Helps your body to relax – Along with your mind, your body has to be able to relax in order to get to sleep. This means your heart has to be able to beat at a slow, steady pace so that your muscles and body can relax. Music can help if it is slow and matches the rhthym of a calm heart because it can subconsciously slow your breathing so that you reach a semi-meditative state and your muscles stop being tense and relax.
Calms down an overactive mind – Have you ever noticed how your thoughts seem to become abstract and random just as your drifting off to sleep? This is your mind becoming relaxed. It stops focusing on the here and now, but instead starts to delve into the apparent chaos of the subconscious mind. To help your mind get there, it needs to be able to relax. While using music to assist with meditation is a relatively new approach (meditation is traditionally done in complete silence), adopting the practices used by meditators to relax their mind and body can be an effective way of overcoming insomnia. Soft, relaxing music can enable you to calm the mind and to free it to think more freely and in a less ‘present’ active state.
Blanket out background noise - If you live in a busy street, with noisy flatmates or family members watching the TV until late at night, background noise can be a real problem when you are trying to get to sleep. Music can be helpful in providing a blanket of soft noise to replace the background sounds that might be jarring and keeping you awake at night. Another option is to listen to ‘white noise’ that provides a continuous stream of sound that can mask distracting background noise that’s disturbing you from reaching the land of nod.