Abstract
Sleep is vital for human health and wellbeing, and sleep disturbances are comorbid to many mental and physiological disorders. Music consistently improves subjective sleep quality, whereas results for objective sleep parameters diverge. These inconsistencies might be due to inter-individual differences. Here, 27 female subjects listened to either music or a control text before a 90 minutes nap in a within-subjects design. We show that music improved subjective sleep quality as compared to the text condition. In all participants, music resulted in a reduced amount of sleep stage N1 during the nap. In addition, music significantly increased the amount of slow-wave sleep (SWS) and increased the low/high frequency power ratio. However, these effects occurred only in participants with a low suggestibility index. We conclude that listening to music before a nap can improve subjective and objective sleep parameters in some participants.
Highlights
Sleep plays an important role for maintaining physical and mental health[1,2,3,4,5], and is critical for general well-being[6,7]
This paper points towards the possibilities that the effects of music on objective sleep parameters might depend on certain individual differences
In a series of studies[29], we have shown that hypnotic suggestion to sleep deeper increases deep slow-wave sleep (SWS) and slow wave activity (SWA) in high suggestible healthy participants
Summary
Sleep plays an important role for maintaining physical and mental health[1,2,3,4,5], and is critical for general well-being[6,7]. The positive effects of listening to music on subjective ratings of sleep quality are well established across different age groups including both healthy participants and patients.
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