Earplugs for Sleep: Blocking Noise for Better REM at 71
At 71, I wear earplugs to bed every night. Silicone ones, both ears, along with a blackout mask. It is the least glamorous thing in my whole protocol and one of the few I never skip.
My bedroom is not loud. That is the part most people miss. You do not need a jackhammer outside the window to lose sleep to noise. You only need enough sound to keep pulling you back toward the surface.
Noise Wakes You Up Without Waking You Up
A sound does not have to be loud enough to remember. It only has to be loud enough to register.
What it sets off is a micro-arousal, a brief slide toward lighter sleep that you will never recall in the morning. The night still counts as eight hours in bed. But deep sleep and REM get chopped into shorter pieces, and those are the stages doing the repair work.
That is the whole case for earplugs. Not silence for its own sake. Fewer interruptions in the stages that matter.
What the Research Actually Shows
The cleanest study I found put fourteen healthy adults in a sleep lab wired to polysomnography, under recorded intensive care unit noise and light. The noise and light alone gave them lighter sleep, less REM, and a longer wait to reach REM. Add earplugs and eye masks and they got more REM time, reached it faster, woke less, and showed higher overnight melatonin (Hu and colleagues, Critical Care, 2010).
A later meta-analysis pooled thirteen randomized trials and 797 intensive care patients and found earplugs and eye masks significantly improved self-reported sleep quality (Fang and colleagues, Journal of Advanced Nursing, 2021).
Now the part most articles leave out. A French randomized trial in real ICU patients found more deep sleep in the earplug group, but the difference did not reach statistical significance, and almost a third of them pulled the plugs out at some point in the night (Demoule and colleagues, Critical Care, 2017).
And notice what all of that research has in common. It was run in intensive care units, which are far louder than your bedroom, on patients far sicker than you. Treat those numbers as a ceiling, not a forecast.
The Trade-Off Nobody Mentions
Blocking and comfort pull against each other. Every earplug on the market is a choice between the two.
Foam wins on the numbers. Mack’s Ultra Soft is rated 33 NRR, about as high as consumer plugs go. It also expands inside the ear canal, and that pressure by morning is what most people quit over.
The Loop Quiet I use are rated 24 dB SNR, which works out to 14 dB NRR under the American standard. That is well under half the attenuation of foam. I am spelling that out because plenty of write-ups call these high-blocking earplugs, and they are not. They are comfortable earplugs.
I made that trade on purpose. A plug rated 33 that I pull out at two in the morning protects nothing. A plug rated 14 that stays in until sunrise does. If your noise problem is genuinely loud — a snoring partner, a road outside the window — start with foam and find out whether you can live with it.
What I Actually Use
Loop Quiet Silicone Earplugs
Reusable silicone, four tip sizes, and a low enough profile that I can sleep on my side without the plug pressing back into my ear. That is what killed foam for me. I wash them once a week with soap and water and let them dry completely. One pair lasts months, which is the quieter argument for silicone — foam is a bag of disposables you keep rebuying.
Affiliate link. I earn a small commission if you buy through it, at no extra cost to you.
What Earplugs Will Not Fix
They patch one hole in the bucket. If the room is warm, if the television is on, if you are on your phone at midnight, plugs are not going to rescue the night.
They work best alongside the rest of it. I sleep in total darkness with a contoured mask, which matters here because the study above was testing noise and light together, not noise on its own. I keep the phone out of the bedroom. And everything else I changed is in how I finally got sleep right at 71.
One Warning, Especially After Sixty
Every time you push a plug in, you push a little earwax in with it. The ear canal normally clears itself outward, and plugs work against that. The Cleveland Clinic lists earplug and earbud users, and everyone over 55, among the groups most likely to end up with impacted earwax.
That is not a reason to skip earplugs. It is a reason to seat them gently instead of jamming them deep, clean reusable plugs regularly, and have someone look in your ears at your next appointment — sooner if your hearing goes dull or an ear starts feeling full.
If You Want to Try It
Buy a cheap bag of foam plugs and wear them for a week before you spend real money. If your sleep improves, noise is a genuine problem for you and it is worth buying something comfortable enough to keep in all night. If nothing changes, you have saved the money and learned something useful about your bedroom.
If you want the rest of what I do, my full daily regimen is in my protocols, the training side is under fitness, every number I track is in test and stats, and the products I actually use are on my discount codes page.
Do you sleep with earplugs? Tell me in the comments which type stayed in and which ones you gave up on.
Stay sovereign, stay healthy,
Gary
A note from Gary: I am not a doctor, and I am definitely not your doctor. I am a 71-year-old man running a 129-year experiment on himself in public. Nothing here is medical advice. Talk to your physician before changing anything, especially if you have any history of ear infections, tinnitus or hearing loss.
These are products I use on my push to 200. I only put something on this list after I’ve tested it on myself. The links are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission at no cost to you.
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