Music and Sleep: Can YouTube Music Help You Sleep Better?

Music is a powerful art tool, not just for entertainment. It was used in the past as a tool to treat several diseases, address societal problems, and connect people from different cultures and walks of life. With time, music has become more useful and is currently used due to its sleep benefits that help listeners fall asleep faster and also get better sleep quality.

Nowadays, finding the music of any genre is easy thanks to the introduction of music streaming platforms like YouTube. For example, you can find deep sleep music on YouTube for free in a matter of minutes. All you need is a mobile device, tablet, TV, or computer with internet access to enjoy a variety of music on YouTube. But how exactly does music help listeners fall asleep, and most importantly, what type of music is best for sleep? Keep reading this article to find out, and when you’re finished read our other YouTube guides:

Table of Contents

Why Does Music Help You Fall Asleep?

Whether you are a parent or not, you have probably seen music’s effect on babies, especially infants. Once rhythmic music or a lullaby starts playing, crying babies become calm and fall asleep shortly after. But it doesn’t stop there; even adults can and do benefit from better sleep quality after listening to sleep music.

In another study targeting adults, listeners claimed to have experienced better sleep quality after listening to music for approximately 45 minutes before going to sleep. Even better, the benefits showed a cumulative effect, with the study participants reporting to have slept better after listening to music every day before going to sleep. If you suffer from a lack of sleep or insomnia, music can help decrease the time you spend awake waiting to feel sleepy. This was realized after a study on women with insomnia showed that incorporating music into their evening routine shortened the time it took them to fall asleep from about 27-69 minutes to just 6-13 minutes.

Music is simply powerful. Researchers found it to have diverse effects on the mind and body. It can influence breathing and heart rate and trigger the body to release hormones, stimulating the body’s immune system, brain waves, and emotional responses.

For example, the release of a hormone called dopamine after listening to sleep music can boost good feelings during bedtime, reducing stress, pain, and other issues related to sleep problems. After listening to music, your autonomic nervous system relaxes, leading to a slower heartbeat, breathing rate, and blood pressure, which improves sleep quality.

Music also helps drown out environmental factors that hinder sleep. Examples are noise from cars, airplanes, and neighbors shouting or arguing. These environmental factors can also be detrimental to your health as they are not only linked to sleep inefficiency but also to cardiovascular diseases. If you suffer from anxiety, listening to music can help.

What Kind of Music Is Best for Sleep?

Music is powerful because it doesn’t always trigger the same reaction. Instead, there are a variety of music genres with different melodies, rhythms, and tempos, each triggering different reactions. The reactions can be emotional, cognitive, or bodily. For example, listening to classical music that you used to enjoy when young can trigger your childhood memories. That’s because the mind can associate music with memories familiar to us by activating parts of the brain, like the hippocampus, which processes memories.

Listening to rhythmic sleep music on YouTube can help you fall asleep by:

Slowing down breathing
Lowering heart rate
Reduce blood pressure
Relieve anxiety and stress
Calm the nervous system
Ease muscle tension
Trigger the release of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and other sleep-friendly hormones while reducing sleep-stifling hormones like cortisol

Simply put, listening to sleep-friendly music can help your body and mind to tune into sleep mode, so you don’t spend too much time awake, waiting for sleep to kick in.

Best Music to Listen to on YouTube When Sleeping?

When looking for or designing a sleep playlist on YouTube, one of the most important things to consider is the song’s tempo. Tempo is the speed at which a song plays, and it’s usually measured in “beats per minute,” often abbreviated to BPM. A song with a slow BPM is best suited for sleeping. You should thus consider songs with 60-100 BPM. If you don’t know which songs to choose, here are a few to start with:

Madonna – Bedtime Story

You probably know of Madonna. She’s a famous musician. Her song, “bedtime story,” is a 90s classic that will help you sleep soundly at night. For this song, Madonna uses hazy vocals that make the song bubbly and ambient, thus ideal for unwinding and sleeping.

Norah Jones – Don’t Know Why

This song is perhaps one of Norah’s finest works, which can be attested by the fact that it shot to the top of the charts in 2002. However, the song still remains a masterpiece more than two decades later. You’ll definitely enjoy adding it to your YouTube playlist; her smooth, velvety vocals and piano production makes it relaxing.

Sufjan Stevens – The Dress Looks Nice on You

Similar to the other two we’ve mentioned, Sufjan Stevens’ “the dress looks nice on you” is a song meant to put listeners in a relaxed, slumbery mood. Like instrumental music, it has soft guitar sounds that blend perfectly with the musician’s voice.

Charlie XCX and Carly Rae Jepsen – Backseat

If you know Charlie XCX, you might be surprised to find one of their songs in this list since most of their songs are up-tempo party bangers. But, on the contrary, “backseat” is a slow jam with heavy synths and auto-tuned casings that make it suitable for sleep.

Rihanna – Same Ol’ Mistakes

Rihanna has a lot of popular songs, so unsurprisingly, one of her tracks made it to our list. “Same ol’ mistakes” is soft and airy; it’s a song that shouldn’t be missing from your sleep playlist.

ASMR

There are still other good sleep songs that should be on the list that we have not mentioned. There are too many to mention exhaust. You can do your research and add the ones you like the most to your playlist. We can’t conclude the list without including ASMR channels and videos among the best music for sleep.

Some of the best ASMR channels with videos and vocals that will put you to sleep quickly are Julia’s “itsblitzzz,” Trisha Paytas’ “channel water,” and Karuna Satori ASMR. Watch videos from these channels, and you will struggle to stay awake shortly after.

Conclusion

Listening to music has a lot of benefits to our mental and physical state. Add slow, rhythmic, and instrumental music to your YouTube sleep playlist, and you won’t have to take sleep medicine to help you fall asleep at night. Apart from music, you can try out ASMR videos and white and brown noises to help you fall asleep. You don’t have to settle for the few sleep songs we listed; there is quite a number we haven’t listed. Just search for “sleep music” on YouTube and add the ones you like to your playlist.