Side or Stomach Position
Adults already spend the majority of time sleeping on their side, and research has found that people spend more time sleeping on their side as they age. Still, there isn’t evidence to suggest that a certain body position leads to better sleep, and the sleep doctors I spoke to said you can’t really control your movement while you’re asleep anyway.
The average adult only spends about 7 percent of their sleep time on their stomach, but I already fall asleep on my stomach as a rule. I can’t drift off unless I’m in a very specific position with my arms pinned underneath me, my face turned to the right side, and my right leg in a figure four.
Shush
The adult equivalent of “shushing” a baby is white noise or a fan (which can be used on babies as well). A meta-review of 38 studies reviewing the efficacy of noise as a sleep aid published this year showed that the evidence for this is weak. There was a lack of consistency in the research — many of the studies used a different kind of background noise — and some studies found that if the noise was too loud, it actually interrupted sleep, and could be bad for your hearing.
That said, “Clinically, if someone tells me they sleep better with the fan on, that’s perfectly fine, but it’s not something I would recommend to everyone,” said Jennifer Mundt, an assistant professor of neurology specializing in sleep at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. I live adjacent to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, so I have been using a white noise app on my iPad and have conditioned myself to associate white noise with getting sleepy. That can be comforting, said Dr. Mundt.
Swing
Rocking an infant helps put them to sleep, and the SNOO, a bassinet that uses motion and sound to calm a baby — an invention of the aforementioned Dr. Harvey Karp — is a hot ticket registry item. There’s a passage in a famous essay by David Foster Wallace, written about his trip on a luxury cruise ship, where he claims that heavy seas are great for sleep, because “you feel rocked to sleep, the windows’ spume a gentle shushing, engines’ throb a mother’s pulse.”
Unfortunately, none of the experts I spoke to knew of any research that tested the efficacy of rocking a grown-up on land or on the high seas, though, “There is probably a market for an adult SNOO,” said Dr. Mundt.
