly 19-minute decrease in REM sleep.
If pink noise was combined with aircraft noise, both deep sleep and REM sleep were significantly shorter compared to noise-free control nights, and time spent awake was now also 15 minutes longer, which had not been observed in aircraft noise-only or pink noise-only nights.
Participants also reported that their sleep felt lighter, they woke up more frequently, and their overall sleep quality was worse when exposed to aircraft noise or pink noise, compared to nights without noise—unless they used earplugs.
Journal Reference: Mathias Basner, Michael G Smith, Makayla Cordoza, et al., Efficacy of pink noise and earplugs for mitigating the effects of intermittent environmental noise exposure on sleep, Sleep, 2026;, zsag001, https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsag001
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Monday February 23, @04:37AM (4 children)
Sounds awful to me. Too much emphasis on the higher frequencies. Brown sounds way more pleasant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snlA7rFR0iQ [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by ls671 on Monday February 23, @04:53PM (3 children)
Silence is the best for myself. I know people who sleep with the TV on all the time. They say they can't sleep well without it and this is has always puzzled me.
I wouldn't want any sound to help me sleep or relax, this kind of puzzles me too...
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Monday February 23, @10:01PM
I think that's for the people that have never come to terms with their inner-monologue. To them silence seems to bring out the inner demons that they have never managed to tame. So what they do? They drown it out with external noise, be that music or TV or ping noise. I understand that's an issue with some people that fall under ADHD.
But yes, it puzzles me that people do not practice self-reflection, just drown out their thoughts with external stimuli. Reminds me of alcohol addicts that cannot go to sleep without downing that bottle of vodka or they get overstimulated without the depressant to return to new normal.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Tuesday February 24, @07:24AM (1 child)
There's reasons. Personally, I've got tinnitus and sometimes I need something to hear to keep it at bay. And some people do need to give their brain something to process.
(Score: 2) by ls671 on Tuesday February 24, @11:08AM
Makes sense if you have tinnitus I guess but my brain has plenty to process in silence. I often start "dreaming" before I go to full sleep and dream all the time while sleeping and I like it. I sometimes wake up and go back to sleep to continue my dream, sometimes successfully.
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Monday February 23, @04:48AM (4 children)
I know a poin is not a line and therefore a study is not a true reflection of reality. I have no way to test this, but for many years (20+) I have slept in a room with a (purposefully) noisy Ac unit, which masks outside noises and helps me sleep. In the city where I live (and I guess every other city), there are traffic noises, neighbors who, for whatever reason, must wake very early and make noises as they move about, urban fauna. etc. The noise from the Ac drowns all that and I can sleep until is time for me to get up.
Not sure if I get enough REM sleep, but I'm pretty sure I'm good, otherwise I would not feel rested in the morning. Maybe it is not "pink noise"?
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday February 23, @07:16AM (3 children)
It's not all noise, they're talking specifically about pink noise and I don't think there is any way to know if random noise is pink without running it through a spectrum analyzer.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday February 23, @02:26PM
I have an air filter in my room which I leave on 24/7. It sounds much like the brown noise in the YouTube above.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 23, @03:46PM (1 child)
You can hear it, its rather distinct. White noise is constant, pink is "bass heavy" and the treble is missing because its constant power per octave.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday February 23, @06:15PM
You can, but it's not like there's only 2 different kinds of noise. I have no doubt that most people can tell the difference between pink and white. It gets harder when you start tossing in other sounds into the mix, for example red noise.
(Score: 4, Funny) by anubi on Monday February 23, @06:06AM (6 children)
I had bought a new cellphone.
Several weeks went by. All seemed fine.
But my sleep was really lousy.
I finally found out why. It was my phone.
I thought I had it completely turned off. It wasn't. There was this notification still turned on. It sounds exactly like my doorbell. So for several months at all hours of the night, "Ding-dong!". All done in less than one second. Subconsciously waiting but not realizing what woke me , thinking I was hallucinating/dreaming that doorbell after many answerings of my doorbell in the middle of the night with no one there and all suspicions some kids were pranking me were unverified ( a little dab of white heatsink grease on my doorbell button went undisturbed ).
It was such a relief to have had it do the dingdong when my bladder already had me up in the wee-wee hours of the morning.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Monday February 23, @06:21AM (2 children)
That sounds awful. I hate all the notifications, alarms, and general interruptions of smartphones. When I get a new one, it takes a couple of hours to turn all that crap off and fix the other settings.
I keep the phones in the other room when I sleep, which hopefully helps.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday February 23, @12:07PM
My phone was on the charger. It was only letting me know the battery had charged.
Usually I am nowhere around when charging the battery.
On top of the dresser in my bedroom.
I must have slept right through most of the ding-dongs, as I only got one per night at no fixed time, but subconsciously it registered, putting me on alert and had no idea why.
I sure chased a lot of ghosts. Glad I did my own investigation. I would have had everyone else thinking I was nuts too. Especially a neighbor who I thought might do such a thing. But until I had proof, I wasn't saying a word to anyone. I was even considering a bored neighborhood cat may be amusing itself at my expense.
As I could find no evidence at all of anyone doing it.
Yes, I did disconnect the doorbell at the transformer. That was my proof it wasn't my neighbor or a cat. Albeit I did consider maybe a mechanical prank chime was involved being rung right outside my front door or bedroom window. Again, no evidence.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 23, @03:51PM
We exited the "social" era some years ago and entered the "notification" era.
"Provide a feeling of self-importance to the user via constant interruptions and reminders"
Its a shift of power from the tool working for the user, to the user working for the tool. It's the "push marketing spam" era of phone use. Rather than you using the phone, the phone uses you.
I would agree completely with your comments, this situation is very annoying.
It extends to desktop OS also. Windows 11 has all kinds of "look how important I am, my OS continually emits popups about BS" I kid you not you'll get endless popups along the lines of my virus scanner ran automatically and found no problems but would just like to let me know it really cares about me and I'm important.
(Score: 4, Funny) by RamiK on Monday February 23, @10:57AM
I use Dun dun duuun! [wikipedia.org] as message notification.
Old films make me sleepy now.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Freeman on Monday February 23, @05:46PM
Do yourself a favor. Set the do-not-disturb mode up on your phone. The only thing that gets through from about 8PM to 6AM are repeat calls from favorite contacts. Everything else can wait for reasonable hours to be contacting me at home.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Nobuddy on Tuesday February 24, @06:43PM
my phone is silent on every function in Do Not Disturb mode- with exceptions for whitelist numbers only. And that is just the spouse and kids.
I will decide when i check my messages, thank you very much.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23, @11:10AM (4 children)
Does snoring with earplugs potentially increase the chances of hearing loss? I guess it depends on the type of earplugs? It has to not reflect back the outbound sound from inside the ear?
See "The Occlusion Effect and Ear Canal Sound Pressure Level": https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26649518/ [nih.gov]
I also suspect prolonged eating of foods that cause very loud crunch etc sounds especially with the wrong sorts of earplugs/earphones can cause hearing damage.
BTW with active noise cancellation, from my understanding of physics, energy is not destroyed, so how can you be sure that no part of your ear is getting near doubled energy from active noise cancellation + the noise? Think of the standing wave thing - the node parts stay at zero amplitude but other parts don't. Just because you can't hear it means it can't do damage?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23, @01:15PM (1 child)
As a kid, I was particularly sensitive to television flyback transformers. I could hear one of a neighbor was watching TV - in his house - and I was in mine.
No complaints, just an observation.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday February 24, @03:08AM
A lot of people can hear those, myself included.
Back in the CRT era, I had a computer monitor and a TV next to each other. One or the other made that annoying mosquito whine. Fix: a chunk of tinfoil between them.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gnuman on Monday February 23, @10:11PM (1 child)
You see, sounds waves are compression waves. You can send another compression wave and it literally gets cancelled.... You could do same with waves in the ocean too, if you send exactly opposite wave, you'd end up with perfectly smooth surface +- high frequency chop.
And no, energy is not destroyed with such things. And ANC mostly attenuates lower frequencies anyway and only by certain amount, like 20dB or maybe 40dB, and that's not that loud by any measure, but when noise is reduced by 40dB, that makes huge difference.
It mostly works like this actually. If you can't hear somethig, it's because your ear is not moving or your ear is already destroyed.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Tuesday February 24, @03:11AM
What about high-pressure sound waves outside of your perception range?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday February 23, @03:58PM (3 children)
Not entirely sure where the "traffic" thing comes from.
I glanced at the study and the results seem to be:
You get the most deep sleep in silence. Adding either pink noise like rain (or pink noise sound generators) or adding jet aircraft noise is worse than silence, and adding both pink noise and aircraft noise was worse than either alone.
The numbers involved are REALLY small and I am too lazy to analyze their probably very dodgy statistics. I imagine this sleep story is similar to traditional dietary scaremongering where the numbers do not support the scary headlines, but until they stop getting clicks as a reward, we'll keep getting scary bedtime stories, probably with alternating conclusions depending mostly on funding source LOL.
WRT traffic I don't know where traffic comes into play. They may mean "air traffic" as per the study which specifically mentioned aircraft noise. Most people reading will think of the motel next to the interstate thats continuous tire noise with some occasional engine braking in terms of "traffic" noise. I think most people call that "airport noise".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Monday February 23, @06:20PM (2 children)
Traffic is just a common type of sound to be exposed to where people live and it's something that's recent enough that humans haven't evolved to deal with. It also tends to be irregular and something that would spike cortisol levels even during the day.
I don't doubt that silence is generally better, but silence isn't something that you can typically achieve without causing other issues like a build up of CO2 in the room due to the airflow that you'll lose when soundproofing. Masking it with sounds that the body doesn't mind as much can be a potentially viable alternative, hence studies like this.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday February 24, @02:46PM (1 child)
Well, yeah, but I don't think of pink or white noise WRT traffic. To me traffic sounds like giant trucks, sometimes engine braking, public safety sirens, reving engines, that kind of thing.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Tuesday February 24, @07:14PM
I can see that, but it's more consistent. There's a massive difference between a baseline consistent noise and one that starts and stops randomly.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Monday February 23, @10:29PM
Noise machines are a last option, in my opinion:
I've known a couple people who have gone almost crazy when the machine stopped working. They had to go right out and buy another.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by Nobuddy on Tuesday February 24, @06:40PM
earplugs are the opposite of helpful- all you can hear is the EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
white noise generators are valuable for drowning that out so you can sleep.