Is it good to sleep with Ambient Noise?

Sleep is as important to the human body as food and water. In fact, sleep deprivation might kill you, or drive you insane. After 3 or 4 days straight without sleep, you will start to hallucinate.

It would be really nice if all our bedrooms were conducive to a good night’s sleep would it not? However, that is not always the case. If you have ever taken care of a newborn baby you will know what true sleep deprivation feels like.

There are other things that can prevent you from sleeping deeply, like loud neighbors, loud cars and motorcycles going down the road in front of your home, and the loud snoring of your loved ones.

Thankfully, there is a way that you can block out all of those unwanted noises so you can fall to sleep almost effortlessly, and it is through the use of ambient sounds.

 

Noise vs Noise

It might seem counterproductive, but it is true that you can fight noise with other kinds of noise to help yourself relax and fall asleep easily. These noises are used to block out the undesirable sounds. Ambient sounds are actually uniform, so your ears can tune them out after a while.

White noise is actually a combination of all audible frequencies of sound, and are all played back using the same amplitude. Because this noise contains all of the discernible sounds, white noise acts as a mask that prevents other sounds from disturbing you.

Is it good to sleep with ambient noise in the background?

There is some debate as to whether it is good to sleep with ambient sounds or not, and most of the contention revolves around the use of white noise specifically.

There are some researches that came to a glaring conclusion that constantly subjecting yourself to white noise can cause you to have tinnitus, otherwise known as that constant ringing or buzzing in your ear. They suggested that listening to white noise for long periods can affect the functioning of brain cells, thus resulting in tinnitus. However, the problem with this research is that all experiments were conducted on lab mice, and testing on human subjects have yet to be tried.

Researchers have also found that if you were to subject yourself to more than 120 decibels of ambient sounds (aka running your white noise machine at full blast) every night, then there is a huge chance that it will have a negative effect of the hair cells in your inner ear, which might result to temporary, and sometimes even permanent hearing loss.

On the other hand, if using ambient white noise is one of the only ways that you can get a good night’s sleep then by all means continue doing so, however, you should lower the volume to an OSHA-recommended 60-70 decibels to prevent damage to your hearing.

White noise helps people go to sleep because it covers up all the jarring noises that keep you up all night.

Is White Noise the Best Choice?

There are some people have come out saying that ambient sounds playing in the background actually helped them mask the sound of tinnitus in their ears. However, there are some people who said that it made their tinnitus worse, but that may be just because they are not listening to the “right” kind of noise.

There are many different colors of ambient noise; there’s the standard white noise, Brown noise, violet noise, and many others. The one that is showing the most promise is pink noise. Fans say that pink noise is much better than white noise.

Pink noise contains all the frequencies that white noise has, but the ones at the upper ranges have their volumes decreased. It is said that these higher frequencies are responsible for triggering tinnitus, so lowering them to an acceptable volume can effectively mask the sounds coming from your inner ear.