Influence of sound during your sleep

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Sound can have negative and positive influences. To loud and irregular sounds could wake you up. Sounds louder than 30 decibel (for example bird calls) will have effect on the sleep of most people. Ofcource, the severity and intensity at which noise impacts sleep is different for everyone. But the most likely moment when noises will wake up people is at stage 2 of their sleep. (just after the REM-sleep).

The effect of sound by waking up

This fact will be used to wake someone as pleasant as possible. Stage 2 is namely the optimal moment to wake up. Then, people aren't in a deep sleep or in a REM-sleep, so you won't be disorientated. The alarm can be very soft because people will wake up very quick in stage 2, which is another benefit.

The moment of waking up isn't the only important part of waking up. The way you're waking up is also important. As Dev Banerjee of Sleep Clinic said: "The first sound we hear in the morning has such an effect on our mood for the rest of the day". Dev Banerjee says that the alarm which will wake you up influence your experience of that night. For example, you will wake up happy with birds tweeting, cockerel crowing and waves crashing. So the type of the alarm needs also our attention.

Effect of sound during sleep

As told above, sound can have negative influences during your sleep. But sound can also be used to create a positive influence. A sound which have positive influences is white noise, which is a constant sound. This sound will reduce the difference between peak sounds and background sounds during your sleep. So it minimalized the variaty. White noise can be created because of a fan, an air purifier or an white noise machine. The amount of decibels of the white noise should be below the 50 to 65 decibels.

Nowadays, white noise is used to improve the sleep of babies and toddlers. These groups have irregular sleeprhytms. They won't wake up because of noise of their parents who are still awake, because the white noise 'reduces' the sound of the parents. And they also associate white noise with sleeping, so when they hear white noise, they know it's bedtime. Because of this, they will fall faster asleep.

These technique, white noise, can also be used in our case. It will have the same kind of effects. White noise will also reduce the diference between background sounds and peak sounds for adults, which will lead to a better sleep. We realize that the effect for adults isn't as big as at toddlers. Most adults sleep a lot more regular and at times their envirnment is more quite. But it can be usefull for people who live in noisy areas, for example near a busy road or railway.