What’s New in Psychology?
A Sleeping Pill Versus Music as an Insomnia Treatment
Jim Windell
More than a third of all adults will experience insomnia at some time this year. According to the CDC, as many as 30 percent of adults say they get less than the recommended hours of sleep at night. And the Sleep Foundation reports that 50 to 70 million people in the U.S. have ongoing sleep problems. Not getting enough sleep is linked to various chronic diseases. To deal with their sleep problems, more than 20 million adults in this country take sleep medications most nights.
To say that sleep is a concern for a significant number of Americans is an understatement. Which is why so many of us various stratagems to get the quality sleep we crave. But what is the best method for getting better sleep and for treating insomnia?
That’s a question that Jesse Koskey had. Koskey is a psychiatrist in the UC Davis Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He decided to study whether listening to music was better than a sleeping pill. The results of his study were published in the Carlat Report recently. Koskey went into his studies with the idea that behavioral changes, and not medications, are the best approach to improving sleep. This is why he was interested in learning more about music for sleep.
What Koskey found was that listening to music reduces the overall severity of insomnia, improves sleep quality and helps to initiate sleep. The effect was comparable to prescription sleep medications, such as the Z-drugs and benzodiazepines.
“Music is a low-cost, accessible, and effective treatment for insomnia,” Koskey says. “The only side effect I came across was the ‘earworm effect,’ where a song gets stuck in your head.”
Koskey explains that sleep music playlists, like those found on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music and others, tend to feature slow-tempo, ethereal music. He says that these slower-tempo songs are thought to produce an effect known as “entrainment.” Entrainment is when your body synchronizes with your environment or another person, such as falling into step when you walk with a friend. The same entrainment can happen with music. Music around 60 beats per minute (bpm), which is the same as a relaxed heart, can entrain the rest-and-digest part of your nervous system (the parasympathetic system), leading to a slower, more relaxed heart rate. In addition to slowing your heart rate, research has shown that relaxing music can also reduce blood pressure in listeners.
For instance, the ambient music trio Marconi Union set out to entrain relaxation through their composition “Weightless.” The piece starts at 60 bmp and gradually slows over the next eight minutes to finish at 50 bpm. A small study of healthy volunteers demonstrated that listening to “Weightless” reduced blood pressure and anxiety. In the studies Koskey looked at, the participants preferred familiar tunes without lyrics and songs with slow tempos, regular rhythms, bass tones and tranquil melodies. But Koskey reports that you don’t have to listen to slow ethereal music to get sleepy unless that’s what you like.
“A lot of studies include relaxing classical or ambient songs,” he says. “But one study showed that the music participants picked out themselves – including video game and pop music – helped just as much as an album called ‘The Most Relaxing Classical Music.”
Finally, Koskey points out that there is no one way to listen to music when you are trying to get to sleep. Headphones work as well as speakers. Some of the study participants listened to music for 30 to 60 minutes while others listened all night.
“The gist is that there's no wrong way to try music as a sleep aid,” Koskey concludes. “And it's likely to help with mild sleep problems.”
To read the full report, find it with this reference:
Koskey, J. (2023). Music for Sleep. The Carlat Report: Psychiatry. Available at: https://www.thecarlatreport.com/ext/resources/2023/04/10/TCPR_AprMay2023_for-posting.pdf?1681402406
