We’ve all been there. Bedtime rolls around, you find yourself nestled underneath the covers, and even though you know you should be going to sleep, there’s something keeping you awake.
There are all kinds of things that can make drifting off to sleep difficult; the temperature in the room, the stress from your workday, even your eating habits. Of course, the most annoying sleep disruptions are often the ones you can’t do anything about, including noise.
Noise from your neighbors, noise from the person sleeping next to you, noise from the hustle and bustle going on right outside your window. For a better look at these nighttime noisemakers and the way people cope with them, eachnight conducted a survey of nearly 1,000 people to find out what’s keeping them up at night, how much sleep they’re losing, and how to find peace in a noisy environment.
When asked about some of the most common nighttime noisemakers, 94% of people polled acknowledged having a personal experience with at least one. Led by neighbors (keeping people awake roughly three nights a week), neighbor’s pets, nature, and busy highways accounted for the most frequent disruptions. And while noise from the road, including busy intersections and highways, impacted between 27% and 32% of respondents respectively, having one right outside your bedroom window could be keeping you awake roughly five nights a week on average.
So which of these disruptions will you get used to over time and which will remain a thorn in your bedsheets? Nearly 3 in 4 people who identified noisy highways as keeping them up at night said they ultimately acclimated over time. In contrast, just 43% of people suggested they ever got used to hearing their neighbor’s pets in the middle of the night. In fact, neighbors and their pets were identified both as the loudest and the worst noisemakers people had to deal with.
Whether or not there’s anything you can do to get used to the sounds standing between you and slumber, the average person loses 36 minutes of sleep every night to these nuisance noises. Roughly 1 in 3 people dealing with the sounds of nature, their neighbor’s pets, or a busy intersection admitted to sleeping poorly, and roughly half of those enduring entertainment venues nearby, nature, or a busy intersection say they wake up still feeling tired.
These evening disruptions can be severe enough to influence where we decide to live in the first place. Among people planning on moving in the next year, more than half (59%) said nighttime noises would play a factor in their decision process. Roughly 2 in 3 people living with nighttime noises believed their sleep would improve if they moved somewhere quieter.
Regardless of what’s keeping you up at night, losing z’s isn’t just a problem that starts and stops in the bedroom. Expert analysis shows that frequent sleep disruptions can have a major impact on your physical and mental health, affecting everything from your work performance to your personal relationships.
Getting the right amount of sleep at night doesn’t just make us feel good when we wake up in the morning; it helps to reduce feelings of stress, enhance our cognitive function, boost our memory and immune systems, and even regulate our appetites and eating habits.
If moving somewhere quieter sounds like overkill to get away from the nighttime noisemakers keeping you up at night, you might want to reconsider just how important your beauty sleep is to the rest of your day.
