Absolute silence. I wear ear plugs. No light, I use a sleep mask. And a weighted blanket, ideally.
Unfortunately this doesn’t always add up to good sleep, because as a chronic insomniac the noise keeping me awake is usually inside my own head.
When I’m really struggling, I can sometimes zone out to music. I’ll pick a band with a big discography so I don’t run out of songs, and just one that I’m really familiar with so that I don’t feel like listening really closely. I’ll use earphones to not bother my husband. I might get some sleep this way, but it’s not good quality. Better than nothing, though.
Any form of continuous or white noise works for me. As a member of the nose-hose-brigade, I breathe through a filtered and moisture-ed setup with my face covered, so fans have no effect on me, but they really mess with my wife’s sinuses - so we use a white-noise machine.
Interesting note: She really gets stopped up under blowing air, and I had to build a small plexiglass shield over her side of the bed in our camper. The ductwork is simply too close in the tighter confines, but we need the A/C most nights.
What? Noise comes in different colors? Off to youtube to check on this…
Box fan. Preferably a low pitch one. I’ve had one since I was a kid. My parents had very loud fights freaquently. Now I have fairly loud tinnitus. I could (and have harmonized to it. Can’t stand it. Hubster also snored horribly before cpap. So I’m truly addicted.
The wiki link is already posted, but I prefer “brown noise” because it sounds most like a heavy rain, waterfall, or rushing rapids. White noise and many of the rest have a tinny sort of timbre that makes me think I need to turn off the TV.
If I could get an actual, non-looped rainstorm in a rainforest on a rainy river, with maybe bug and frog noises, that would be ideal. But my loop sensitivity would catch anything that repeats more frequently than an hour or so. I’m cursed with whatever is the sound equivalent of photographic memory, I get severe earworms constantly.
I have the ability to fall asleep almost any time, any place, in nearly any position (other than standing). One year in college, I lived in an apartment where my bedroom window faced a rail line that was probably only 75 feet away. There was a railway crossing about 100 yards down the line, so we not only got trains rumbling past many times a day, but the sounds of the crossing alarms, too. I think it took me less than a week to be able to sleep through all that.
I’m reminded of the hoary old story about a lighthouse keeper back in the old days. Which lighthouse had a monster fog horn that blew every minute day and night in foggy conditions.
One night the foghorn malfunctions and goes silent. Right on time the lighthouse keeper sits bolt upright awake, shouting “What was that!?”
Podcasts in soothing voices for me - I like the one @commasense mentioned and in fact we discussed it in a thread where I asked if was AI generated (yes). I also like “Let’s Read,” which is 100% human, but it is occasionally too gory or otherwise disturbing so I don’t use it for sleep anymore, even though the guy has a great voice and most of the content is perfect for falling asleep to.
I live in a quiet rural area. Nobody even drives down the road next to my house. I do not need ambiant noise. But the damn chickens, turkeys and other birds next door are making noise all the time. Except for a few hours of total darkness these things never shut up.
