My marriage hits its 18th year this spring. One thing that has become more noticeable and prominent lately is my husband’s snoring. Some nights, all is well (like the nights he had his sleep studies conducted) and others are not. If he has a drink with dinner or works longer hours, I’m almost certain to hear him from our upstairs bedroom while I am in our downstairs living room.
I decided to try a “white noise” app to help me sleep. Some nights I even had to use it when I moved myself into our college-aged daughter’s vacant room to catch some sleep. Along with nature sounds and traditional “white” noise, the app featured other colors. I settled on “brown” noise as my go-to, but then I started to notice something weird and I wondered if I were alone.
Even though when I woke up I couldn’t actually “hear” the brown noise–I was used to it and had a moment of not even realizing it was still playing, when I stopped the app, I noticed distinctive ringing in my ears. The app was not super loud and my phone was not close to my ears, so I was confused why that occurred. The first time I noticed it, I wrote it off as a coincidence. Once it happened a couple more times, however, I wondered if there were something happening that I should know.
I put my superior Google skills to work and learned that tinnitus sufferers sometimes are encouraged to use white noise to alleviate their condition. BUT, some studies have found that white noise use can actually aggravate tinnitus or, as in my case, give people a sense of their ears ringing.
Apparently, a recent study determined that exposure to “unstructured noise” like white noise (even if it isn’t at a harmful decibel level) can accelerate the aging of the brain. The study posits that the brain can rewire itself in a negative manner if it is “fed random information, such as white noise.”
Other studies, one in 2015 for example, have suggested that white noise didn’t affect health people’s cognitive function in any negative way.
I only know what I noticed in myself and it made me decide to try breaking up with my BFF brown noise. Last night I tried a rain storm given that thunder and pounding rain were not “random” sounds to my brain. My brain has heard that before and can make sense from it.
When I woke up this morning, I did not have the ringing in my ears, so I consider that a win. Lord knows I don’t need to be rewiring my brain or prematurely aging it! I have enough problems without creating more.
If you are someone who sleeps with someone who snores, what are some of your best tips for snoozing peacefully?
