Can Music Actually Help You Sleep?
We all know someone who listens to music in order to fall asleep. Maybe it’s you, a friend, or a family member, but using music as a sleep aid is not a new idea. Adults sing lullabies to children in order to help them fall asleep. Lullabies are a constant in many different cultures all around the world. When I was young, I often had trouble falling asleep, so my mom played Kidz Bop to help me fall asleep. The use of music as a sleep aid has been around for generations, but why? Can music be an effective sleep aid?
Researchers at Universities in the United Kingdom conducted a study that investigated the various effects that music has while we try to sleep. 651 people aged 18–79 years old completed their online survey between 2014 and 2016. The survey asked them if they used music as a sleep aid, how often they listen to music as a sleep aid, what type of music they listen to, and the reasons for doing so. The researchers found that the use of music as a sleep aid related to higher sleeping scores. They found that when music was not used as a sleep aid and when age and stress levels increased, sleep quality decreased. Thus, music shows promise as an effective sleep aid.
The next important question is does this work for everyone? Age and musical engagement both impact the use of music. People who have greater musical engagement and are under 27 years old, reported greater use of music. Most of the participants used the music in order to fall asleep quicker. However, the main classifications for the reason people use music are in order to distract themselves from those wandering thoughts at night, block out noisy neighbors, help change their current physical or mental state, or lastly just out of habit. I personally listen to music to help me sleep when I have a wandering mind.
Is all music the same when you’re trying to sleep? Most people would think slow quiet music is most conducive to sleep. However, I personally will sleep to anything from calming piano music to hard rock. In the same U.K. study, participants listened to 14 different genres and 545 different artists. Based on the different types of music, it is logical to assume that a listener’s preferred music is more calming than unfamiliar music, in order to help as a sleep aid. This goes against the common belief that slow music is required to put you to sleep, which sparked the creation of sleep playlists/stations on Spotify or Pandora. These playlists attempt to generalize the music to help people fall asleep by playing slow tempo pieces, however, what likely matters more is an individual’s personal preferences.
I think it is important to point out that, due to the information being collected from a survey, the conclusions drawn are correlational. This means that you cannot make definitive causal conclusions. In this case, the researchers obtained all information from the participants, but were not able to control other factors that might influence the relationship. For example, look at the relationship between ice cream sales and shark attacks. As ice cream sales increase, so do shark attacks, but you are missing an important part of the context. In reality, it is temperature that is causing an increase in both ice cream sales and shark attacks. While studies like the study done on music aided sleep, often contain interesting relationships between things, it is important to view them critically.
One study by researchers in Switzerland found that music can cause healthier sleep. They found that listening to music before taking a nap, leads to improved subjective ratings of sleep quality. Additionally, in some of the participants, they found a decrease in stage N1 sleep and an increased amount of slow-wave sleep. This indicates that for some people listening to music does cause an improvement in both subjective and objective sleep.
Sleep is an extremely important part of staying healthy and happy. For this reason, we will go to great measures to try to get a better night’s sleep. There is promising support that music may be a helpful sleep aid, so the next time that you are lying awake up at night and can’t sleep, try listening to music, it may help.
References
Cordi, M.J., Ackermann, S. & Rasch, B. (2019). Effects of relaxing music on healthy Sleep. Sci Rep. 9. doi:10.1038/s41598–019–45608-y
Trahan, T., Durrant, S., Müllensiefen, D., & Williamson, V. (2018). The music that helps people sleep and the reasons they believe it works: A mixed methods analysis of online survey reports. PLoS One, 13(11).
