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FOR AS LONG as I can remember, sleep has been my enemy — elusive, maddening, and always in short supply. I was a child incapable of napping, a young adult who existed for decades on only a few hours of sleep per night, and now, a middle-aged man, someone who is perpetually tired yet somehow physically averse to getting a healthy amount of shut-eye. To combat this, I’ve tried every sleep cure under the sun — both natural and technological — with generally unsatisfying results. Masks, medications, meditations, earplugs, weighted blankets, a variety of mattresses, and a bevy of nighttime rituals never changed the fact that I am a person who struggles to fall asleep or remain in that state.

The one constant friend along my decades-long sleep odyssey has been sound. Whether it be the CDs with the sounds of the rainforest or thunderstorms that I wore out during college and grad school, or the variety of fans that have spun through my NYC apartments over the years, I’ve found that some degree of white noise has helped calm my overactive brain and drag me kicking and screaming to slumber town.

To that end, I’ve invested in a variety of white-noise machines and sleep-adjacent devices over the years, most of which are a mixed bag. While there is no shortage of sound machines, sleep apps, or gimmicky alarm clocks that promise to help you regulate your sleep cycle, most of them are more or less doing the same thing. I found that clocks that gradually light up and/or brighten the room in order to gently raise you into consciousness have little to no effect in my bright, sky-lit bedroom. And digital sleep machines, often loaded with a dizzying array of sleep sounds, such as a tumbling clothes dryer or the simulated hum of being on an airplane, are too synthetic sounding for me. Even worse, some essentially play a repeating loop of an audio, which can be maddening if you are an insomniac. This pursuit of a good night’s sleep became a full-time quest during the pandemic, and I eventually landed on three different sleep gadgets that were not only effective, but felt almost holistic in comparison to all the other digital doodads I’d cycled through in the past.