Calming Music

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.

Negative If these thoughts were negative, worrisome, or stressful in nature they were placed in this level 3 theme. Thoughts Similarly, this theme was utilized when the person used the term ‘thoughts’ or its Relaxing Music synonyms as the experience they wish to block. Silence This theme points to the use of music to fill a void of external sound. All participants provided specific online consent for their participation and had the right to withdraw at any time with no penalty.

Switch off Comments that explicitly used the term ‘switch off’ to refer to the experience were included here. Visual map demonstrating the hierarchical organization of all themes and sub-themes. Counts of observed accounts for each theme are found in brackets next to the theme title. "Spirit Vision," (David & Steve Gordon. Serene and lovely contemporary Native American informed-drumming music utilizing Taos Log Drum and Incan Pan along with other instruments and ocean/forest nature scenes.

Rich says he has no intention of making albums like the phlegmatic Offering to the Morning Fog for the rest of his career, even if it might be the most profitable path. “We need to express the full dynamic range of light and dark,” he says. “Just creating relaxing pablum is probably worse than doing nothing right now.” But regardless of what direction Rich takes his career, Offering to the Morning Fog will always be available to lull you to sleep. By the time Middleton released Sleep Better, a once-derided field was gaining legitimacy and sprawling in many directions. In the experimental wing, Basinski and Rich were suddenly being asked to perform sleep concerts for thousands of horizontal fans at major festivals like Le Guess Who in the Netherlands and Moogfest in North Carolina. In an era of experiential pop-ups and events, consumers were embracing the opportunity to pay $250 per ticket for the privilege of falling asleep to Max Richter’s Sleep.

For example, the aim of regulating mood to improve sleep may require different genres, artists, and musical characteristics to those chosen when the aim is achieving distraction from negative thoughts or external sounds. On the other hand, it may be a combination of both the intended therapeutic use and the musical preference that optimizes music’s beneficial effect. Music has many promising neurological and physiological effects that may be indicative of its effective use in the fight against sleep loss. In some clinical populations listening to music has been suggested to reduce anxiety and the subjectively negative effects of physical pain . Potential mechanisms for effect are ascribed to the modulation of sympathetic nervous system activity and levels of the stress hormone cortisol . The subjective psychological benefits of music have also been linked to chemical changes observed via hormone levels.

High-tempo music may pump you up and get you ready for the day, while soothing, meditative music may mellow you out and help you fall asleep. Music has a powerful and profound effect on the body and mind, influencing our breathing and heart rate and even triggering the release of hormones and boosting the brain’s cognitive and emotional areas. If you want to listen to music as you fall asleep, that’s fine. But don’t rely on headphones or earbuds, which can make sleep uncomfortable and damage your ear canal. Everyone is different, but I recommend to my patients they opt for music without words, at bedtime.