Schedule of Events | Search Abstracts | Invited Symposia | Symposia | Rising Stars | Poster Sessions | Data Blitz

What’s on Your Mind during the 12 Minutes Before Lights-Out Influences Sleep Quality

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 3:00 – 5:00 pm PST, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Alysiana M. Martinez¹, Alani G. Cox-Cáceres¹, Hannah R. Maybrier¹, James E. Glazer¹, Ken A. Paller¹; ¹Northwestern University

High-quality sleep is valuable for cognitive function, emotional well-being, and physical health, but many people miss out on these benefits due to poor sleep. Effective methods for improving sleep at home could help those suffering from poor or insufficient sleep. Calming, pre-sleep routines are commonly recommended to reduce pre-sleep arousal and improve sleep quality; how that can be most easily accomplished and how much it helps is unclear. Prior studies typically used polysomnography in a sleep lab or were conducted at home without objective sleep measures. Here we used EEG in the home to evaluate a guided program of pre-sleep relaxation with elements of mindfulness, mental imagery, and body scan. Participants (N=38) slept as usual on night one (baseline) and listened to a 12-minute audio recording immediately before bed on nights two and three, counterbalancing two conditions across participants. We thus compared pre-sleep relaxation versus a control recording of ambient music with layered pink noise and tonal rhythms presented as brain entrainment. We assessed sleep measures using a wireless sleep-monitoring device with four-channel EEG (Muse-S). The relaxation program significantly reduced sleep-onset latency compared to entrainment, with a trend for shortened N2 latency. Participants reported greater subjective-relaxation improvement after the relaxation versus entrainment program. This study thus demonstrates the feasibility of wearable-EEG methods to assess pre-sleep routines while sleeping at home and suggests that listening to a relaxing guided audio before bedtime can help people fall asleep quicker and maybe obtain better sleep.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Auditory