The right answer depends on one thing: whether your problem is falling asleep or staying asleep. A timer suits the first and undermines the second. Running all night suits the second and asks you to accept eight hours of sound you did not need. Most people pick by habit and never revisit it, which is why so many are running a 60-minute timer against a 3 a.m. problem.
The case for a timer
- You only need the runway. If you are usually asleep within twenty minutes and stay asleep, sound after that point is doing nothing except existing.
- Less sound overall. Nobody knows the long-term effect of eight hours of nightly audio exposure, and the honest position is that less is safer where less is sufficient. Guidance on bedroom noise points at a very quiet room, not a filled one.
- Battery and heat. A phone playing audio all night drains and warms, and the charger cable becomes part of the bedtime setup.
- It is a boundary. A timer you start deliberately is a small ritual: this is the end of the day. That cue is worth more than people credit — see the wind-down routine.
The case for leaving it on
- Your noise does not keep office hours. A snorer, a night bus, a neighbour's alarm at 5 a.m. — masking that ended at midnight protects nothing.
- Light sleep comes later. Sleep runs in cycles, and the later part of the night carries proportionally more light sleep, when you are easiest to wake. That is the stretch where a mask arguably earns the most.
- You surface briefly and do not remember. Brief awakenings are normal. In a masked room many of them end without you ever being aware of them; in a silent one, a single door can turn one into twenty minutes awake.
- The ending can itself wake you. Which is the whole problem with a hard stop.
Why how it stops matters as much as when
A mix that cuts off abruptly creates exactly the kind of change your auditory system is built to notice — the same class of event as a door closing, only inverted. If you have ever been woken by a timer ending, that is why.
Pease fades out over roughly two seconds rather than stopping dead, so the room returns to quiet as a slope rather than a step. It is a small detail that decides whether a timer is usable at all. If you are using something that cuts hard, favour a longer timer or none, because the stop is doing more damage than the extra hour of sound would.
If you want to feel the difference tonight, open the Sleep preset and set a 30-minute timer from the clock in the bottom playback bar — then try the same mix with no timer tomorrow.
Keep the mixer page open while the timer runs: navigating to another page or reloading resets it. Browsers can delay timers in the background, so use a separate alarm when waking at a specific time matters.
Picking a length
Pease offers 5, 10, 15, 30, 45 and 60 minutes. Choose from the symptom, not from the biggest number available.
| What is happening | Setting | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| Asleep quickly, wake rarely | 15–30 minutes | Covers the runway and no more |
| Mind still going at lights-out | 30–45 minutes | Gives the wind-down room without committing the night |
| Noisy street or shared wall all night | No timer | The masking has to outlast the noise |
| Partner snores | No timer | Snoring typically deepens later in the night |
| Wake at 3 a.m. and cannot get back | Short timer, restarted | 10–15 minutes on waking, rather than all night pre-emptively |
| Napping | 15–30 minutes | Matches the nap; the fade-out doubles as a gentle limit |
A note on phones in the bed. If running sound all night means sleeping with a phone on the pillow, that is a trade worth examining — screen light and notifications cost more sleep than most masking gains. A cheap speaker across the room, or the phone face-down on a charger out of reach, keeps the sound and drops the rest.
Testing it on yourself in a week
You cannot tell from a single night, because the first night with any change is about novelty. A workable test:
- Keep the same mix and the same volume all week — the only variable is the timer. Start from something deliberately plain, such as Rain 45 with Fan 30, and save its URL so you reopen identical settings each night rather than rebuilding by ear.
- Nights one to three: 30-minute timer. Nights four to six: no timer. Night seven: whichever felt better, to confirm.
- Each morning, before looking at your phone, note two things: roughly how long it took to fall asleep, and whether you remember waking.
- Compare the mornings, not the nights. Sleep-quality judgements made at 3 a.m. are unreliable.
If neither option makes a difference, that is genuinely useful information: your sleep problem is probably not a noise problem, and there are better-evidenced places to look. If the timer helps but the sound still feels wrong, the issue is more likely the sound you chose or the volume.