Pink noise reduces REM sleep and may harm sleep quality

https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/pink-noise-reduces-rem-sleep-and-may-harm-sleep-quality

by gnabgib • 5 months ago

110 75 5 months ago

Bratmon• 5 months ago

Participants slept under different conditions, including being exposed to aircraft noise, pink noise, aircraft noise with pink noise and aircraft noise with earplugs

And yet the conclusion is about pink noise vs silence. We may have a new textbook example of HARKing right here!

gnabgib• 5 months ago

The conclusion is:

The results, the researchers said, suggest not only that earplugs—which are used by as many as 16% of Americans to sleep—are likely effective, but also that the overall health effects of pink noise and other types of broadband noise “sleep aids” need to be studied more thoroughly.

ggm• 5 months ago

One of those least-worst choices?

What if the intensity was modulated as a function of the dB of externally sourced sounds?

sowbug• 5 months ago

"Pink noise sounds like a waterfall." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise

tartoran• 5 months ago

Helps me quite a bit to focus when Im in noisy spaces.

mezzman• 5 months ago

This reminds me of an old Wired interview with Danny Hillis when he developed a system called Babble that used unintelligible vocal bits as background sound to help concentration, too bad it never really went anywhere. https://www.wired.com/2005/06/applied-minds-think-remarkably...

is_true2• 5 months ago

With some friends we usually go camping near a waterfall and we always try to camp a little further so we don't hear the noise. At least not too much. We always assumed it was related to the fact that you can't hear anything approaching, some kind of primal instinct

xtiansimon• 5 months ago

Sounds like my tinnitus.

piperflatline• 5 months ago

Thanks for sharing. I'll have to reconsider my nightly noise setup, but good to know.

lanyard-textile• 5 months ago

If you're resting well with your current setup, I wouldn't change it. There are so many individual factors involved with good sleep.

empressplay• 5 months ago

This study had no controls at all, and can safely be ignored.

The participants reported not previously using noise to help them sleep or having any sleep disorders.

All this study said was that people who didn't need noise to sleep had their sleep disrupted when noise was introduced. It has absolutely no implication for people who use noise to help them sleep.

Meaningless trash.

trial3• 5 months ago

study aside, pink noise is awful imo - it's perfect if you're calibrating a PA system and need specific power spectral density properties, but bad for my brain. if sleeping somewhere without a fan or whatever i use brown noise, it's closer to a lower rumbling.

thenobsta• 5 months ago

I really like brown noise at night.

My immediate thought about this article was that I'd love to see this study on brown noise (albeit, with more participants).

Second thought was that, I wonder if some A/B testing with my garmin watch would give signal on this. Life is probably too hectic to get real signal.

Obscurity4340• 5 months ago

Dr Seth Horowitz did some interesting work in psychoacoustics and documented how low amplitude low pitch movement-based sound(s) promotes falling asleep mediated by the vestibular system. Explains why its so easy to fall asleep in the car

llm_nerd3• 5 months ago

I get how difficult a study like this is to carry out, but each participant was involved for just seven days, each night exposed to different conditions. The control environment was silence, and every other conditions did worse than controlled silence. In others they piped in fake environmental noises, pink noise, or made the participants wear earplugs with some other combination.

Eh. People condition to an environment, and someone conditioned to something like pink noise wouldn't have the acclimation issue (and they either specifically selected for people who don't use noise machines, or they just randomly got only people who don't), and it might drown out smaller environmental noises that otherwise would have disrupted their sleep. It would take a much longer study to determine this.

Or hey, maybe those insecure sleep masks tracking EEG and other things will give us some insights eventually. People just need to harvest the data from the other services.

xnomad• 5 months ago

I grew up in South East Asia with air con running all night, when I moved away I found it hard to sleep in 'quieter' countries

thenthenthen2• 5 months ago

This. In summer I get ‘addicted’ to fan noise and cant sleep without. I moved to Asia and the AC is such a blessing.

is_true2• 5 months ago

I'm also addicted to the fan but not only for the noise I like feeling the wind in my face, I think that as it also helps lower your body temperature you sleep better

zhoujing2042• 5 months ago

The study may well be flawed—small n, selection bias, lack of proper controls, sure. But can we please stop using personal anecdotes to dismiss scientific inquiry?

Arguments like 'well, it works for me,' or 'I took this med and recovered immediately,' or 'I saw X happen right after a vaccine' are not valid refutations. Science is frequently counter-intuitive and often contradicts our personal experience and gut instincts. That is precisely why we rely on the scientific method and statistical rigor—rather than individual perception—to establish evidence.

llm_nerd3• 5 months ago

This study is tiny and of negligible value. They didn't even try to pretend it's of real value, and instead just dropped the classic "our study clearly demonstrates that people should probably study this stuff". Conditioned norms are by far the most relevant condition for sleep for most people, and sleep studies of tiny durations with tiny sets are basically just noise makers (har har). Even worse, they seem to have specifically excluded people who already use noise machines, ensuring that their participants were conditioned for the silent norm.

Scientific method, statistical rigour...eh, this looks like a headline chasing study.

nandomrumber8• 5 months ago

On the other hand, my life isn’t a double-blind randomised controlled study.

I can’t bifurcate n times and give half of the me’s one treatment and the other half of me’s no treatment, and I especially can’t do that without revealing to myself which group of me’s received the treatment, and which received no treatment or a placebo. Who even know motivates us.

Additionally, what works for some version of me, for example there was a me who was younger and fitter and more appealing to the ladies, may not work for the older version of me who is less young, relies on testosterone supplementation to not be a writhing crying mess on the floor, and hasn’t had a root in 18 months.

That’s why the practice of medicine has always been considered an art and a science.

There’s art in learning to apply the practice of medicine in an effective way.

Also, populations change over time. Older doctors will notice that decades ago every second person came in with problem x, but now the patients of a similar age and similar live experience now seem to be experiencing more y and less x.

The human condition, while at least somewhat consistent insofar as we’re still puzzled by some age old questions, is also a moving target.

XorNot• 5 months ago

It's the dehumidifier for me. Which kills two birds with one stone.

JamesTRexx• 5 months ago

I noticed I'd feel sleepy after more than half an hour in the server room. Likely the fan noise but the lower temperature might influence it as well.

Unfortunately too expensive and large to set this up in the bedroom to help me sleep nowadays.

red-iron-pine• 5 months ago

used to run data centers. the hot aisle after lunch would always lull me to sleepiness. cold aisle sometimes too, assuming I was bundled up.

hippo22• 5 months ago

I grew up near train tracks. I’m totally of incapable of even hearing trains unless they’re directly in front of me.

anigbrowl3• 5 months ago

Researchers observed 25 healthy adults, ages 21 to 41, in a sleep laboratory during eight-hour sleep opportunities over seven consecutive nights.

Absurdly low n. Additionally, I've become very skeptical of anything coming out of sleep labs after my wife was sent to one (at a prestigious teaching hospital) by her doctor some years ago: the 'sleep opportunity' was lights out at 9pm for 8 hours, and the staff were wholly indifferent to the fact that she's a night owl and prefers to sleep after midnight. Additionally she reported that it was not particularly quiet or dark.

I am not a fan of noise machines but I have noticed that I sleep best on rainy nights, which has a similar average sound spectrum, and is about the same as the sound of your blood circulating near your eardrums. Testing pink noise along with aircraft noise (which is closer to red noise) is equivalent to just making the noise level higher with slightly more midrange energy. Some noise can be relaxing for light sleepers; too much is just annoying.

DANmode• 5 months ago

Sleep labs are like doctors are like mechanics are like restaurants - their only legal obligation is to not kill you,

not be of any particular quality.

Do your homework.

oivey• 5 months ago

That is a low n, but I’m not sure what the alternative is. Surely random anecdotes (n=1) are even less powerful?

Darge• 5 months ago

Random anecdotes might be less biased. For example, no pressure to publish nor sell a product.

samus• 5 months ago

The low n is not the only questionable thing about the study. What a big n gives you is diversity of samples and tighter confidence intervals, but it can not correct for methodological limitations. Specifically, they didn't invite any people with sleep issues or who are already sleeping under noise. Therefore the conclusion is a "duh" - if you don't require pink noise to sleep, then don't add it.

anigbrowl3• 5 months ago

I'm not inviting you to draw conclusions from my semi-random (but informed by years of professional thought about why people like different sounds) anecdote.

jjk166• 5 months ago

The alternative is higher n. The study makes a claim, it does not present the evidence necessary to back up that claim. Until someone does a larger study, no conclusion should be drawn.

ChiMan• 5 months ago

Common sense and experience inform my theory of good sleep: Pitch black, stone quiet, with noise limited to pre-sleep audial approximations of the dream-like mental noise that precipitates sleep.

kstrauser• 5 months ago

Glad that works for you! To me, silence sounds a lot like insomnia.

nandomrumber8• 5 months ago

-sleep audial approximations of the dream-like mental noise that precipitates sleep.

What does this mean for you?

My hypnagogia, or mental-noise that precipitates sleep as you put it, is entirely visual hallucinations.

I’m not aware of ever having been able to recall any auditory hallucinations.

Mistletoe• 5 months ago

I’ll match your anecdote. I slept with white noise in my former home which was in a noisier town and felt it improved my sleep. Now that we’ve moved to a nice historic neighborhood I find I sleep best with nothing on at all. The silence there is so wonderful. Maybe silence is the ultimate luxury.

throwforfeds• 5 months ago

The thing that stood out more to me than the n being low is "the participants reported not previously using noise to help them sleep or having any sleep disorders." Sleeping with pink noise seems like something that you'd end up getting acclimated to.

My n=1 is that I often sleep with a fan on and live in NYC -- whenever I stay in a place where there is no noise I tend to have trouble sleeping, so I end up turning on some nature sounds on my phone from myNoise.

el_benhameen• 5 months ago

Yeah that seems silly. I was a quiet-room sleeper until I met my wife, who needs some kind of white noise to sleep. I eventually adapted and now sleep much better with noise than without (at least subjectively), but that change took a while, at least several months. I found it quite difficult to sleep with for a while.

staticassertion2• 5 months ago

Perhaps too meta or off topic but I thought it was funny that you thought their n was low and then cited a story about one person.

gboss• 5 months ago

The way I’m understanding it is that it’s more that if there’s a real population of people like his wife, that is only 5 percent of the actual population or even higher, for example, it may not be caught by such a small sample size.

zeta0134• 5 months ago

My options are "fairly loud, low rumbly, mostly full spectrum noise" or "continual, nonstop barking." Only one of these options makes sleep possible. :) I'd prefer quiet, but it's so rare to actually have it.

lukeinator42• 5 months ago

It's a within-subject design and they literally did a power analysis in the paper. This is not absurdly low n.

emsign2• 5 months ago

Sleep studies often have low numbers of participants because conducting tests in a controlled environment of a sleep lab is expensive and time consuming, as they have only so many beds.

GeoAtreides• 5 months ago

Absurdly low n

Please divulge the statistical calculus showing this is an absurdly low n. Please explain how to determine the appropriate sample size.

No, "number _seems_ small" is not adequate statistical reasoning.

andai• 5 months ago

I wonder if gentle noise might be relaxing in the same way that watching trees swaying in the wind is relaxing.

gdevenyi• 5 months ago

25 healthy adults

Come on guys. Replication crisis has been fully documented

c2h5oh• 5 months ago

7 nights is not nearly enough to get used to new environmental factor introduced in the study, possibly exacerbating disruption from sleeping in a new place (sleep clinic).

n=25? Seriously?

This is barely passable as an early hypothesis test before you perform an actual study.

diogenescynic• 5 months ago

I feel unsafe wearing earplugs. You're so totally unaware. I'm worried I'd sleep through an alarm.

eastbound• 5 months ago

Since I own a house, I’m afraid of burglars (or rapt) and any crack seems like a sign the roof might fall… so yes, no earplugs…

nandomrumber8• 5 months ago

Intentionally misspelling rape won’t make it go away.

Believing people won’t be triggered by seen the word rapt instead of raped isn’t doing anyone a service.

fn-mote• 5 months ago

A lot of comments here dismiss the study for having a small N.

Exploratory research uses small N at the start. This kind of research can have value even if it is not conclusive.

Imagine the expense (and dominance of Big Research) if every study needed 100,000 participants to run.

If you don’t want to read exploratory studies, ignore them when they hit the headline news.

Other criticisms of this study (e.g., participants didn’t previously sleep with noise) seem more on the mark. I’m not an uncritical fan.

enraged_camel• 5 months ago

Bashing studies for having now N is common because it’s the easiest thing for non-scientists to criticize when they don’t like a study’s findings.

Scientists, on the other hand, know that low N does not necessarily reduce the validity or the value of a study.

braiamp• 5 months ago

I would recommend reading the paper rather than the article, or at least the abstract:

Compared to a noise-free control night, EN reduced N3 deep sleep (p < .0001) while PN reduced REM sleep (p < .001). Adding PN to EN worsened sleep structure, despite minor dose-dependent improvements of EN-induced sleep fragmentation and N3 sleep increases. Earplugs mitigated nearly all EN effects on sleep but started failing at the highest EN level (65 dBA). Morning cognition, cardiovascular measures, and hearing were not affected by nighttime noise, but subjective assessments of sleep, alertness and mood were significantly worse after EN and PN exposure.

filterfish2• 5 months ago

My ex-partner has tinnitus and saw a psychologist who specialised in tinnitus. The psychologist suggested she buy a machine that generates a sound slightly quieter than her tinnitus which retrains the brain not to hear the tinnitus. So she bought a machine that generated about 15 different sounds and settled on a pink-ish sound and played while she slept. It took a couple of years but it effectively "cured" her tinnitus. It drove me mad for a while but after a while I didn't notice it.

The machine had different sounds because the sound of tinnitus is different for different people: hers sounded like cicadas, a sound I quite like but she hates!

I have misophonia and used to live in a house where a coffee van would start a generator at 0530 so I used a fan to help drown out the sound. I could still hear the generator but I could sleep through. It fundamentally changed the quality of my life.

nandomrumber8• 5 months ago

Misophonia, interesting, I hadn’t heard (snort!) of that before. There are certain sounds I will inappropriately respond to, I’ll I read up on misophonia, thanks.

Anyways, you might be interested in a recent episode of DOAC (Diary of a CEO):

Sleep Expert Dr. Michael Breus breaks down the 4 chronotypes to master your sleep, how to fix insomnia, the truth about sleep apnea, and why the 8-hour myth is wrong!

Dr. Michael Breus is a clinical psychologist and a Diplomate of the American Board of Sleep Medicine. He has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, served as a WebMD sleep expert, and is also the bestselling author of books such as, ‘Sleep Drink Breathe’.

Apple Podcast link or conjure your own from preferred provider:

https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-diary-of-a-ceo-wit...

filterfish2• 5 months ago

Misophonia, interesting, I hadn’t heard (snort!) of that before. There are certain sounds I will inappropriately respond to, I’ll I read up on misophonia, thanks.

The misophonia isn't a bad place to start: https://www.reddit.com/r/misophonia/

I've watched a few episodes of DOAC so I'll watch that. I know my chronotype but that's about all so it'll be interesting so what they say!

rpozarickij• 5 months ago

I use the Background Sounds feature (in Accessibility settings) on iOS with a Bluetooth speaker every night while I sleep. It's quite battery-friendly and has several sound options alongside dedicated volume control with which you can set background sound volume independently of the main volume. It's also possible to add a shortcut button to this feature in the Control Center (the screen that's shown when you pull down from the top of the screen).

This makes occasional outside/neighbour noises much less noticeable, although I do keep earplugs near my bed just in case (not great for my tinnitus, but still usually better than without them if they're needed).

nandomrumber8• 5 months ago

Only tangentially related.

I occasionally fall asleep to either a movie / TV episode on repeat in a media player on the PC in my bedroom, or a YouTube short which repeats.

The audio almost always gets integrated in to my dreams, and almost always in a highly entertaining and humours way.

Anyways, I feel I sleep better when there is background sound, even if it’s other people (quietly) partying in the house.

PacificSpecific• 5 months ago

I'm with you. The way I deal with insomnia is to pretend I'm sleeping in a noisy environment. For example an apartment under a elevator highway or a cot behind a bunch of refrigerators. Or even in a tent on a lively beach.

Don't know why but it works great.

timonoko• 5 months ago

I have the best. Natural noise generator, which means microphones outside. With 3 layered windows the winter is just too silent, or rather: filled annoying multistory house noises. In summertime windows are open and that is about the suitable noise level.

Also there is the outdoorsman's reaction to silence. When birds go silent, there is something bad happening. Bears or wolf pack.

emsign2• 5 months ago

Yes, after I've heard that, I used pink noise on purpose to induce more deep sleep. It's beneficial when you want your brain to flush more metabolites. I guess.

musicale• 5 months ago

It's too bad that cities are so unlivable due to noise pollution (constant aircraft noise, road noise, loud rumbling that travels for miles, 24/7 emergency vehicle sirens, etc.)

Pink noise reduces REM sleep and may harm sleep quality

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