Has your spouse tried using Breathe Right strips at night? It’s a simple solution that worked for me.
Can you please tell more about this?
Elbow them in the ribs and tell them to shut up.
This is what my wife does.
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More about…what?
I’ve had the good fortune of working with folks in the PPE category. @Pottery is raising a key point. If you’re talking one-time disposable foam plugs, the key is to make sure you’re inserting them into your ears correctly. This means rolling them into ‘cigars’ before inserting into your ears and letting them expand naturally. Also helps to pull back gently on your earlobe, using the opposite hand reaching behind the back of your head as you’re doing so.
I recommend trying out noise-canceling headphones or earbuds. They use advanced technology to actively block out external sounds, providing a more peaceful sleep environment.
There are a number of different buds on the market that are quite small and designed for sleeping. They work quite well.
Personally, I use just one bud at a time and place it on my “outside” ear since I am a side-sleeper. If and when I roll over, I usually just swap ears.other times I am sleeping so well I don’t notice and still rarely have any discomfort.
I started the “one ear” protocol because the buds I was using did not have the battery life to go through the night. So if I woke up in the middle of the night (which I always do) I would swap out the buds. However, I discovered that this worked really well for me in general since I could still be aware of stuff in the night (sick kid, dog whining to go out, etc).
The newer buds can go 8 hours on a charge so I don’t have to worry about swapping them out in the middle of the night.
I have been sleeping with earbuds for quite a few years now, starting with corded buds….about 3 years ago I started with BT buds.
If you do the “one ear” method, it helps to find buds that are are a somewhat universal fit. I am currently using buds from a company called Bonamour. I have both the regular ones and the Pro. The Pro buds are a little smaller and also bit more side-specific, but I can use them in either ear regardless. You can find similar, cheaper options on Amazon, but the ones I have tried have all had the charging case fail within a few months. (However, it appears Bonamour uses the same factory based on design)
For me, it isn’t necessarily about noise cancellation but distraction. I tend to have a “busy mind” when I go to sleep and these help distract me. I put on a podcast and I am asleep within 5 minutes, usually less. Set the timer on the app to turn off in 30 minutes. When I wake up (old man bladder), I just repeat the process once I get back in bed.
They have significantly helped improve the quality of my sleep.
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CPAP machine. You can buy them without going to a physician, but they can be ridiculously pricey.
Bose had a pair that they discontinued early last year. They won a bunch of awards and were reviewed fairly well, but Bose dropped them. Apparently they didn’t sell quite enough tomake them worth continuing.
I guess people can get comfortable with anything over time, but I think of a picture of Alex Van Halen with headphones duct taped to his head when I thing of people wearing them to sleep in. UNCOMFORTABLE! Separate bedrooms, or banishing them to the living room? Actually elevated sleeping positions can lessen/eliminate the snoring. (Sleep Number beds are NOT the answer)
No actual knowledge here, but from my market analysis, the Bose options had a fundamental flaw - they were not compatible with music or podcast apps. You could only listen to their sound library or just the white noise cancelling sound.
But I did not see that as a problem. People were buying them to help them ‘go to sleep’, not keep themselves focused on whatever they were listening to. It doesn’t make sense to have them be able to function as a standard Bluetooth set. I mean, shorts will cover your butt, but wearing them to a black tie event will not work well unless you intend to flip off the function.
I think Bose’s problem is they kept the price high (like they do with everything) and thought that their name alone would sell them to people. Apparently it hurt some people at Bose and they took their ball and went home rather than reducing the price. I too did some basic research, and those buds had a devoted fan base that was shocked that they were cancelled. Some are still holding out for the rumored ‘next gen’ version that never showed up.
Oh, no doubt the high price was a factor…but I think that bolsters my argument, too. If someone is gonna spend that much money on a pair of ear buds, you would think that they would have the basic functionality of regular ear buds since they are at a premium over something like AirPod Pros, which also have noise cancelling.
But ‘Bose’. If they worked, and apparently they did, they are like a tool to me. I will pay more for a ‘tool’ that is quality, will last, and does the job. I just waited too long to do it. (I wonder if the pandemic also helped kill them, the world will never know)
But Bose is like Sony in the day, and yes, Apple too. Oh, and clothing too. Most of what people are paying for is the name. The name doesn’t mean it really is better than the ‘other guys’, but it does mean that you can have some (self delusional?) cache for being ‘dumb enough’ to pay that money. But for the Speed Buds not having BT functionality, I would not be surprised to have people carping because they can’t use them all day and not have them last until they fall asleep because the battery dies. Like I said, they were made for a purpose, and making them ‘normal’ wouldn’t work so well… Keeping them specialized played into their demise, but yadda yadda yadda…
‘We’ used all kinds of things to provide some kind of ‘white noise’ to help with sleeping, and found a pedestal fan that is just noisy enough to block out a lot of the IRL noise. It was cheap, it also moves the air around, and it just was something that works. We have even traveled with a small Vornado fan and it seems to work just as well, just a little bulky. But I find sleeping without anything while traveling seems to work better, but the wife disagrees. (The best sleep I’ve had while traveling was at Kona Village with the horny frogs and other wildlife advertising all night. The wife sat up all that first night not able to sleep through the cacophony of nature. (It rained the next night and worked for both of us)
But, on last thing: We tried a fancy ‘computer white noise’ machine, and what drove me nuts with it was the ‘pattern’ in the advertised ‘random sound’. My sleeping mind identified the loop length in the programming of all of their loops and it started to drive me round the bend. I ended up tossing the damn thing. It seems weird that would be a problem, but it was.