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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.
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.
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.
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.
Personally, I trust the results of a sleep study, or any study on anything, by people I don’t know with questionable incentives than I do anecdotes of commenters I’ve been following for 10 years on HN, especially when they align with my own experiences, and conversations I’ve had over beers with people in industry (whatever that might be).
A lot of “science” is junk, not insofar as it’s false, but like water is wet.
Good science: there are compounds in cruciferous vegetables that appear to exert some health benefits.
Junk science: bok choy is green.
If a sleep lab is ignoring the fact of chronotypes (it’s obvious our genetic history would require some people to be predisposed to keep an eye out for toothy clawed things, and dangerous ‘others’) while most of their tribe / community are sleeping), the people who work there do so because it pays the bills, not because they’re passionate about working in the medicine / health industry at all.
I encourage people to get up and walk out if you find yourself at a service provider that doesn’t care about you. Find someone who gives a frak.
We ran a pilot with n=12 when testing a hardware product because each sleep study night costs real money and takes weeks to schedule. You learn enough to decide if it's worth scaling up. The bar for "publish-worthy science" vs "should we keep building this" is totally different though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've run the same sleep study protocol on myself about 15 times now with an at-home EEG headband. Pink noise consistently cuts my REM by 20-30 minutes, even when I can't consciously hear it. The effect shows up whether I fall asleep at 10pm or 2am, so circadian timing doesn't seem to matter much for this particular phenomenon.
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.
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.
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:
> 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.
Wait, how do you even measure if your brain has been "retrained not to hear" something? If the machine is quieter than the tinnitus, how does that create the masking effect — wouldn't you still be hearing the tinnitus over it? Or is the theory that focusing on a slightly quieter sound somehow rewires the perception?
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).
The approach you're describing sounds like Tinnitus Retraining Therapy (TRT). The evidence for it is mixed—some trials show benefit, others don't find much effect beyond placebo. But what's consistent is that when people do improve, it takes months to years, which matches your ex-partner's timeline. The mechanism isn't fully settled; it might be more about habituation than true "retraining."
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.
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.
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
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...
I tried one of those office babble generators once. Crashed three times in a month and support wanted logs I'd never configured. Went back to a plain fan—twenty years, zero downtime.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
> 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!
> 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.
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.
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.
Actually, pink noise isn't just one frequency—it's a spectrum where power density decreases by 3dB per octave. You might be thinking of a pure tone? Either way, yeah, doesn't sound great for REM sleep.
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.