Does music help you fall asleep?

Trouble falling asleep is one of the most common sleep disorders and can usually be traced back to stress and a lack of relaxation. Soothing music or gentle meditation are considered effective remedies for stress-related difficulties falling asleep. You can find out here how music really helps you fall asleep and how certain sounds can have a positive effect on sleep.

Table of Contents

1. Trouble falling asleep
2. Hearing during sleep
3. The effect of music
1. This is how music affects body & mind
2. How music affects sleep
4. Conclusion

1. Trouble falling asleep

Every fifth German suffers from sleep disorders and their numerous negative consequences for our quality of life, everyday life, performance and our health. An irregular sleep-wake cycle, stress or the wrong sleeping environment can disrupt our regeneration at night or prevent us from getting a restful sleep in the first place. Because stress in particular interferes with relaxation in the evening and is often responsible for the fact that we have difficulty falling asleep despite being tired. If it regularly takes longer than 30 minutes to fall asleep after going to bed, experts speak of problems falling asleep. You can find more information and tips on the subject of sleep disorders here.

Numerous home remedies are known to naturally promote the process of falling asleep, and listening to music is also an effective way for some people to calm down and get in the mood for sleep. But can music really help you fall asleep effectively?

2. Hearing during sleep

During sleep, our brains are in overdrive and our senses remain active. In this way, our hearing also reacts to acoustic stimuli in our environment during sleep and while falling asleep and forwards the perceived signals to the brain. Noise, noises and other acoustic signals cause the nervous system to be activated and tend to counteract sleep, which is why a sleeping environment that is as quiet as possible is generally recommended. So can music have a positive effect on sleep at all?

3. The effect of music

This is how music affects body & mind

How a certain type of music affects us is usually very individual and depends on our personal taste in music. Music fundamentally affects us humans in different ways and can have both a calming and stimulating effect on our mood and well-being. This is because of our natural emotional response to musical sounds. These activate the emotion-forming limbic system of our brain and thus promote the release of stress-relieving hormones, for example. Studies also show that listening to music also affects our physical well-being and influences our heartbeat, breathing rate, blood pressure and muscle tension, among other things. Calm and melodic sound images can promote both mental and physical relaxation, especially in states of stress, by activating positive emotions, lowering our blood pressure and heart rate and slowing down breathing.

How music affects sleep

Because excitement and stress hinder the process of falling asleep, it is important to calm down and relax sufficiently before going to bed. If we concentrate on pleasant or soothing music while falling asleep, disturbing stimuli from our sleeping environment as well as negative thoughts and feelings on an emotional and physical level can be faded out more easily. This calms, promotes relaxation and can support an undisturbed falling asleep process.

In order to promote falling asleep, you should therefore generally rely on soothing and slow songs or rhythms that do not include excessive dynamic changes or sudden changes in sound. Especially when a noise stands out in an otherwise quiet sound environment, our brain reacts very quickly and puts us on alert, which disrupts the sleep process and wakes us up. Depending on the phase of sleep we are in, the sensitivity of our hearing to stimuli can vary. This means that music that is perceived as pleasant while falling asleep can later disturb sleep and lead to awakening.

Tip: Try using a timer or timer function to turn down the volume after a while or turn off the music altogether.

4. Can music help you fall asleep?

Whether music ultimately works as an effective sleep aid varies from person to person and basically depends on why we lie awake and how sensitive we are to external acoustic stimuli during sleep. Due to the calming effect, melodic and calm music as well as meditations are usually well suited to counteract stress and a lack of relaxation and to accompany a calm process of falling asleep. Listening to relaxing sounds and melodies or your favorite songs can then easily be integrated into the evening routine in order to find a relaxed and restful sleep quickly.

Also interesting: How diet affects falling asleep.

5. Conclusion

• The hearing also processes sounds and noises during sleep, which is why a quiet sleeping environment is generally recommended.

• Music has an individual effect on people, activates the emotional system and influences important bodily functions such as pulse, heart rate and breathing.

• Calm melodies or meditations can promote relaxation before sleep and facilitate the process of falling asleep.

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