Why the Sound of Wind in the Trees Can Settle You, Even on a Blustery Night

October is when the wind comes back. The leaves are loose, the evenings are dark by seven, and the first proper gusts of the autumn start pushing through the trees at the end of the road. It is a sound that can keep some people awake and lull others straight off, and the difference often comes down to where you are hearing it from and how much of it there is.

There is a word that turns up online for the sound of wind moving through leaves, psithurism, from the Greek for whispering. You will not find it in most dictionaries, but the fact that people went looking for a word tells you something. A steady rush through a canopy is one of the most familiar sounds there is, and for a lot of us it reads as calm rather than threat.

There is some research behind that feeling. In 2017 a team at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, led by Cassandra Gould van Praag, played people recordings of natural and artificial soundscapes while scanning their brains and measuring their heart rhythms. The findings were published in Scientific Reports. When people listened to the natural sounds, their attention tended to point outwards rather than inwards, and the measures linked to the body's rest-and-digest side rose a little. With the artificial sounds, the pattern leaned the other way, towards the kind of inward-focused activity seen in worry and rumination.

A larger look at the evidence came in 2021, when Rachel Buxton and colleagues pulled together results from 18 studies on natural sounds for the journal PNAS. Across them, natural sounds were linked with lower stress and annoyance, better mood and better performance on thinking tasks. Water sounds had the strongest link with positive feelings and birdsong with easing stress, but the broader point was that the sounds of living places seem to do people a modest amount of good.

Neither study was about wind in the trees specifically, and it would be a stretch to say that wind does one particular thing to your nervous system. What wind through leaves does share with rain and running water is the shape of the sound. It is broad and steady, it rises and falls slowly, and it has no words or tune for your brain to follow. Sounds like that are easy to stop listening to, which is often exactly what you want when you are trying to settle.

The catch is that wind is not always steady. A soft rush through an oak is one thing. A gust that rattles the window, a bin lid going over at two in the morning, a gate banging somewhere you cannot see, those are sudden and unpredictable, and that is the kind of sound that pulls attention back in. On a blustery night it is usually the bangs and rattles that keep you up rather than the wind itself.

So if the wind is keeping you awake, it is worth separating the two. Wedge the gate, bring in whatever is loose, and pull the curtains to soften the window. Then, if the gusts still catch you, a low, even sound in the room can help smooth over the spikes, much as white or pink noise does. The aim is not to drown the weather out, just to give your ears something steady to rest on so each new gust is less of a jolt.

If you find that broad, steady rush comforting, you can borrow its shape on a still night too. In Create Your Zen, pick the forest and layer rainfall with a slow stream at a low volume, two sounds that rise and fall in much the same unhurried way, and leave them playing while you read or wind down. It will not fix a bad night on its own, and if sleep has been hard for a long while that is worth talking to your GP about. But on a dark October evening, the sound of trees moving in the wind is one of the gentler ways to let the day go.