7/20/2021: Better sleep with smart earplugs

Sleep-centric earbuds compared

Plus: Google Meet’s subscription squeeze, a clever weather app, and more scheduling trickery

Jared Newman

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July 20, 2021

For reasons I haven’t quite grasped, my body’s become convinced that I’m an early riser. Almost every morning, I start stirring about two hours before I’m supposed to, and from then on it’s a struggle to relax myself back to sleep.

So when a company called QuietOn reached out a couple months ago about loaning a pair of its active noise cancelling earplugs to review, I was intrigued. Distracting sounds are part of what keep me up, and while I’ve tried using cheap Bluetooth earbuds to pipe white noise into my ears, they’re too big to wear comfortably without lying on my back. QuietOn’s buds are much smaller and entirely focused on silencing outside sounds.