I’m a Light Sleeper. This Is How I Managed to Sleep in a Noisy Dorm.

By: Simone Meadows, Guest article

Are you a student? Do you have flatmates? Do you live in a student dorm? If you answered yes to all of my questions, then you will most likely relate to most of the struggles I am about to describe.

I live in a dorm and share an apartment with five other people, and on top of that I am sharing a room with one other person. As you can imagine the building is very old and the walls are paper thin. All of us go to different courses so we also run on different schedules. I personally like to go to sleep very early, while others seem to be the most awake – and loud at that – when I am trying to fall asleep.

I am a light sleeper so every sound disturbs me greatly. I can hear whenever anyone turns on the shower, flushes the toilet or checks the fridge for a midnight snack. I can also hear all the noises coming from outside as I like to sleep with my window because it gets too hot if I keep it closed.

This means that I never get a good night’s sleep. My window is located above a busy street and there are cars driving on it at all times of the day – and night. Do not get me started on the paper-thin walls. I can always hear when my next-room flat mate is watching Netflix without earbuds, having a phone conversation or being serenaded by her boyfriend (yes, that has actually happened – he sang Elvis Presley’s Can’t Help Falling in Love three times in a row – which is sweet, but not when you are not the one meant to be hearing it and not when it is late and you are trying to sleep).

The girl I share my room with is also quite a noisy sleeper, and by that I mean that she does not only snore but she also occasionally talks to herself in her sleep, which can be quite terrifying in the middle of the night. I can also hear our upstairs neighbours and they seem to like to move around their chairs at three in the morning – this makes very unpleasant scratching noises on the wooden floor.

Besides the above-mentioned disturbances there have been many other situations in which I would have liked to be able to block out all this noise. I do not know why I did not think of buying earplugs for sleeping earlier. I always used phone earbuds and blasted music during the day to block out noise but that did not help me at night; blocking out noise with more noise just does not work for me when I am trying to sleep.

I mentioned my problem to a friend and she recommended looking into getting a pair of silicon earplugs. I found the BOLLSEN earplugs by chance while I was looking through earplugs that were also suitable for sleeping. I took a chance on them and I am happy that I did.

Since I started using the BOLLSEN Life+ I have actually been able to get in a healthy amount of sleep every night. No more trouble falling asleep because my flat mates are being noisy or having a love life, no more upstairs neighbours and their noisy chairs, no more car noises – with the Life+ earplugs it is as if there are no new buildings being built and as if no one is driving around at night anymore.

I would highly recommend these earplugs to anyone – even non-students – that is having trouble sleeping or falling asleep – be it due to noisy neighbours, flatmates or the outside world.