Dr. Don Wood explains why people need background noise to sleep: it distracts from underlying trauma or ADHD-like avoidance. TV light suppresses melatonin and worsens sleep quality. Overriding your brain's natural progression from beta to alpha to theta to delta waves can cause long-term health problems.
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Quite often I hear people say, I need to listen to TV to fall asleep. I need to have some noise in the background. It's because if their mind doesn't have something to distract it, then they start focusing on the trauma. This is almost sort of the ADHD child that is trying to block out the trauma by focusing on something else. So if the TV is on, they don't have to think about what's wrong or what they're having trouble with. It's just a distraction. Now there are some noise machines that are working on basically retraining the brain to go into a theta brainwave state. So that's a little bit different. Those are sort of frequency brain training. That's not too bad. But the people who say to me, I can't fall asleep without watching tv, it's not the TV that's helping them fall asleep. They just eventually are just numbing themselves and not thinking and they're letting the TV do the thinking for them. So that's really why that would work. But a lot of times that light from the TV is actually affecting the ability of the brain to produce melatonin, which is what you need, the hormone to fall asleep. So that's actually going to affect the whole system. You're not going to get really good sleep. So that's going to affect your health down the road as well. Sleep is a process where you come from beta brain waves to alpha brainwaves to theta brain waves and delta brain waves. It's a progression. The reason people have trouble sleeping is if their mind's in a high beta state, it's very active. They're trying to jump the process of alpha going into theta and trying to force themselves to sleep. So. So if you hack that system of natural sleep, it's going to show up in some form of health issue. You're just really ignoring the true problem. The problem. The chances are coming in from something else that's going on in your life that's not allowing you to naturally sleep. Wouldn't you rather know why as opposed to just trying to override it and work around it?
