Soft Music Brings You to Slumber

Sleep can sometimes become difficult as we get older.

But a joint study at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, and the Buddhist Tzu Chi General Hospital in Hualien, Taiwan, shows that listening to gentle music at bedtime can help.

Monitoring 60 people aged 60-83 with sleep difficulties, researchers found that spending 45 minutes listening to slow, soft music lowered heart and respiratory rates, improving sleep quality by 26 per cent in the first week, and more as the study went on and the subjects mastered the relaxation technique.