Sound Asleep
Written by Lyz Cooper, Therapeutic Music Advisor at Zepp Aura
- Barriers to Getting Good and Healthy Sleep
Getting a good night’s sleep is essential for health and wellbeing and it is well-known that one of the main barriers to getting a good night’s sleep is stress. Stress and sleep are closely related — stress adversely affects sleep and poor-quality sleep leads to elevated stress levels.
2. The Effects of Stress on Sleep
When we are under stress, the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) switches on, engaging our ‘fight or flight mode’. In this mode, our heart rate and blood pressure increases, our muscles tense and our anxiety levels rise as the adrenal glands release hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. It is no surprise that being in this state is not conducive to getting a good night’s sleep.
3. The Solution to Refreshing Sleep
The therapeutic music on the Zepp Aura is designed by expert musicians and therapeutic music designers. Care is taken to deliver unique music specific to your needs and to enable you to relax more deeply by switching off the sympathetic ‘fight/flight’ branch of the nervous system (SNS) and activate the ‘rest-digest’ para-sympathetic nervous system (PSNS). This is done through careful placement of certain sounds that encourage the breathing to slow down through the ability of the brain has to synchronize to the external stimulus which is called ‘auditory driving’ or ‘entrainment’.
Once the PSNS is engaged the music helps you to enter what is known as an Altered State of Consciousness (ASC). An ASC is a natural everyday occurrence that happens when the brainwaves slip into a lower frequency. As a result, we feel deeply relaxed and daydreamy and can easily fall asleep. This state also helps us to integrate many of the events of the day, which helps switch off a busy mind and prevents us from waking in the middle of the night worrying about unnecessary things.
For further reading on brainwave entrainment and altered states of consciousness and music for sleep, see below:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1389945719301820
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/56a2/10a16b308e0bbf7961cdae081ef3d518cc13.pdf
