Is a white noise machine worth buying for light sleepers?
Getting a good night's sleep in a multi-unit building will require a few electronics and tough conversations with early birds
I woke up, grinning and ready to grab a plate of Christmas lasagna. For three quarters of my life, our family made this dish every Christmas Eve. Until I became a vegetarian in my early 20s, I was in charge of defrosting and frying all of the meat. My brother was in charge of shredding cheese. When I switched to a plant-based diet, my new job was sauce, seasoning and noodles. Then, me, my mother and my brother would stand in an assembly line to layer each aluminum pan with all of the ingredients.
My mother would then wrap up each platter (other family members and friends pre-requested their own pan over the holidays) and bake them overnight so they were ready on Christmas morning. And at some insanely early Christmas hour, my father would wake up with roosters and wash all the dishes we’d left behind on Christmas Eve.
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As far as I was aware, nothing had changed on this particular Christmas Day. But when I walked out of my childhood bedroom and looked around for lasagna, all the kitchen windows were cracked and it was chilly. (No one who is sane rolls windows up during a Chicago winter.) I found my parents and asked where the lasagna was, and they both looked at me and my older brother like we had five heads.
Apparently, the two of us slept through a mild fire from dripping meat grease in one lasagna pan, windows being shoved open and doors opened to let out the smoke. At one point, the smoke was apparently so bad that my mother had to sit on the back porch to avoid an asthma attack. My brother and I, bright-eyed and well-rested, hadn’t heard nor smelled a thing. We were the epitome of the TikTok sleepmaxxing* trend without even trying. If our Labrador/German Shepherd mix happened to bark from the basement, we missed that too.
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Clearly, they got the fire under control in enough time to not need the fire department. And wild as it may sound, I sorta miss younger Shamontiel.
Recommended Read: “Soundproof your home to block out noisy neighbors upstairs ~ Get a good night's sleep by soundproofing your condo or apartment”
Why do I miss my younger self? In my teens and 20s, I could easily get eight hours of sleep no matter what was going on. I’m not sure why and how it happened to ruin my sleepmaxxing, but I’ve become a light sleeper since my mid-30s, and it’s wearing on my sleeping habits in my early 40s.
An overnight visit with my parents felt like I was on a Tom Joyner cruise. The only way to get through it was to damn near suffocate myself with a pillow to block out all the noise of my father doing simple things like opening an ironing board or my mother tapping away on her smartphone while playing Words With Friends. And the sound of that crazy “anh anh anh” alarm in my old bedroom made me want to grab my covers and sleep in their garage.
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As an inexplicably light sleeper, I had to make a few changes in my own home so I didn’t feel like there was a parade going on whenever my early bird condo neighbors woke up.
First, I got rid of that Sanatic “anh anh anh” alarm clock in 2018 and bought a travel alarm clock that played nature sounds to wake me up. Not only did my InLife Sunrise clock play sounds like ocean waves to make me feel like I was back in Hawaii on my 30th birthday, but I could switch the color of the “sunrise.”
Although that clock has been with me for seven years, I had another problem. How was I supposed to sleep when the alarm ocean waves weren’t playing? Before I adopted a (third) dog, I was already traumatized by the sound of a mouse squeaking on a glue trap in my living room and started purposely playing Lo-Fi music on YouTube to avoid complete silence (and me imagining I had another mouse).
And as much as Lo-Fi music and brown noise was therapeutic on that streaming service, the problem was commercials would randomly blast in the middle of the sleep music AT THE SAME VOLUME. Imagine that Pete Davidson Verizon commercial playing for the 1000th time while you’re trying to rest. (I loved that commercial the first 20 times I saw it. I loathe it now.)
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Now add that frustration to a condo neighbor who thinks all doors are her enemies. She slams lobby doors, her front door, her back door and even the medicine cabinet, and her bathtub speaker conversations sound like she’s in the middle of the Essence Festival.
Something had to give. Lasagna sleep was a thing of the past. Since I had to worry about commercial breaks during YouTube sleep sound audio, I bought a white noise machine, one that played 30 sounds for me to choose from. I knew I would eventually have to have a tough conversation with two neighbors. So, after all that was done, did I finally get some sleep?