Counting Sheep Before You Sleep

S H Subrahmanian writes about why seniors tend to have sleeping problems.

- S H Subrahmanian

A recent report states that white noise may be doing more harm than good to the quality of sleep. White noise is just like any other monotonous stimulation which has been tried many times in many ways over decades, and the evidence is poor, say researchers. While people who find it difficult to fall asleep at night do a great many things to aid their sleep, white noise and white noise machines have become quite popular in the West in the recent past. Simply put, a white noise machine generates a background noise which is known to soothe a person and help him sleep better and faster.

The noise can be anything of your choice – the humming of the ceiling fan, sounds of rain and wind, thunder sounds, hair blower machines, etc. As such, many people are known to download applications that generate such ‘relaxing’ sounds that they come to associate with sleep. And while they are hugely popular, their efficacy has been recently questioned, though! According to ‘The Guardian’, Mathias Basner, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia and colleagues systematically reviewed and identified 38 studies that researched noise as a sleep aid.

And even though there was some evidence that continuous noise reduced the amount of time it took for people to fall asleep, the quality was extremely poor, with at least one study suggesting that the noise may lead to more disrupted sleep, thus being counter-productive. “If these applications or devices could only do good things, I wouldn’t really care. But because there may be negative consequences, I would just be careful. I wouldn’t broadly recommend them, because there is no evidence that they are actually working,” Basner said.