Possibility of Sleep Induction using Auditory Stimulation based on Mental States

TL;DR

This study explores how different auditory stimuli, tailored to mental states, can effectively induce sleep, with findings indicating white noise and rainy sounds are particularly beneficial for sleep induction.

Contribution

It introduces a method to select auditory stimuli based on mental states to improve sleep induction effectiveness.

Findings

Good sleep group fell asleep more with white noise and rainy sounds.

Rainy sounds helped subjects fall asleep when sham failed.

Auditory stimulation effectiveness varies with mental states.

Abstract

Sleep has a significant role to maintain our health. However, people have struggled with sleep induction because of noise, emotion, and complicated thoughts. We hypothesized that there was more effective auditory stimulation to induce sleep based on their mental states. We investigated five auditory stimulation: sham, repetitive beep, binaural beat, white noise, and rainy sounds. The Pittsburgh sleep quality index was performed to divide subjects into good and poor sleep groups. To verify the subject's mental states between initiation of sessions, a psychomotor vigilance task and Stanford sleepiness scale (SSS) were performed before auditory stimulation. After auditory stimulation, we asked subjects to report their sleep experience during auditory stimulation. We also calculated alpha dominant duration that was the period that represents the wake period during stimulation. We showed that there were no differences in reaction time and SSS between sessions. It indicated sleep experience is not related to the timeline. The good sleep group fell asleep more frequently than the poor sleep group when they hear white noise and rainy sounds. Moreover, when subjects failed to fall asleep during sham, most subjects fell asleep during rainy sound (Cohen's kappa: -0.588). These results help people to select suitable auditory stimulation to induce sleep based on their mental states.