Newborn not sleeping? Try this hidden iPhone feature

Newborns can be difficult. They eat all the time, urinate and defecate wherever they want, and can cry all night. According to American Academy of PediatricsPlaying sounds from a white noise machine can help calm your baby and get him settled — and give you a moment of relief. And if you have iPhoneYou don’t need to spend money on a new white noise machine.

When apple iOS 15 released In 2021, the operating system brought a hidden feature called Background sounds. It allows you to turn your iPhone into a white noise machine, and you can play these sounds on their own or within an audio, music, or video streaming app.

When Apple introduced this feature, there were six ambient sounds played in a loop: rain, stream, and ocean — which are natural sounds — and bright, balanced, and dark noise — which are different tones of sound. White noise. When apple iOS 18 released In 2024, it added two sounds to the feature: Night and Fire. and iOS 26 It brought in more background sounds of instrumentation, such as rain on the roof and chatter — which sounds like a busy café.

If you want to use these sounds to soothe your baby again, or for any other reason, here’s how to enable background sounds on your iPhone.

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How to access background sounds from your Control Center

Instead of digging into Settings every time you want to play background sounds, here’s how to set up a toggle in Control Center to turn on the feature for use on your iPhone.

1. It opens Control center.
2. Tap the plus sign (+) at the top left of your screen.
3. handle Add a control Near the bottom of the screen.
4. handle Hearing Control (ear icon) is under Hearing accessibility To add to Control Center.

Once the Hearing Control icon appears in Control Center, tap it to see three options: Speaker, Background Sounds, and Live Listen. Then click on the adjacent notes Background sounds To turn on the feature. You can also click on words Background sounds To open a menu to choose a different background sound as well as adjust the volume.

Use accessibility shortcuts for background sounds

You can also set up an accessibility shortcut to turn background sounds on or off from your home screen or within the app. Here’s how to set it up.

1. handle Settings.
2. handle accessibility.
3. handle Accessibility shortcut.
4. handle Background sounds.

Now when you press the side button on your iPhone three times, the background sounds will play. You can click the button three times again to turn it off again.

More background sound options

If you want more control over your background sounds, this is where you can go.

1. handle Settings.
2. handle accessibility.
3. handle Sound and image.
4. handle Background sounds.

Near the top of this menu, you can turn on background sounds by tapping Background sounds Toggle, you can change the background sound by clicking voice And choose a new sound.

There are two switches in this menu: Use it when playing media and Stop sounds when locked. Click on the toggle button next to Use it when playing media Allows background sounds to continue playing while watching a video or listening to music. And click on the switch next to Stop sounds when locked Ensures that background sounds are turned off when your device is locked. If you don’t have this enabled, sounds will continue to play when your device is locked.

There are also two new menus in iOS 26: Equalizer and Pausing Sounds with a Timer. The equalizer allows you to adjust the tone and ambience of background sounds, as well as more balanced towards the right or left speaker or headphone. Stopping sounds with a timer allows you to stop background sounds at a specific time that you can choose or after a certain period of time has passed.

For more iOS news, here’s everything you need to know iOS 26.1 and My review of iOS 26. You can also check our website iOS 26 cheat sheet.