When the hard season hits, stress becomes part of the everyday routine, and even the magnesium sitting on your kitchen table — the one you sometimes remember to take and sometimes don't — doesn't seem to be doing much anymore. The good news: you can finally like and repost every meme about work overload and burnout, because now you actually relate. The bad news: everything else. Starting with sleepless nights.

We have already done a deep dive into insomnia, looking at just how common the problem actually is in our region. But somewhere along the way, TikTok caught on too — and started serving up an endless stream of tools, treatments and “quick fixes” promising better sleep. So what actually works, and what is just another marketing gimmick? Let's check.

(Quick heads up: if sleep problems keep coming back, that is a conversation for your doctor, not the internet.)

If you live in Dubai and regularly sleep well, congratulations: you appear to be part of a rather small club.

A 2024 survey of over 950 UAE residents found that more than 40% sleep less than six hours a night, with stress named as one of the top reasons. WHOOP’s 2024 data backs this up: Dubai ranked among the cities with the lowest sleep performance among device users, while the UAE as a whole came third from the bottom globally, with an average sleep-performance score of just 74%.

The reasons behind those rather depressing numbers aren't exactly a mystery: high stress, a work-first culture and limited time for sport or recovery thanks to, well, all of the above.

When I first came across the list of things supposedly supporting better sleep, my reaction was mostly: okay… sure. The longer I spent looking into them, though, the less ridiculous some started to sound. The final sip was the experiences of people who had actually tried them — hello Reddit, I love you, thank you for doing what you do — and decided they deserved a proper investigation.

One important point before we get into them: none of these things can magically compensate for consistently sleeping five hours a night. And sleep quality itself is more complicated than simply counting hours. Researchers also look at how continuous your sleep is, how much time you spend awake during the night, how regular your sleep schedule is, how you move through different sleep stages and how rested and alert you feel the next day.

Some of that is in your hands — and worth paying attention to regardless of whatever sleep hack the internet is currently obsessed with. Other parts, including the architecture of your sleep, are processes your body largely handles on its own. What we can investigate is whether any of these treatments and tools can give it a better chance of doing that job properly.

Sound therapy is probably one of the biggest categories in the sleep world, but it is also a very broad one. For our purposes, let's split it into two: music and non-musical sounds, particularly white and pink noise. They might seem to be doing roughly the same thing, but there is an important difference (get ready for the spoiler): music is mostly used to help us wind down and fall asleep, while white and pink noise are supposed to make the sounds around us less likely to disturb us once we do.

Music

The idea behind music is fairly simple: it is supposed to make the transition from awake to asleep easier. Slow, calming music may reduce mental and physiological arousal, creating better conditions for the body to wind down.

And there is some decent evidence behind it. A 2022 Cochrane review included 13 randomised controlled trials involving 1,007 adults with sleep difficulties. Participants generally listened to prerecorded music for 25 - 60 minutes a day. Across ten studies involving 708 people, music improved subjective sleep-quality scores by an average of 2.79 points, with the evidence rated as moderate certainty.

So what should you actually put on? Thankfully, there is no scientifically approved sleep genre. Studies have used everything from classical and New Age to jazz, Chinese traditional music, Buddhist music and Indian ragas. What tends to be more consistent is the character of the music: slow, soft and predictable, often instrumental or meditative and commonly around 60–80 BPM.

Sleep score: 8/10. Good evidence for better perceived sleep quality, with some evidence for easier sleep onset.

White and pink noise

White and pink noise come into the sleep conversation for a slightly different reason. While music is there to ease you into sleep, these sounds are more about protecting it once you are there. Traffic outside, neighbours, the air conditioner switching on and off — even relatively small changes in sound can become surprisingly noticeable at night.

This is where sound masking comes in. A continuous background noise makes the difference between the quiet room and those sudden sounds less pronounced, so they have less chance of disturbing your sleep.

The science, though, isn't quite as neat as the theory. A 2022 review of 34 studies involving 1,103 adults found positive sleep outcomes in six of 18 white-noise studies and nine of 11 pink-noise studies.

At first glance, 9 out of 11 makes a pretty convincing case for pink noise. Look closer, however, and the picture changes: only two of those studies had a low risk of bias, while most of the positive findings came from laboratory settings. So there is something interesting here, particularly for people whose sleep is easily disturbed by noise — we just can't call it a proven fix yet.

Sleep score: 5/10. Promising for masking disruptive noise, but the overall evidence is still inconsistent.

A sauna before bed sounds logical enough: you come out warm, relaxed and ready to collapse into bed. But the science behind the idea is actually slightly more interesting — because getting hotter isn't really the point. Cooling down afterwards is.

Before sleep, our core body temperature naturally begins to fall as part of our circadian rhythm. More blood travels towards the skin, particularly the hands and feet, allowing the body to release heat. And this is where the sauna theory comes in. Heat increases blood flow towards the skin; step out into a cooler environment afterwards, and the body can begin shedding that heat. In other words, you heat yourself up to potentially make the cooling-down process more effective.

Does that translate into better sleep? Possibly — but this is where we need to separate sauna from heat more generally. Direct evidence for sauna and sleep is still fairly limited. What we know much more about is passive heating.

A 2019 systematic review of 17 studies found that taking a warm bath or shower at around 40–42.5°C, one to two hours before bed, was associated with better sleep efficiency and subjective sleep quality. Even 10 minutes of warming was associated with falling asleep faster.

There is an important caveat, though: more heat doesn't necessarily mean better sleep. If you remain overheated afterwards, the effect may work in the opposite direction. Elevated body temperature, sweating, thirst and an increased heart rate are hardly ideal conditions for falling asleep.

Sleep score: 6/10. The temperature theory has decent evidence behind it. For sauna specifically, the scientific evidence is still limited.

If warming the body and cooling down afterwards can support sleep, as we saw with warm showers and saunas, alternating between hot and cold sounds like it should take the idea one step further. That, essentially, is the appeal of a contrast shower. But its connection to sleep is rather less straightforward.

Alternating temperatures repeatedly changes blood flow and skin temperature: warm water dilates blood vessels near the skin, while cold water triggers the opposite response. It is a mechanism much more commonly explored in sports recovery, where contrast therapy has been studied for things such as fatigue and muscle soreness.

So how did it end up in the sleep conversation? The connection is mostly indirect: if contrast therapy leaves you feeling more physically recovered and relaxed, perhaps better sleep follows.

The problem is that the research doesn't give us much reason to make that leap. Studies have looked at cold-water immersion after heat or exercise, but adding the cold component has shown little or no clear benefit for sleep quality or duration. In other words, something can be useful for recovery without automatically becoming a useful bedtime intervention.

Sleep score: 3/10. Interesting for recovery, much less convincing for sleep. There is currently very little evidence that alternating between hot and cold actually improves sleep quality.

I have a confession: float therapy is partly why this article exists. I have wanted to try it for ages, but somehow every attempt to book a session has ended the same way: I see the price, hesitate, and decide my money can stay exactly where it is for now. Mostly because one question keeps getting in the way: does it actually work?

The concept itself is intriguing. You lie in a dark, quiet tank filled with warm water and enough Epsom salt to make you float almost effortlessly. With very little sound, light or physical sensation to process, the idea is to strip away external stimulation and give the nervous system less to deal with.

And this part isn't entirely wellness marketing. In one study, 50 people with anxiety and stress-related disorders completed a one-hour float session and reported significant reductions in stress, muscle tension, pain and negative affect, alongside greater relaxation and serenity.

But — familiar story by now — relaxation and better sleep aren't necessarily the same thing. When we look specifically at sleep, the evidence becomes much thinner. Small studies of flotation-REST have reported promising sleep-related effects, but large, high-quality trials are still lacking.

Sleep score: 5/10. Promising for relaxation and stress reduction, with some encouraging sleep findings, but the direct evidence for improving sleep is still limited.