Music And Your Sleep
Listening to music just before you go to bed could ruin your sleep. This finding comes from a Baylor University psychology professor who was prompted to investigate music’s effect on sleep after he realized he was waking up in the middle of the night with a song stuck in his head, a phenomenon often referred to as having an “earworm”. “The more you listen to music, the more likely you are to catch an earworm that won’t go away at bedtime. When that happens, chances are your sleep is going to suffer,” wrote Michael Scullin, Ph.D. He found that people who experience earworms regularly at night – one or more times per week – are six times as likely to have poor sleep quality compared to people who rarely experience earworms. His study also suggested that it wasn’t necessarily about lyrics, as the results showed that listening to instrumental music led to worse sleep quality – about twice as many earworms.
Source:
Michael K. Scullin, Chenlu Gao, Paul Fillmore. “Bedtime Music, Involuntary Musical Imagery, and Sleep.” Psychological Science, 2021; 095679762198972 DOI: 10.1177/0956797621989724
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