There are many benefits of a good night’s sleep aside to feeling refreshed the next morning: it can help reduce stress, keep your heart healthy, and eliminate depression. While sleeping, your brain continues to process and register noises on a basic level. Noise can disturb your sleep, causing you to move, wake, or experience a change in blood pressure and heart rate. Even if you don’t fully wake up, noises can wake you a little and affect sleep cycles. Whether or not a sound wakes you depends on that sound’s personal meaning, so people are more likely to wake when a sound is relevant or emotionally charged. White noise creates a type of shield, blocking out those sudden changes that frustrate light sleepers, or people trying to fall asleep.

Many sleep specialists recommend using a white noise machine if you have trouble falling asleep or are easily awakened during the night. White noise is when sound waves of a bunch of frequencies combine and form a sound like the constant hum a fan creates when it’s blowing air. In the book “Say Goodnight to Insomnia,” insomnia researcher Gregg Jacobs says these devices work in two ways: by blocking distracting noises and by producing soothing sounds that are relaxing and help to induce sleep. White noise machines may generate their own white noise or play it back in a loop, which is an endless, repeating, sound recording.