Can Music Help Me Sleep?

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.

The study’s results helped lead to the conclusion that relaxing classical music could help reduce sleeping problems and would be a good treatment that nurses could use to help treat patients with insomnia. Research has found that music at roughly 60 beats per minute has the most significant effect on our brain. “As you are falling asleep, your heart rate begins to slow and starts to move toward that 60 beats per minute range”, says Breus.

This mixed level of agreement on music’s success in the face of anecdotal reports led us to ask on what basis and in what manner people may be using music intuitively to help them sleep. Such insights have the potential to guide both effective and ecologically valid designs of sleep studies in the laboratory. Typical genres of music used for sleep include classical music, ethnic music, ambient music, meditation music and lullabies. Although researchers have recognised a wide diversity of music genres aiding sleep. The characteristics of music that have improved sleep quality in the music-sleep literature include slow tempo, small change of rhythm, and moderate pitch variation of melody. The selection of music does not appear to impact sleep quality.

Spotify conducted their own research and found that you can reduce blood pressure and heart rate by listening to this song. They named it the best song to listen to if you are a nervous flyer because of its relaxing effect. Of course, it’s not the only song that could help you drift off to sleep at night. As it turns out, there’s a science behind how certain types of music contribute to great sleep—and it has to do with more than just the brain. Unfortunately, that evening bite may interfere with your sleep.

The most common reason given for using music as a sleep aid was to ‘help fall asleep quicker’. 56.82% of participants who used music to help them sleep claimed they strongly agreed or agreed with this statement, and only 20.10% said they disagreed or strongly disagreed. This was followed by ‘reduction in time spent in bed before falling asleep’ (54.35%), and ‘increases sleep satisfaction’ (34.74%). Studies into music’s efficacy as a sleep aid have used subjective self-report measures and occasionally objective measures such as actigraphy and polysomnography. The majority have been conducted in clinical populations such as individuals with chronic insomnia or patients in hospital settings [28–30].

After WWII, musicians were brought to U.S. hospitals to aid the healing of soldiers’ physical and emotional trauma. Classical music is commonly thought of as somnolent music, that which makes us feel drowsy, sleepy and peaceful. When it comes to relaxing meditation music for sleep, try “Canzonetta Sul-aria” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Nocturne No.2, Op.9 by Frédéric Chopin or this 8-hour mix of Classical Music for Sleeping. And then there is a group of humans who enjoy falling asleep to music. My sense was the structural integrity of Bach, Mozart and some of the other classical music masters couldn’t help but fuel beneficial development Sleeping Music of neural pathways. Ever since, if I find my own mind racing when it’s time to hit the pillow, I turn to this recording to help shut off the chaos of the day and enter a more peaceful inner space.