Piano Guidance
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What is brown noise ADHD?

“What the brown noise is supposed to be doing is subtly raising that arousal, thus making people with ADHD more alert and more focused,” he says. There's also some science that suggests brown noise could help anyone—not just people with ADHD—stay focused.

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Every morning, within the first five minutes after I sit down to work, I place my head in a giant wind tunnel that magically muffles all of my intrusive thoughts. Or at least that’s what it feels like as soon as I hit play on my current top track: A sweet, eight-hour YouTube loop of brown noise. Within 60 seconds, my typical mind swarm of suddenly urgent items (Should I clean out my fridge first? And review my credit card statements for possible fraud? What is every original cast member of Pretty Little Liars up to these days?) have been put down for a nap. The whoosh sound that replaces them feels like a soft weighted blanket that I’ve safely swathed my brain in, allowing me to get rolling on something substantive. Brown noise is certainly having a moment. TikTok is full of testimonies to its alleged mind-quieting powers, and the hashtag #brownnoise has received 72 million views as of August. Most are along the lines of a particularly popular clip from user Natalya Bubb: The creator stares into the camera as they share (or reenact) the experience of hearing brown noise for the first time, and curious expressions give way to dropped jaws and smiles. “I’m sucked into a vortex of hyperfocus,” one TikToker marvels. “I have ADHD and my brain has never been so silent,” says another.

I get it. Like millions of Americans who live with ADHD—roughly 8% of people aged 18 to 44, according to the National Institute of Mental Health—I rely on a piecemeal collection of strategies to maintain focus and complete everyday tasks. Since I started using it in June of this year, brown noise has become my new best friend. But is it backed by science?

What is brown noise, exactly?

You may have used steady, staticky white noise before for sleep or as a study aid—though, according to experts, white noise is sometimes misused as a catchall term. “The different ‘colors’ of noise simply refer to the bandwidth of frequencies included in the noise,” Nina Kraus, PhD, professor of neurobiology, communication sciences, and otolaryngology at Northwestern University and author of Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World, tells SELF. Basically, the different “colors” of sound are loosely named after the colors of light: White noise, Dr. Kraus explains, contains all of the sound frequencies humans can hear, similar to how white light contains all of the color frequencies we can see.

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Brown noise gets its name not from the color, but because it’s produced by a type of random movement known as Brownian motion. It’s also called red noise since it’s rich in lower, rumblier frequencies (similar to how red light has a low frequency on the visible spectrum). Participants in a 2017 clinical trial for tinnitus, or ear ringing, retraining therapy (TRT) preferred brown/red noise to white and pink noise, comparing the sound to a “shower or rainfall.”

Does brown noise help people focus?

Overall, studies of the potential positive effects of brown noise on people with conditions ranging from ADHD to tinnitus have been few and far between. While TikTok influencers may have you believing there’s a ton of evidence backing brown noise’s relaxing and focus-boosting effects for people with ADHD, that’s technically not true. In the few studies on brown noise and focus, the participant pools haven’t been large or diverse enough to prove anything definitive, Joel Nigg, PhD, director of the Center for ADHD Research at Oregon Health & Science University, tells SELF. That said, “it makes a lot of sense theoretically,” he adds.

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