Is Falling Asleep To Let’s Plays Medically Approved Gamer Melatonin Or Nah – Aftermath

For about seven years now, the only way I’ve been able to lull myself to sleep is by watching YouTube Let’s Plays. This isn’t a jab at YouTube gamers being boring. As a kid, I would routinely fall asleep to the smooth voice of NBA commentator Michael Breen, and this is a similar vibe. It’s comfy shit. 

I’m not the only person who uses this very millennial sleep method. There are countless YouTube channels with thousands of subscribers who make content to fall asleep to. And there are plenty of Reddit threads asking for content creators with a chill vibe and a comforting voice, or if there are good playlists to fall asleep to.

However, there’s always been this nagging question in my mind over whether my self-made, undiagnosed insomnia remedy is just new-age snake oil or if there’s some actual medical benefit to falling asleep to video game commentary. So I decided to ask a sleep expert about it. 

A week ago, I sent out a broad message to neurologists in Chicago. Neurologists are medical professionals who specialize in diagnosing and treating disorders of the nervous system. A key part of their work involves brain activity and sleep. After reaching out across the Chicagoland area, I connected with Dr. Kenneth Lee, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago and the medical and clinical director at the University of Chicago Sleep Center. 

Lee was quite excited to talk with me because he is a gamer himself. Among his colleagues at UIC, Northwestern, and Loyola, he’s the only gaming professional in the field. (Nice). He provided his gamer credentials, saying that he’s been a gamer his entire life, owns a gaming PC, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and mainly plays a lot of Balatro, Vampire Survivors, and Skate 3, along with RPGs like Cyberpunk 2077 whenever he isn’t playing Mario Kart World with his boys. In short, I wasn’t speaking gibberish when I asked him about Let’s Plays to fall asleep to from a medical standpoint. 

Having a career where patients of all age groups approach him with questions about sleep problems, Lee told me that falling asleep to Let’s Plays isn’t new territory for him. 

“It is a phenomenon that we have noticed. It’s not exclusive to just Let’s Plays. We oftentimes see this just with people being in bed on TikTok. And then, in the older populations, it’s like needing the TV on to go to sleep,” Lee said. “Let’s Plays is almost kind of an extension of that behavior in the past. I see that as the Gen Z version, so to speak. But I think that the premise is very similar to what a lot of people have done throughout the ages.”

While Lee admits it’s hard to measure, sleep studies haven’t previously determined how many people identify with the Let’s Play community for sleep. He notes that a significant number use “some sort of device” as a distraction or noise to help them fall asleep. Lee estimates this accounts for about 20 to 30 percent of the population. However, as the saying goes, just because many people do something doesn’t mean it’s beneficial. Regarding whether Let’s Plays help or hinder the process of falling asleep, from a neurological perspective, the answer varies. But Lee did explain the medical science behind what this process has done for people like me as a solution to insomnia. 

“What it really does is that [Let’s Plays] kind of help relax the brain,” Lee said. “It’s kind of like your winding down process, essentially, in terms of just kind of your relaxation state.”

In neurology, Lee says he and his colleagues emphasize to their patients struggling with insomnia that having a routine is important. One suggestion is to set aside a worry time before you go to sleep—maybe two to three hours beforehand, during which you take stock of or inventory the things you need to do or what’s worrying you. That way, when the time comes to greet Mr. Sandman, you can dedicate the last hour of worry time to relaxing. Or, in anime speak, Nazuna Nanakuza in Call of the Night saying, “Stay up until you feel satisfied about your day.”

“These Let’s Plays and so forth, really can be an extension of that—[doing] this kind of routine,” Lee said. “The other thing that it does is it gives you something to focus on, to some extent, which can also help relax things, focus in terms of shutting things down.”

Another aspect of falling asleep to Let’s Plays, which Lee mentioned as a tip for people seeking a good routine, is practicing what’s called sleep hygiene. This essentially means ensuring your environment is as conducive to sleep as possible, such as by making sure your bed is optimized for you to fall asleep.

Speaking anecdotally, my sleeping environment over the past decade has involved cozying up on my Casper mattress and memory foam pillow, putting on my Bose headphones, queueing up hours-long Let’s Plays, and drifting off. A problem with this, however, is that it isn’t good sleep hygiene, because I’m trying to fall asleep to a screen emitting bright light. Lee said he recommends patients try to avoid screens. Although he concedes that his refrain is a boilerplate medical statement, he does acknowledge that for some people, allotting some screen light in their sleep routine can be helpful. 

While in the past, I would turn to YouTube playlists from creators like Super Best Friends Play, Snapcube’s Real-Time Fan Dub, or Team Four Star’s Dragon Ball Z Abridged Series to listen to and fall asleep, I encountered the screen issue Lee mentioned when trying to reset my circadian rhythm: all the flashing lights would wake me up. It wasn’t until I grew tired of modifying familiar comfort playlists by keeping my laptop lid almost closed or flipping over my dimmed phone and started exploring videos specifically made for sleep that I saw a noticeable difference in my sleep quality. 

One of the channels I frequent, SleepyTime Edits, which posts videos of 10+ hours of Oneyplays, sets its videos to a dim, still image, creating a calmer visual ambiance. This transforms video game compilations into a podcast-like experience, as well as providing me Smiling Friends-adjacent content to laugh myself to sleep to. 

In describing SleepyTime Edits’ makeshift solution to Lee—asking whether this kind of media engagement supported or interfered with the brain’s transition into sleep—he said that it’s “a bit of a double-edged sword.” 

“Say that you’re watching a Let’s Play that is super intense, like an EVO event or something that you’re really into, that’s not the best thing that’s going to help you quiet your brain. If it’s more relaxing, that can calm your mind down. Even if it’s something you’ve seen, like a Let’s Play that [you’ve] watched before,” Lee said.

He continued, “You do have to be careful about things such as light. I recommend to my patients that you use a dimmer setting— a lot of devices now have blue light settings. But really, I also recommend a light setting itself, because a lot of bright light can interfere with your sleep onset, and dim lights as well. It really varies. But it can be paradoxical in that it can be relaxing, but it can also be activating, too.”

Regarding whether there are any medically recognized videos to help with insomnia, Lee mentioned a treatment he and his colleagues use called cognitive behavioral therapy. 

“The way I like to think of this is retraining your brain how to sleep. What happens with more chronic insomnia—insomnia that’s been there for several months—is that your brain loses the ability of how to sleep,” Lee said. “What [cognitive behavioral therapy] does is help guide you with meditation techniques  [and], a lot of times, things that can help, like white noise.” 

Lee said that much of the CBT video content is easily accessible on YouTube, featuring videos that demonstrate breathing and progressive muscle relaxation techniques to help calm the mind and promote sleep. This can be especially helpful when finances are tight and people can’t afford a sleep prescription from a doctor or sleep expert. One point Lee emphasized was the University of Chicago business center’s insomnia treatment, DrLullaby. During this virtual session, patients, guided by a sleep-trained clinical psychologist, work together to find ways to improve their nighttime sleep. 

Although Lee acknowledged that using Let’s Plays to sleep shares a similar functional approach to cognitive behavioral therapy as a layman’s solution to insomnia-focused sleep medicine, he also issued a warning for individuals who find it helpful in falling asleep or relaxing.

“During the nighttime, things like noises, even though they’re low-lights and so forth, something flashing can actually disrupt your sleep,” Lee said. “Try to recognize that as well, and try to limit the stimuli that’s around you.” 

Which naturally leads into the next reason not to fall asleep to Let’s Plays: random loud noises. When I first reached out to Lee to start that conversation and sighed with relief at my mention of the Game Grumps not making him burst into dust, he noted that LPers you find comfort listening to, while adding to the soothing process of falling asleep, can just as easily break your rhythm if they’re prone to having a shouting match in the middle of playing. 

“Everybody’s a little bit different. Some people are going to be more susceptible when you’re watching a Game Grumps Let’s Play if somebody yells or shouts out something,” Lee said, adding that folks do run that risk of having their sleep cycle interrupted. 

When it comes to whether Lee considers Let’s Plays a medically sound way to fall asleep or a workaround with its own risks, he says he’s somewhere in the middle. 

“It can be helpful if that’s part of your routine to relax and help make it so that you know your mind and your body are in a place that can easily fall asleep. I think that it can be helpful,” Lee said. “I don’t think that there’s been any evidence to suggest specifically Let’s Plays and so forth, or any studies, which would be an interesting area to explore.” 

“That being said, [Let’s Plays] can also backfire on you so you have to be cautious with that. It could backfire for a single night, where, say, you have a Game Grumps Let’s Play and then they start screaming [and] that wakes you up, and now you have trouble falling back asleep. And then it could potentially develop into more of a chronic insomnia, where it helps you kind of acutely, but then, over time, because of those things, you’re actually developing more problems. That’s where it is a little bit of a double-edged sword, and you do have to be cautious taking a stock of your own individualized approach to it.”

I, ever the rebel, have ignored the warning signs because they’ve also led to a fun result in my sleep, where whatever Dan and Arin are babbling about ends up influencing my dreams. This creates a pretty fun mystery box phenomenon every night, where I look forward to seeing how these videos influence my otherwise dreamless sleep. When asked whether there is an explanation for how sleeping with Let’s Play channels ends up scripting my dreams, Lee says medical science has yet to fully explain that phenomenon. 

“I wish we knew more about that or why that happens, but there’s so much about the subconscious that we just don’t know. As you’re going into transition sleep, or even just when you’re going into sleep, your brain is not shut off to what’s around you. If you think about just kind of why we have that evolutionarily, if there’s a threat, you wake up. So you’re still absorbing things, you’re just not recognizing it. How the subconscious kind of interprets that into dreams, that’s a great question. And one I don’t really have an answer for, but it has been explored throughout the ages,” he said. 

While Lee couldn’t provide an explanation for why Let’s Plays might influence sleep or if they are similar to brain dances in Cyberpunk 2077, he did give a polite send-off to people like myself who use Let’s Plays to fall asleep. It’s the most courteous way a medical professional can suggest to a gamer to touch grass while counting virtual sheep. 

“If you are using Let’s Plays, we recommend that the bed should only be used for sleep and intimacy,” Lee said. “So trying to do those things outside of bed and then, when you’re feeling tired, going to bed, is the best approach.”

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