How a Little White Noise Machine Took the Edge Off My Husband's Snoring

At 3:10 on a Tuesday morning last spring, I lay in the dark listening to my husband breathe and did the arithmetic I always do. If I fall asleep right now, that is three hours and twenty minutes before the alarm. If I fall asleep in twenty minutes, it is three. I am 54, retired, and nobody is waiting on me at 7 a.m. anymore, and I still ran the numbers like a woman with a school bus to catch.

Paul is 57. He snores the way a porch swing creaks: low, regular, not loud enough to wake somebody in the next room, loud enough to keep me awake on the far side of a king bed. He runs hot, too, so around midnight the covers come off his side and onto mine, and the sheet dragging across the bed is its own small noise.

I had already handled the light. A contoured sleep mask fourteen months ago, worn every night, and then blackout curtains over our one east-facing window. Those two did their job. They did nothing at all for a man breathing twelve inches from my ear.

I put off the Homedics SoundSleep for the better part of a year. Partly it felt like surrender. A nurse spends twenty-four years learning to remove the cause of a problem rather than cover it up, and there is no removing a husband. Partly I thought it would be one more thing humming in a house that already has a ceiling fan, central air, and a refrigerator that runs loud in August.

So I bought one about ten months ago, mostly because it was small, modest by the standards of sleep gadgets, and had close to sixty thousand reviews, which I check the way other people check a mechanic. Amazon lists it as the SoundSleep. The box in my hand said SoundSpa. Same machine.

It sits on my nightstand now, six and a half inches wide, six deep, two tall, eight ounces, and it plays six recorded sounds. I use the white noise most nights. That is the entire product.

It does not stop him snoring. It gives my brain something steady to hold on to instead, and that turns out to be the whole job.

Here is what I tell people who ask, and a few have. The machine does not treat snoring. It does not open an airway or make Paul breathe any quieter. He still snores. What changed is that the sound sits in front of the snore, close enough to my ear that my brain stops reaching for the next one. For the first three nights it drove me a little mad. By the end of the week I had stopped hearing it, which is the point and also the strangest part.

I keep the volume low and I run it off the wall adapter with the timer off. The auto-off timer and the volume control are both there and both simple. I just do not use the timer, because the one night I set it, I woke at 3 a.m. to a quiet room and a snoring husband, which was worse than never having bought the thing.

It covers the neighbor's truck too. There is a man two doors down who leaves for work around 5:40, and the diesel idles in the driveway for a few minutes. Before the machine, that was my second wake-up of the night. Now I hear it only if I am already awake, which some mornings I am. This is not a wall of silence. It is one sound laid over the others.

We took the Homedics machine to my son's place in Georgia in July. It ran on four AA batteries for four nights and I never touched them. Eight ounces is easy to find room for in a bag, and there was no learning curve for a guest room with a different kind of quiet.

Paul's verdict: he calls the Homedics machine my little noise box and says he can take it or leave it. He falls asleep first, so his opinion costs him nothing. What I notice is that I no longer lie in the dark cataloguing his breathing. I wake at 6:20 to a room that is already brightening and I walk my three miles. Paul still snores. I just stopped keeping score of it.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you are where I was, here is the short version. Try the boring things first and in order, one at a time, because if you change three things in one week you will never know which one worked. Light comes first, and you can test it with a towel over the window before you spend anything. Then sound. A box fan will do in a pinch, but a fan also blows air on a man who already runs hot, and then he fights the covers all night, so I found the machine easier to keep where I wanted it.

And be honest with yourself about what the Homedics SoundSleep is. It is a small plastic unit that plays six sounds at whatever volume you set. It will not fix a snore, it will not cool a hot sleeper, and if what wakes you is a door slamming or a car door in the driveway, it only helps with the part that is steady and predictable. What it did for me was turn a sound I could not stop listening for into a sound I could stop hearing. Ten months in, that is worth the space on my nightstand.