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Use a White Noise App When Traveling
Hotels don’t care about your 3 a.m. hallway noise... Your phone can.
The facts
White-noise apps turn a chaotic hotel room into a predictable sound blanket. The data say they help you fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer.
In a 2017 randomized controlled trial, researchers cut sleep-onset latency by 38 % when subjects slept with broadband white noise instead of ambient sound.
A 2021 study of New Yorkers battling city roar found that white-noise machines significantly reduced wake after sleep onset (WASO) and improved subjective sleep latency, with a strong, but not statistically significant, uptick in objective sleep efficiency.
Hospital evidence backs it up: coronary-care patients exposed to 50–60 dB white noise kept their total sleep time steady (~6.7 h) instead of losing almost two hours overnight.
Why does it work?
Constant broadband noise “fills” the sound spectrum, masking sudden peaks (slamming doors, street honks) so they never cross your brain’s wake-up threshold.
This masking raises the acoustic arousal threshold, meaning louder intrusions are required to trigger cortical arousal and micro-wakes.
Steady noise may also promote neural synchrony through stochastic resonance, nudging the brain more quickly into stable N2 sleep and reducing latency.
How to implement it?
Download a reputable white-noise app (e.g., Dark Noise, Noisli, or simply the “fan” toggle in your phone’s clock).
Set volume just above the background hum, if you need to raise your voice, it’s too loud.
Pick “plain white” for maximum masking, or try pink/brown if harsh high frequencies bug you.
Run it all night (headphones optional) and keep your phone in airplane mode to avoid dings.
Hotel room hack: place the phone speaker facing the hallway door to block footsteps first.
Your turn!
Give it a spin tonight and tell me tomorrow if the static stole your jet-lag thunder. Bet you know a buddy who needs this, forward it his way.
That was your tip of the day. You’re welcome! 🤝
Mensletter Team.