Of Background Noise And Sleep

 I have been experimented with background noise generators for sleeping at night.

My sleep pattern, which for years have never been fantastic, is something of a bit of a frustration to me now.  I am not sure if it is due to the change in location (it gets darker much earlier here) or a general sense of being away from my family, but I end up sleeping in one of three camps:

1)  Sleeping through from within 5 minutes of hitting my pillow to when my alarm goes off;

2)  Waking up in the night, missing my window of falling back to sleep (it is two minutes or so, much like Seneca's), and then being up for at least two hours before I can go back to sleep;

3)  Fitful waking up and falling back asleep that is restful.

Add to this that no matter which of these options I get on the "Nightly Wheel of Sleep", I seldom feel rested - even if hit Option 1 above and get 7 hours a night.  

In general, the room I sleep in has blackout curtains with minimal light (that was a problem when I first moved in).  There is a local light rail that runs nearby from 0400 to 0000, so that is a factor (for which I had been sleeping with earplugs).

One of the things that The Ravishing Mrs. TB has taken to over the last year is a background noise generator to help her sleep - in her case, due to tinnitus.  I was complaining about the sleep I was getting last week, so she suggested I try it.  And, as it turns out, the I-phone conveniently has an entire app dedicated to background noise generation with many selections.

How is working?  On the bright side, I can report that I have not had the experience of waking up and then staying awake for two hours as apparently the noise is enough to fool my mind into going back to sleep, and I can scarcely (that I recall) hear the early morning train.  On the less bright side, I do not know that I feel any more rested per se, and in some cases my mind feels like it has been active all night.  I will also note my dreams have been extremely vivid (and rather odd to boot).

My options for "noise" are Balanced Noise, Bright Noise, Dark Noise, Ocean, Rain, Stream, Night, and Fire.  I am trying a different one every night to see if there is any difference in my ability to sleep or how rested I feel when I wake up (so far, none).  And my intention is to try this out, then try another night with just the earplugs and see if there is a noticeable difference.

Do I think it will really help the issue?  I am not sure; the fact that I still do not feel truly rested is a bit bothersome (but maybe I have not let the experiment run enough).  The next step would be to try to expand my bedtime by another hour to see if a set aside full eight hours helps at all (which would be a drag in some ways to my mind, as I really would like to use that time doing something else).  

But some progress is better than no progress at all.  And besides, maybe this teaches me more about sleep that I really need to know.