Featuring Aroma Snooze Plus Review
As a parent the amount of information there is on social media and the internet about sleep and sleep aids can be completely overwhelming. There is so much pressure on parents, and at times it can feel like we need a million different tools in order to support our children to fall asleep and sleep through the night. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I ended up down this rabbit hole myself. As an Occupational Therapist working in paediatrics, I knew the importance of having good sleep hygiene (pre-sleep routine) to assist children and babies to wind down, know when it is time for sleep and help them to resettle during the night.
In my attempt to find a sleep routine that worked for my family, I ended up collecting 3 different white noise machines; one cordless that only played white noise, one plug in machine with multiple sound options and a third smaller one for travel. I then found myself with multiple diffusers – one regular diffuser and another nebulizing so there was no need for water. Just to top things off we also had a home music system with a speaker in her room and 2 separate night light options (one red the other white light).
If your child doesn’t need white noise, a night light or similar to fall asleep, please don’t feel that these things are required in order for your child to sleep well. There is no ‘perfect’ sleep set up that we are striving for, we are just aiming to respond as well as we can to our child’s individual needs and our environment.
It is so important that I acknowledge here that as our children grow their preferences will shift and what works for us as a family will change, so it is expected that some things will work for a specific season of time. When my daughter was an infant the white-light duck-shaped wireless night light was amazing! It meant that we could move it around her room when needed and gave us enough light to be able to do a nappy change without putting the room lights on. At that point I would have recommended this to anyone who asked, but right now I can’t remember the last time we reached for ducky, and he is probably gathering dust in the back of a cupboard.
Now that my daughter has turned 1, I feel like I’m able to pass on some lessons that I have learnt (some the hard way) with regards to sleep. We have finally seemed to find our way into a good routine that works for us: dinner, bath/shower, pjs, brush hair/teeth, read two books, milk and then bed. But setting up the room for bedtime just seemed to be taking us longer and longer: shut blinds, turn on night light, put the diffuser on while she was in the bath but make sure to turn it off before bed, turn on music – sleep playlist with a timer, put on white noise machine and make sure music/white noise were at the right volume.
Despite this routine working well at bedtime, the amount of time it took us to set up and manage the numerous plugs, cords and machines was becoming a real challenge. As well as frustrating us when we had to set this up numerous times a day prior to sleep time, anything that looked like technology had become very exciting to our 1 year old, and I was having to unplug things during the day and hide the diffuser behind her cot to make sure she couldn’t hurt herself with the cords.
As a parent the amount of pressure that you are under at any given time is immense, so it is very important to reduce this where possible and streamline things in any way you can. So that is what I did. I unplugged the diffuser, white noise machine, speaker and night light, and set off to trial the Aroma-Snooze Plus. I cannot believe that in my hours of scouring the internet that I didn’t find this sooner, with functions to play noise/music, scent diffusion and lights all in one device, activated by a remote, with a timer setting!
My bedtime setup routine honestly went from 5-10 minutes to about 30 seconds and I have no more problems with cords or power points. The aroma-snooze now lives permanently behind a chair in the corner of the room and can stay there all day (unless I need to refill the diffuser). I use the remote to; turn on the diffuser and set the timer for two hours, play pink noise all night, and turn the light on and off. To make it even better, the timer function is linked to both the light and the diffuser, but not the sound, so I can set it to turn off the diffuser, but the audio can play all night.
From my perspective though, the real winner is the flexibility of the Aroma-Snooze, so even when my daughter’s preferences change as she gets older, we can adapt to this easily. We can change the type of oil we use in the diffuser, use a looped voice recorder function (for you to record your own song/message), Bluetooth speaker connectivity (so you can stream audio from your phone), red and rainbow lights (red light helps with our circadian rhythm and is more soothing overnight than a white light) and 2 interchangeable covers. It also has 5 different sound options:
- Pink noise (very similar to white noise just a different frequency of sound)
- Rain sounds
- Heartbeat
- Lullaby
- Meditation
This being said, the Aroma-Snooze has so many features, in some ways it does not offer the same flexibility as using other separate devices. The major downside from my perspective is that the lowest volume setting is still quite loud in our daughter’s small bedroom, as a result we’ve had to place it on the other side of the room away from her bed. Another challenge for me is that you can’t easily swap from Bluetooth to white noise without having to manually reset the device. To make the Aroma-Snooze work perfectly for us, I have chosen just to compliment it with a separate speaker, this means that I can have pink noise and music playing at the same time, with the music stopping after she has fallen asleep and the pink noise continuing.
All in all though, balancing the pros and the cons, I feel like the Aroma-Snooze is a fantastic option for parents. With a thoughtful design that looks nice in your space, lots of great features and the flexibility to age with your child, I’m sure it’s going to be a staple in our house for years to come.
MEGAN WEST
Occupational Therapist
