Sleeping away from the comfort of your own bedroom means it can often be difficult to get a good night’s sleep, with noisy hotels or unfamiliar surroundings making it tricky to rest. We’ve been using sound machines for years and, as light sleepers we can honestly say that aside from getting the best mattress online and some great pillows for sleeping, a sound machine is a true sleep essential. Experts recommend placing the machine at least 30cm from your baby, and starting off with a quiet volume. You’ll find plenty of sound machines for babies too, as these are brilliant devices for helping little ones settle more easily. Does your sound machine need to double as an alarm clock or night light? After all, there’s zero point buying a pure white noise machine if you can’t stand the sound of fans. When choosing the best sound machine for sleep, think about which sounds relax you the most. It offers just one type of noise, which is unusual for a sound machine, but it’s very effective for sleep. HoMedics sound machines are among the best-known – HoMedics also makes some of the best sunrise alarm clocks – but the Marpac Dohm Classic is our top pick. 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.White noise machines and nature sound machines are simple to use, and are usually mains powered, though some can also be battery powered (good for travel). Any acoustic stimulus being continuous or not has the potential to interrupt the sleep process.” There I can see a benefit, but not when sleeping in a relatively quiet environment. Prof Christian Cajochen, who heads the Centre for Chronobiology at the University of Basel in Switzerland, said: “I think the better 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. White noise is just like any other monotonous stimulation, which has been tried many times in many ways over decades, and the evidence is poor.” “The main concern to overcome in poor sleep is the busy or racing mind. “Even the idea is a very limited one conceptually,” he said. You probably want to have a period where the auditory system can wind down, regenerate and prepare for the next wake period.”Ĭolin Espie, a professor of sleep medicine at the University of Oxford, agrees the research quality of studies on continuous noise and sleep is poor. “It is an active process, which generates metabolites, some of which have been shown to be harmful to the inner ear. “Whenever we’re exposed to sounds and noise, the inner ear is translating that into nerve signals that are then interpreted by the brain,” he said. He is also concerned about the potential ill-effects of not allowing the auditory system to switch off overnight, although this also has not yet been tested. “I wouldn’t broadly recommend them, because there is no evidence that they are actually working.” But because there may be negative consequences, I would just be careful,” said Basner, whose research has been published in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews. “If these apps or devices could only do good things, I wouldn’t really care. Although there was some evidence that continuous noise reduced the amount of time it took individuals to fall asleep, the quality of the evidence was extremely poor, and at least one study suggested the noise may lead to more disrupted sleep. Mathias Basner, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, and colleagues systematically reviewed the scientific literature and identified 38 studies that have investigated noise as a sleep aid. One theory is that they help to drown out other bothersome sounds such as street noise another is that listening to the same sound each night may trigger a kind of Pavlovian response, where people learn to associate it with falling asleep. They have been hugely successful – the Bedtime Fan app, available on Apple devices, has had more than 3m downloads, while the Android White Noise Generator has more than 1m.
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