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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.
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.
Dr. Nigg explains that the idea that brown noise can help people with ADHD focus aligns with other research on something called optimal arousal theory. Basically, he says, the theory posits that “the reason it’s hard for people with ADHD to pay attention is that they’re not alert enough.” By this logic, then, their brains need a certain amount of extra stimulation compared to folks without ADHD to rouse into “interested” mode. “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. A second scientific concept, “stochastic resonance,” has also been cited in existing research to support the idea that white or brown noise can, perhaps counterintuitively, help a person’s brain muffle diversions in order to concentrate on one thing.
Dr. Nigg explains it using an example: Imagine your significant other is talking to you, but you can’t process what they’re saying to you because your TV is blaring. “White noise would solve that problem, according to stochastic resonance theory, by amplifying the signal relative to the noise,” he says. (The amplified signal, in this instance, is your partner’s speech.) “Your brain takes advantage of the noise, making it easier for you to muffle what you’re trying to ignore”—the TV sounds—“instead of what you’re trying to attend to.” That weighted-blanket-on-my-brain feeling just might be stochastic resonance at work.
Can brown noise be harmful?
Dr. Kraus says that unwanted noise can do more harm than good when it comes to how the brain processes sound. She’s previously written about what she calls the disruptive biological consequences of external noise, pointing, in part, to research on its negative impact on children’s reading comprehension. But Dr. Kraus is referring to rackets that come and go sporadically, such as car alarms, not the steady thrum of a sound like brown noise.
What’s more, “our brains are not all the same,” Dr. Nigg adds, meaning, we don’t all respond to certain sounds in the same way—a point that Dr. Kraus agrees with. Going back to that optimal arousal theory, brown noise might be a gift to someone whose brain needs a dash of extra stimulation, while someone who has zero problems sitting down to concentrate may find it distracting.
Of course, blasting any sound into your ears at top volume around the clock isn’t advisable. Like some other ADHD coping strategies I’ve tried, brown noise may become less effective over time. “I imagine if you used it every day, all day, the effect could gradually wear off,” Dr. Nigg says, because your brain may get too used to that particular stimulation. It’s a tool, not a one-stop productivity solution.
So why, according to me and the many equally convinced #ADHDsquad TikTokers populating my feed, does brown noise seem to work better than white noise for focus? Why did my nose wrinkle in distaste when my YouTube loop autoplayed into a much-tinnier new white noise “song” that I enjoyed much less? “It may be a placebo,” Dr. Nigg offers. “Everyone’s saying it works better, so it works better.”
In any case, Dr. Nigg believes that brown noise is reasonably safe to listen to, and if it works for you, it works. “The evidence happens to be very good,” he says. “But even if the evidence was poor, why not do it if it helps you and there’s no meaningful risk?”
For me, this possible placebo is delivering results: I’m returning texts within 24 hours and hitting writing deadlines on time (ahem). The whole reason that digital ADHD communities exist on TikTok, Reddit, and elsewhere online is because the behaviors that put each of us on the path to diagnosis can strain every aspect of our lives—from relationships to academic and professional performance—and we’re looking for tools to relieve some of that pressure. I’m gonna bump that brown noise while I’m working for as long as it keeps pushing me forward. Just let me clean a little and google a few things first.
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