Back To Sleep Music

A Potentially Important Ingredient in the Recipe for Good Sleep (and Hence Less Symptoms)

One of the things that a Parkinson's diagnosis taught me is the vital importance of good sleep, and why, and how, to prioritize it for health and for symptom reduction. Due to my sleep/insomnia being so bad that it was significantly making my symptoms worse, I spent a lot of time researching sleep and implementing things by trial and error to find out what worked for me. One thing I am pleased with myself about is that I managed to fix this, getting to a stage where I was consistently falling asleep fast and not wake up until morning.

Over the past couple of months, I noticed sleep started to worsen again, first by waking in the night from nightmares, sometimes starting to have whole body shaking for a few minutes after I woke up, but initially able to get back to sleep. Then it became waking with high anxiety, heart pounding, leading to anxious thoughts and harder to get back to sleep. Then a more rapid decline over the last couple of weeks of not being able to fall asleep in the first place.

So I took stock of what I was and wasn't doing compared to when I first fixed my sleep, and realized I had totally stopped having a specific youtube track of sleep music [the one below] playing quietly in the room on a speaker all night. The reason I stopped this was that it wasn't doing my phone much good to have it on all night. Stopping it at the time didn't seem to have any immediate impairment on my sleep. However, I watch a lot of youtube on my TV these days, and wondered if it was possible to play it on the TV instead and turn the screen off. There is indeed an "audio only" option with my TV.

So I have tried playing the music through the night this way, and hey presto! Back to falling asleep quickly, not waking up from nightmares with heart pounding in chest, and indeed sleeping until morning. The benefits on symptom reduction are very apparent, after the negative impacts of the previous sleepless nights. [The only pitfall I found to playing it via the TV, was that when in audio mode the TV had a flashing LED - also not good for sleep. I put masking tape over it and that seems to have cured that problem.]

So it seems like the sleep music was an integral part of re-training my nervous system to be able to sleep in the first place, but after I stopped this practice, its effects slowly, but then more rapidly, wore off!

For readers from the Parkinson’s diagnosed community, my colleague

Lilian Sjøberg

of

The HOPE shortcut

is about to start the 3rd iteration (Summer 2025) of her course “Overcome Parkinson’s”, get an informational video about this: