And yet the conclusion is about pink noise vs silence. We may have a new textbook example of HARKing right here!

>The participants reported not previously using noise to help them sleep or having any sleep disorders.

All this study said was that people who didn't need noise to sleep had their sleep disrupted when noise was introduced. It has absolutely no implication for people who use noise to help them sleep.

Meaningless trash.

Eh. People condition to an environment, and someone conditioned to something like pink noise wouldn't have the acclimation issue, and it might drown out smaller environmental noises that otherwise would have disrupted their sleep. It would take a much longer study to determine this.

Or hey, maybe those insecure sleep masks tracking EEG and other things will give us some insights eventually. People just need to harvest the data from the other services.

Absurdly low n. Additionally, I've become very skeptical of anything coming out of sleep labs after my wife was sent to one (at a prestigious teaching hospital) by her doctor some years ago: the 'sleep opportunity' was lights out at 9pm for 8 hours, and the staff were wholly indifferent to the fact that she's a night owl and prefers to sleep after midnight. Additionally she reported that it was not particularly quiet or dark.

I am not a fan of noise machines but I have noticed that I sleep best on rainy nights, which has a similar average sound spectrum, and is about the same as the sound of your blood circulating near your eardrums. Testing pink noise along with aircraft noise (which is closer to red noise) is equivalent to just making the noise level higher with slightly more midrange energy. Some noise can be relaxing for light sleepers; too much is just annoying.