Can white noise really make you calm?

This post was written by a former client who reached out about creating this white noise album.  I use the playlist often when I'm trying to work or relax! Give it a try via the link below in the post.  ~Courtney


​ Guest post written by: Kaveh Akaber
 
I’m a filmmaker and composer and have professionally experimented with sound all my adult life and nighttime has always been a creative playground for me. But after our first child, I was struggling to fix my random sleep, take care of my child and try to be creative all at the same time. After years of insomnia, I collapsed. My body said stop. Not even music could calm my senses and make me go to sleep. Doctors advised me to take heavy sleeping pills, but after several weeks I stopped. Before I went to bed, I had a feeling of panic and couldn’t calm myself. This reminded me also of my newborn baby that didn’t have the right tools to calm down before sleep. 

I have tried various methods to deal with this issue for many years.  At one point I was reading an article about different sound therapies. How sound and music could redeem Alzheimer’s patients to start remember again and other sounds that can make you sleep easier. It was during this time I started to look for different methods of white noise sound therapy to deal with my burnt-out state of mind. 
 
Sounds are actually ancient life hacks to make you go to sleep. People have used their vacuum cleaner to make noise and get their babies to go to sleep, driving cars for hours, or listening to static on old radios through the whole night. In all of these sounds, you have white noise. Actually, everywhere you go there is noise. Different noise can also be described in various colors depending on which frequency they have. Light waterfalls can be described as pink noise, and heavy waves on sea can be described as brown noise and so on. In my opinion the problem is our surrounding is based on artificial environments with too many sounds that interfere with our senses. We start looking for total silence instead of relaxing or going into deep meditation. But if you think about it, total silence is an even more unnatural state of mind. In our evolution, our minds have developed in light sounds in surroundings. For example, sleeping under the stars, listening to the wind, or sleeping near the sea. White noise can be discovered in all of these natural environments. 

According to professor Göran Söderlund at Lund´s University, if your body is too tired before sleep you can have a sense of panic stress instead and to fall asleep can take a longer time. Especially babies who don’t have the tool to deal with this issue. White Noise can instead increase the state of alertness and make you more awake and then make you tired quicker and put you to sleep.

So, what noise works for you? There are loads of poor recordings and sounds out there, so therefore I started to make my own noises. I created this Relaxing White Noise Sounds for Baby Sleep album inspired by these events and my friend encouraged me to produce one album especially for his baby. I calibrated the white noise with sound recording pulses from other space, the seaside from south Sweden, winds from the mountains in north Scandinavia, and a hairdryer at home. In my studio I almost fell asleep during experimenting with these sounds! So, I thought this might work! This will definitely not solve all your issues with sleeping and a troubled mind, but maybe a good way to make it easier. A strange mind is a strange mind. The only thing you can do is deal with it.
 
 
/Kaveh Akaber
 

Link to the album Relaxing White Noise Sounds for Baby Sleep: 
https://open.spotify.com/album/4zdA0jutWM8NmHmOhLFcSE?si=7m3tRtUlT5GSVzNcGIZOvg

White noise can be a great part to a perfect bedroom environment.  Read more about a great room environment for sleep here.