Music is a powerful tool. It can pump us up during our workouts and sports, it can help us when we’re feeling blue, and it can even help us get a better night’s sleep. Studies have shown that music can help you to de-stress, improve your quality of rest, increase the duration of your sleep, and decrease any insomnia symptoms you may suffer from.
A study conducted in 2008 and published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing found that calm and classical music helped patients in the study to sleep better, and even found that it decreased depressive symptoms. The study tested 94 total students, divided into three groups. Students were between the ages of 19 and 28 years old and all had current sleep complaints. Group 1 was told to listen to relaxing music for 45 minutes, three nights a week. Group 2 was told to listen to an audiobook for the same duration. Group 3 was the control group, and were told to continue on with their normal sleep habits and schedules.
The study results concluded that relaxing music was the best method with helping to reduce sleeping issues like insomnia and quality of sleep. Audiobooks didn’t have the same effects as the music did. Nurses now qualify music as a verified treatment for patients with insomnia, and even prefer it to some sleep medications.
Rosalind Elliott, a clinical nurse specialist in Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital intensive care unit, stated in this article that, “Medications such as benzodiazepines and atypical antipsychotics are often used to promote sleep in the field of general sleep medicine, but these have been shown to be harmful to the critically ill in both the short and long term.”
The study also found that the longer students practiced this method, the more their sleep improved. This means that listening to music before bed has cumulative results, and works better and better over time.
Listening to music can help you to develop a sleep routine. A sleep routine is very helpful in allowing your mind and body to unwind after a long and stressful day. Everyone’s sleep routine is different (much like a morning routine), but everyone should usually include bathing, brushing your teeth, giving your eyes a break from the blue light on our phones, and now, some calming music. Turns out, our bodies love routine because they can learn what to expect. Practicing these same tasks every night helps to train your brain to release melatonin, which is the hormone that makes you sleepy. While you’re listening to your calming music and washing your face or cleaning your house, you could also add in diffusing some lavender oil or drinking some herbal tea, as these are also proven methods that help with sleep and are easy to incorporate into your routine.
If you’re ready to add some music to your nights for better sleep, go for some soothing songs. Sleep specialists recommend classical music like Mozart, or something that is string instrument-based with minimal bass and percussion. These types of music have the best potential to make you sleepy.
Songs with a slow rhythm of 60 to 80 beats per minute actually mimic the low end of a healthy resting heart rate, which helps your brain to synchronize your heart beat to the musical beat. Spotify, a popular music streaming service, recently polled their users’ “sleep playlists” to identify the best top 20 songs for some shut eye, and found that Ed Sheeran was currently the most popular artist that people listened to before they went off into dreamland.
Phiaton offers several earphones such as the venerable BT 220 NC noise cancelling earbuds that are small in size, but deliver superior sound allowing you to immerse in the music before bedtime. Several users have reported falling asleep without removing them and made them part of their nightly routine. Our new BT 120 NC offers similar noise cancelling performance in a slender neckband profile.
February 19, 2019
This guest post was written by the folks from rizknows.com and myslumberyard.com.