Ask Lemmy

I prefer to sleep in the quiet, but if the neighbours are being loud I'll use a fan to drown them out

A lot of comments in here about white noise and no one talking about brown noise! Brown noise is elite iykyk

Always, because I have to use a CPAP

White noise (usually a fan) has been greatly beneficial to my quality of sleep. I wish I had started doing so many years sooner.

I do not do well with TV or anything that has speech though.

Can’t sleep without the TV on, ever since I was a teenager. I have playlists of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, the entire chronological timeline of Star Trek, Star Wars extended universe, Stargate, and many others. I rotate through them.

ADHD adult with chronic insomnia here. I usually sleep with "electronic ambient music for sleeping with delta waves", which is the prompt I give my bedside google home before bed. I do not sleep more, but the delta waves thing seems to help me sleep deeper.

I sleep with noise but I don't need it to sleep. I just leave my windows open and get the ambient sounds of the city at night: traffic, distant music, fireworks, snatches of conversation as people walk by.

But I also go camping and the sounds of nature are just as fine: coyote howling, wind through the trees, crickets and birds and raccoons

I rarely get true silence but when I do... I still fall asleep just the same.

Yeah, I have a mp3 player under my pillow with a white noise track on it

I started sleeping with rain sounds years ago because I would always hyperfixate on every little noise. The wobbling tone of the ceiling fan was enough to keep me awake some nights. I've played my usual setup for people and it's always too quiet for them to near, but it's louder than every creak and pop of the house. The track I picked was based on what actual rain sounds like outside my window.

We have a ceiling fan, and I also used various white noise apps on my phone. I read somewhere that sound apps running on my phone all night was bad for the battery, so I bought a small, dedicated rechargeable white noise machine.

I absolutely have to have white noise of some sort. My stupid ass brain is ALWAYS on alert for any noise whatsoever. A pin drops on the opposite side of my apartment and my brain freaks out "omg wake up and pay attention!!" it's so fucking frustrating. Any typical creaks or whatever that a house makes, well time to focus the entirety of my attention on it whether I want to or not. A knocking heater? It's the most dangerous thing in the universe and apparently my brain feels that it deserves all of my focus...

I swear sleeping is the most difficult thing for me to do. I'm so tired of being tired lol

My fiancée sleeps with a fan. I sleep with my finacée snoring.

My husband usually falls asleep to tv, so I usually put on instrumental music on earbuds to drown it out. I'll stay up way too late listening to tv otherwise.

I had insomnia for about the first 45 years of my life. At its worst, I would miss at least one night of sleep per week. By "miss" I mean I would go to bed at a reasonable hour, lay there with the lights off and my eyes closed until about 4:00am, when I'd get out of bed, get dressed, and go to work.

I tried drinking myself into a stupor. I tried white noise CDs. I even got a prescription for Ambien from my doctor. That scared me because I thought meds would do the trick, but I took it and still didn't sleep.

One day I saw a post about the Sleep With Me Podcast. It's described as bedtime stories for adults. I followed the link, started listening, and thought, "this guy may be the most boring person I've ever heard".

I started playing it when I went to bed, and it worked for me from the very first night. I fell asleep within minutes of starting the episode, but then I woke up after it ended.

The next night I loaded my phone with all the episodes. I slept through the night, but then I couldn't wake up in the morning. My alarm would go off, I'd hit snooze, then I'd hear the podcast playing and fall asleep again.

What I finally settled on was setting a sleep timer to stop the podcast a few minutes before my alarm would go off.

I've been listening to that podcast every night for the last 11 years. It's been the best sleep of my life. I've actually had the experience of being consciously aware of losing consciousness. It's a weird and wonderful thing.

The thing about the stories he tells is that it seems like there might be a point, and you start listening to the story, but he goes on so many tangents and diversions that it never actually goes anywhere. After a while, my brain just shuts down.

The first episode I listened to was telling a story about a group of people about to enter a pyramid. It ran for over an hour, but I didn't hear more than a few minutes.

The next episode continued the same story, and when I started it the next night, the people were still outside the pyramid. In over an hour of telling the story the night before, absolutely nothing happened.

Just the sound of my CPAP running

I didn't do it for noise initially, but I've become quite dependent on the fan noise from my air purifier these days.

No, I cant sleep with anything with vocals in it. My brain strains too hard trying to interpret or ignore it. Non-vocal music can work very well at low volume as long as its repetitive and thus predictable enough that my brain doesn't have to pay attention or react to a lot of changes in composition.

White noise machine

Tv every night

My window unit on hot days. Also some tv show I’ve seen before.

Go and get that ADHD assessment

not intentionally, white noise from the ac or a fan is fine on summer nights though! and the sounds from my girlfriends headphones when she stays up a bit later than me, but only because I get to be next to her lol

a speaker/TV show/movie? absolutely the fuck not I can't sleep with that my brain wants to pay attention so bad

We have the sounds of NYC to fall asleep to.... when we (are able to) go upstate, I sleep like a rock, the silence is deafening

I use an app (iOS, Android, Windows, web) by TMSoft called White Noise. I think it was like $2.99. It has a bunch of pre-programmed sounds (waves, chimes, birds, traffic, etc) that you can use. You can also import sounds, change existing sounds (alter pitch, make slower, etc), create your own mixes, etc.

My current "sleep sound" is a mix. The base is pink noise, which nicely muffles many sounds. Since a constant hiss can be annoying on it's own, I topped it with a pitch-lowered heavy rain (the regular pitch was a little annoying). To avoid being woken up by bass noises (lawnmowers, vacuum cleaners, delivery trucks), I added in a slowed-down heavy thunderstorm: it has intermittent peals of thunder that rumble on and then fade away; any base noises that I hear, my sleeping mind interprets as a long peal of thunder and doesn't bother waking me up. Underneath all that, I have a very slowed-down heartbeat; my heart will tend to try to match it, prepping me for sleep. And I've added in some very intermittent birdsong and frogs croaking to make it a little more cheerful, and a kitten purring because that's relaxing too so why not?

I tinker with it occasionally, but it really helps me sleep through any disturbances at night.

Yes. I have a list of YouTube channels that make content suitable for me to sleep to.

English isn't my mother language so I think it's easier to me to pay attention when I want to but just turn off my brain when I feel like it's time to sleep

I needed the fan when I was younger, but I am more tired now. lol.

Usually a story-telling or audio play podcast.

Ive been sleeping with a noise maker (the kind that blows air through holes) my entire life. Ive noticed I get deeper sleep in silence though, it just takes too long to fall asleep without the white noise.

I started using a white noise machine and fans on high when I lived down the block from a hospital emergency room. It sounded like a jet engine in my bedroom, but my brain learned to interpret the white noise as profound silence. I moved away from the hospital zone but still use the white noise to sleep.

I sleep with a fan going and some zen-like meditation music on my computer.

Yes.

I prefer movies or anime I've seen so many times that I have them memorized, so my mind follows along effortlessly.

It's sort of like my mind is a toddler, and if I don't plunk it down in front of something familiar that I know it likes, it'll run off and get into god-knows-what and I'll never get a moment's peace.

Varies from one night to the next, but I typically put on something from myNoise.net when I do want sound.