Many people listen to music before bed to relax. However, a new study suggests that doing this can seriously compromise our night’s rest. Can listening to music really make our sleep suffer?
A team of psychology and neuroscience researchers from Baylor University and publishing their study in the journal Pscyhological Science, investigated the relationship between listening to music and sleeping, focusing on a rarely explored mechanism: involuntary musical images, or “earworms,” as well. called “cognitive itch”, when a song or melody is repeated over and over in our head without us being able to do much to remedy it. These events often happen while we are awake, but Michael K. Scullin, leader of the present study, found that they can also occur while we are trying to sleep, causing poorer sleep.
The experts concluded that the sleeping brain continues to process music for several hours after turning off the player, mobile phone, speaker …
For the studio, led by Michael Scullin, they used three very catchy songs: ‘Shake It Off’ by Taylor Swift, ‘Call Me Maybe’ by Carly Rae Jepsen and ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey.
“Almost everyone thought that music improved their sleep, but we found that those who listened to more music slept worse,” said the researcher. “Our brains continue to process music even when it’s not playing, even apparently while we’re asleep. Everyone knows that listening to music makes you feel good. Teens and young adults routinely listen to music around bedtime. But if you have too much of a good thing … the more music you listen to, the more likely you are to end up with an earworm that won’t go away at bedtime. “When that happens, sleep is likely to be affected,” Scullin clarifies.
Surprisingly, the study found that certain instrumental music is more likely to produce earworms and alter sleep quality than lyrical music. “What was really surprising was that instrumental music led to poorer sleep quality ; instrumental music produces about twice as many ‘earworms’,” Scullin said.
The study involved both a survey and a laboratory experiment. The survey had 209 participants answering a series of questions about sleep quality, music listening habits, and the frequency of these “earmorms,” including how often they experienced this incessant humming while trying to fall asleep. They woke up in the middle of the night and immediately after waking up in the morning.
For the experiment, 50 participants were taken to Scullin’s Sleep Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory at Baylor, where the research team attempted to induce earworms to determine how they affected sleep quality. Polysomnography, a comprehensive test and the gold standard measure for sleep, was used to record the brain waves, heart rate and breathing of the participants while they slept.
“We randomly assigned the participants to listen to the original versions of those songs or the instrumental versions without lyrics of the songs. Participants answered if and when they experienced this unstoppable hum of songs. We then looked at whether that affected their nighttime sleep physiology. People who got an earworm had more difficulty falling asleep, more nighttime awakenings, and spent more time in light sleep stages. “
The results were very similar in both the survey and the experimental study.
Referencia: Bedtime Music, Involuntary Musical Imagery, and Sleep Michael K. Scullin, Chenlu Gao, Paul Fillmore First Published June 9, 2021 Research Article https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797621989724
