This Popular Sleep Hack Might Be Ruining Your Sleep

One of the most viewed genres on YouTube are these pink, black or brown noise videos that people use to either study or sleep. These videos rack up hundreds of millions of views. For sleep, one of the more popular noises is pink noise. It sounds like this. The idea of pink noise is that it blocks out external noises and thus helps you to fall asleep faster and not get woken up by traffic. However, the actual research about this might suggest otherwise, that not only does pink noise do nothing but it could even be actively sabotaging your sleep. In this video I'm going to look at a new study that investigated the effects of pink noise on your sleep and I also learned what might be the most optimal sound environment for your sleep. A new 2026 randomness control trial investigated the effects of pink noise and earplugs in the background of environmental noise for sleep. They took 25 healthy young adults in their 20s and put them through a 7-night sleep study while exposing them to different noises and comparing them. The control group experienced no noise at all, they slept in complete silence. Environmental noise group had intermittent real-world noise like airplane traffic and outside noise. The pink noise group got continuous pink noise. The environmental noise plus pink noise group got intermittent environmental noise with continuous pink noise. And lastly there was the environmental noise plus earplugs group. The results were quite surprising. Environmental noise versus sleeping in quiet reduced deep sleep N3 by 23 minutes on average and increased light sleep N2 by 20 minutes. Pink noise at 50 decibels versus sleeping in quiet reduced REM sleep by 18 to 20 minutes and increased N2 sleep by 20 minutes. Environmental noise plus pink noise at 40 decibels versus control reduced deep sleep by 20 minutes. REM sleep by 25 minutes and increased light sleep by 22 minutes and resulted in more wakefulness. Environmental noise plus pink noise at 50 decibels versus control reduced deep sleep by 16 minutes. REM sleep by 29 minutes and increased light sleep by 21 minutes. Environmental noise versus earplugs showed that environmental noise reduced deep sleep significantly and earplugs prevented that. Adding pink noise at 40 decibels to environmental noise shifted additional time into light sleep and reduced REM sleep. Adding pink noise at 50 decibels reduced REM sleep even more. Environmental noise plus pink noise at 50 decibels had similar effects but even greater reduction in REM sleep. Environmental noise plus earplugs versus sleeping in quiet had near identical sleep quality. No significant change in REM or deep sleep. Based on these results sleeping in a noisy environment reduced the sleep quality. But the worst quality is environmental noise plus pink noise at 50 decibels when we're comparing it to sleeping in quiet. Environmental noise by default reduces sleep quality in all conditions but wearing earplugs pretty much nullifies that effect. Pink noise doesn't mitigate the harmful effects of environmental noise and in fact even makes it worse. What it means is that if you're having a hard time falling asleep in a noisy environment then your best bet is to sleep with earplugs rather than using pink noise. But this is just one study. Does pink noise improve sleep quality in other studies? A 2022 systematic review of 34 studies saw that pink noise showed positive impacts on sleep outcomes in 81.8% of the studies. White noise however was positive only in 38% of them. However the risk of bias in both cases was quite high. 2.36 for pink noise and 2.45 for white noise which refers to moderate bias. In a 2023 study sleeping with pink noise resulted in more time spent in light sleep compared to sleeping in silence. Pink noise during sleep also reduced sleep dependent insight and pattern recognition. There are studies showing that pink noise at 60 decibels helps to fall asleep faster but those studies aren't randomness control trials. They're done on a very small amount of people and they're industry funded. There's also a 2020 study on 8 people who received bursts of pink noise only during light sleep and deep sleep but not during wakefulness or REM sleep. As a result their deep sleep increased by 3% and they saw no change in the REM sleep but if you use pink noise during REM sleep it'll reduce it. REM sleep is important for memory consolidation and other mental processes. So overall it seems that pink noise doing sleep reduces overall sleep quality. The worst case is environmental noise plus pink noise. It might be that pink noise is effective if you use it only during certain sleep stages such as light sleep but it consistently reduces REM sleep which is not optimal. I want to take a quick break to let you know about the red light hat by Bonn Charge which a lot of people have been waiting for a long time. Basically you're getting some red light therapy on your scalp. It's a regular cap and it just gives you the specific wavelengths of red light that will help with the hair growth and the collagen synthesis in the scalp. Bonn Charge also has a lot of different types of red light therapy devices like the face mask which actually has specific studies on where they use split face experiments and they show that the LED red light face masks do improve skin wrinkles and collagen synthesis in skin. But yeah Bonn Charge has a ton of different red light therapy devices as well that they've come out with over the course of years. So this red light hat is the newest one it's it's pretty good. I kind of wear it in the mornings just to help with hair growth a little bit and they obviously also have regular red light panels. The big ones that you're going to sit in front of and also get benefits on your skin as well as overall energy. Check out the Bonn Charge red light therapy devices and their new red light hat at bonncharge.com for which there's a 15% discount. Let's now talk about white noise. White noise has low and high frequencies that are like the static tv sound. Pink noise however has louder low frequencies and quieter high frequencies making it more smooth and warmer. Here's what pink noise sounds like and here's what white noise sounds like. A 2020 systematic review of 38 studies found that the quality of evidence for supporting continuous white noise for sleep is very low and another 2024 systematic review found the same results. Very low quality evidence for white noise supporting sleep. White noise has been seen to reduce the time it takes to fall asleep by 38% compared to environmental noise. However other trials on insomnia drugs show that the placebo treatment reduces subjective sleep latency by 13 minutes on average which is comparable to the 38% reduction in this study. So we're not really talking about anything significant in terms of falling asleep faster. We're talking about falling asleep faster in single digit minutes. It's statistically significant but clinically not meaningful especially in healthy people. A randomized controlled trial on infants saw that white noise at 55 decibels 30 to 50 centimeters from the infant reduced crying duration and increased sleep duration significantly. Crying reduced from 4.8 hours to 2.1 to 2.3 hours and their sleep increased from 10.5 hours to 14 to 15.6 hours. That's a very significant result. Up to 50% reduction in crying. However there are some problems with this study. There was no the mothers knew when their baby was getting the white noise treatment which introduces expectation bias and reporting bias. The infants were one month old and crying and sleeping get better the older they get. So there was no true control week. There was also no washout between the weeks so the infants could have gotten used to their treatment. And they had a high dropout rate. 42% of the infants dropped out of the study. Not literally but they stopped participating. The realistic scenario is that white noise might help infants cry less but it's definitely not 50% less. The only realistic scenario where white noise can help with sleep is in noisy environments like in a big city with lots of traffic and airplanes. However as you recall from the previous study wearing earplugs to block out the environmental noise has the best effect and pink noise made it worse. The problem with chronic noise during sleep is that it might also have some unwanted side effects. A 2018 review claimed that although white noise can provide short-term relief for tinnitus it may also induce maladaptive neuroplastic changes that accelerate auditory aging, degrade inhibitory tone and potentially impair cognition. So it might be that this monotonous white or pink noise in the background changes the brain structure in a negative way especially if you use it chronically. At high volumes over 70 to 80 decibels and long duration there's increased risk of noise-induced hearing loss at risk of subocochlear damage. The risk is especially higher in infants who are developing auditory systems. Animal studies show that continuous broadband noise during development leads to impaired auditory cortex organization, poor sound discrimination and altered neuroplasticity. Human observational data suggests that chronic environmental noise correlates with language delay, reading difficulty and cognitive differences. What we know from research is that you should sleep in a low arousal and as quiet environment as possible. The key aspect is sound stability. You want to avoid these interruptions and massive fluctuations in the sound. The more stable the sound environment the better the recovery. Chronic noise from the environment especially above 50 decibels can lead to more sleep fragmentation and disruptions. Masking the noise with low-level noise machines doesn't appear to make it any better as was shown by the pink noise study from the beginning. The best outcome is to wear earplugs either regular foam earplugs or noise cancelling headphones. Now of course there are some differences between people. Some people can sleep in noisier environments, other people need complete stillness but the biggest priority for everyone should be to avoid and minimize these unpredictable changes in the sound environment. Here's a ranking of the sound environments from worst to best. Environmental noise plus pink or environmental noise alone. Low level continuous noise 30 to 40 decibels of white or pink noise. Environmental noise plus earplugs and the best is silence or in a quiet room. Sound is surprisingly important for sleep as I just shared with you. However there are a lot of other things you need to pay attention to to get better sleep. Check out my video where I share how I got 100% sleep scores next.