Health

Listening To Music Before Bed Better Sleep Is Good Or Bad

Listening to music before bed better sleep is a very widespread practice. Why do not you do it? At first glance, it seems like an ideal exercise to promote night rest, it is less stimulating than watching a series or a movie, and it relaxes us and plunges us into pleasant well-being. Blues, jazz, some piano, or even that playlist with our favorite rock or pop singers. What would be wrong with it?

Well, the truth is that it is not as healthy as we thought. What music actually does is leave a mark on the brain. The stimulus forces it to continue processing it for hours. Yes, something ‘bad’ could also alter that sleep architecture in which each stage is decisive to achieve a deep and restful rest.

Those pieces of music, those voices, melodies, and instruments remain in our minds like an echo. It is often transformed into the earworms or musical phenomenon, which translates into the classic song we cannot get out of our heads. It is annoying, disruptive, and can completely disrupt our sleep.

Why Is It Not Good To Listening To Music Before Bed Better Sleep?

The term music or earworm was an expression popularized by Stephen King. As he wrote in a medium, he woke up in the middle of the morning, thirsty and exhausted. The day before, he had donated blood, and he thought that this tiredness and bad rest could be due to it. Suddenly, he realized something when he had some water in his hand.

Indeed, this experience related to the master of terror is a common phenomenon that many of us have ever experienced—all for having stayed the night before listening to music. He was singing over and over again a song he didn’t like. She couldn’t get it out of her head, and it was like a worm running through her mind that she couldn’t stop.

If it is common to suffer from the catchy song phenomenon during the day, it is more troublesome if it happens at night. Let’s delve a little deeper into why it is not good to listen to music before sleep.

A Brain That Never Stops

The brain is the worst workaholic. It is a factory that never closes, a workshop open 24 hours a day, and a computer that never stays on standby. What’s more, if there is something it needs, it is for us to be asleep to carry out decisive tasks of storing and destroying data and cleaning cellular debris.

However, some activities we carry out before sleep make their work difficult. In this way, we were only partially clear now whether listening to music before bedtime benefited him.

It has been the sleep researcher has given us the answer through a study. In reality, playing music while in bed doesn’t relax or promote restful sleep.

The brain will continue to process that music even when we no longer listen to it. The memory is reactivated every so often, and those songs will repetitively return to the memory. It is an endless loop, as exhausting as it is annoying.

Listening To Music Before Bed Better Sleep Improves Your Mood But Does Not Favor Your Rest

This data is important. Something as simple as preparing your favorite playlist, getting comfortable in bed, turning off the lights, and, lastly, your eyes will not make you sleep better. Quite the opposite. It will stimulate your brain to the point of experiencing frequent awakenings.

That is the curious paradox associated with something that pleases us because few experiences are as pleasant as hearing that song that we love so much over and over again. We will feel good, and the worries of the day and the accumulated stress will clear up. However, when you leave your head on the pillow, after a few minutes, your mind will be the one that repeats that song, that music, repeatedly.

What Else Can Disturb Your Sleep At Night?

We know that more than one may not agree with this study. However, sometimes we carry out behaviors that favor a night’s rest when, in reality, we achieve the opposite. It is, therefore, appropriate to consider some practices that might be counterproductive to our sleep:

  • The night snack. Eating, snacking, or preparing that chocolate shake before bed can be very negative.
  • Rest doing series marathons. Although it is true that nothing we want more at night than watching a series or a movie, in reality, nocturnal exposure to screens makes it difficult to rest at night.
  • It has very high or very low temperatures. Sleeping in a room that is very hot or where the temperature is very low is also counterproductive.

In conclusion, now that we know that listening to music before bed isn’t as beneficial as we thought, it’s good to keep one detail in mind. The best sleep hygiene is not to hear or see anything before bed. The brain wants zero stimuli and calm to lead us towards that dream scenario in which we rest as we deserve, and it can work as it needs to.

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