Over recent years, research has cemented sleep as one of the most important aspects of our health. Something as simple as how you sleep can influence your risk of major health problems, ranging from cardiovascular diseases to dementia.
But shut-eye also plays a role in your cognitive function, hormone regulation and quite frankly, the day that follows as a restless night always feels awful.
From staying away from screens before bedtime to using light to reset my internal clock first thing in the morning, I’ve been working hard to improve my sleep over the past three months.
But despite my best attempts, one thing kept disturbing my slumber – noise. I live by a busy road so the sounds of sirens, engines and gears shifting often echo through my bedroom all night.
To make matters worse, my bedroom ceiling started leaking a month ago. And my sleep duration kept getting progressively worse, one drop of water against my bedroom floor at a time.
The leak has also invited constructors onto my roof, seemingly hampering every chance of a quality shut-eye or lie-in I had left.
I’m what Nicole Vignola, a neuroscientist, calls a light sleeper – a person who is more sensitive to sounds when asleep. Whether you are disrupted by something minor like the sound of dripping water like me or sleep through anything, your brain still needs to filter out sounds to maintain uninterrupted sleep.
Vignola explained that the greater the amount of environmental noise, the harder your brain needs to work to filter it out. What’s worse, excessive and prolonged noise can disrupt sleep cycles, leading to impaired cognitive function, memory consolidation, increased stress levels, and even mental health problems.
As impaired cognitive function and increased stress levels have certainly become a part of my daily routine, I didn’t hesitate for a second when I got the opportunity to try out noise-reducing earplugs from Loop.
“Crafted with a focus on both shape and comfort”, the soft silicone earplugs promise to reduce the noise by up to 26 decibels. I was hoping that this simple hack could relieve the burden on my brain to filter the various noises that crop up in my bedroom throughout the night.
Full of anticipation, I opened the small white box that was gifted to me by Loop to kick off the first night of this experiment. I must admit that I was instantly surprised once I placed the earplugs into my ears. I expected Loop Quiet to filter out more noise, yet I was still able to hear the sounds coming from the road.
However, I did notice a difference in how I perceived my close surroundings. I couldn’t hear the dripping of water so clearly and the podcast playing in the background on my partner’s phone became muffled.
I also have to confess that I was struggling to get used to the earplugs in my ears and had to move them around a fair amount to find a comfortable position.
I went to bed feeling a bit sceptical, but when I woke up the next morning, I realised I slept throughout the whole night. This was the first night in weeks that I had uninterrupted sleep.
I was keen to see if the earplugs would stand the test the next night as well, and they did. I slept throughout the night again.
Looking back on the week in which I was trialling the earplugs, I realised that I actually had one of the best sleeps I had in weeks. I even managed to find a good way to put them into my ears to reduce the discomfort to a minimum. And I learned to appreciate that I could still hear things like my alarm in the morning.
Despite the initial fear of them not being noise-reducing enough and some minor discomfort, Loop Quiet has grown on me. The earplugs certainly improved my sleep, and even though my week is up now, I’m still reaching for them every night.
