Demystifying Science | The Risks of White Noise

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“Are ‘white noise’ devices, which are supposed to help you sleep, dangerous?”

Emma Boileau

Studies on the subject are inconclusive, but concerns remain for babies.

“White noise can help babies sleep,” says Isaac Erbele, an otolaryngologist at U.S. Army Brooke Medical Center in Texas who is the lead author of a literature review published last winter in the journal Sleep Medicine. “But animal studies seem to show that for babies, the moderate level of white noise machines would generate noises that are too loud.”

White noise can include waves or wind. A decade ago, the American Psychological Association sounded the alarm after a study showed that the maximum level of some of these devices exceeded U.S. workplace safety standards.

After that 2014 wake-up call, renewed interest in the issue led to more research. In 2020, a general literature review of white noise machines concluded that neither their harms nor their benefits have been convincingly established. “We don’t know whether these devices help you sleep, and we don’t know whether they can be harmful to your hearing,” says Mathias Basner, an epidemiologist at the University of Pennsylvania who was the lead author of the 2020 study, published in the journal Sleep Medicine Review.

Most studies on the dangers of these devices have compared their noise levels to public health standards. “Since we know that babies are generally more fragile, it stands to reason that they are more vulnerable,” says Dr.^r Basner: So we don’t recommend the highest volume levels on these devices. And generally speaking, if the difficulty is limited to falling asleep, rather than staying asleep, we should use a timer so that the device turns off instead of leaving it on all night.”

The D^r Basner has just finished collecting data for a study of 26 people in a sleep lab. Recordings taken in a house near an airport were used. A third of the subjects slept normally, another group wore earplugs and a final group listened to white noise. The data should be available in the first half of 2025.

Another priority area of ​​study is the actual use of these devices by the population, according to D^r Erbele: “Are they used continuously during the night, or just to fall asleep?” he wonders. “Are they used every day?”

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