A good sleeping pattern delivers a lot of benefits. It helps to keep you looking and feeling young while protecting you from illness and disease. Sleep also improves your mood, making stress and anxiety easier to handle. However, many of us struggle to get our recommended 7-9 hours each night, check out this article from Sleep.Report about fixing your sleep schedule. If you’re one of the many people struggling with sleep right now, there could be a solution.
While you might assume that your phone should be the last thing you use before bed, sleep apps are becoming increasingly popular. These tools improve your sleeping patterns, boost relaxation and even encourage less stress. Let’s look at 7 of the best options.
1. Headspace
Headspace is best known as an app for meditation, but there’s more to it than that. There are free sleep-casts available which provide 45-minute long audio experiences similar to adult bedtime stories. These stories help you to visualize things that are calming, so you can improve your chances of falling into a restful slumber. You’ll love headspace if you find that it’s often stress that’s preventing you from getting a good night’s sleep.
2. Noisli
If you are looking for a very simple app for better sleep, then Noisli could be the one for you. It allows you to choose from a range of different soundscapes for your descent into sleep. You can explore options like white noise, wind, thunder, and even gentle conversation from a coffee shop. Just remember to keep your phone plugged in, so you don’t run out of battery.
3. Pzizz
Pzizz is an app that lets you set a timer for the length of a specific sleep session and play soothing stories or sounds during that session. You usually get a combination of music, voice-overs and sound effects to keep you relaxed when you’re snoozing. One downside for this app is that you do need to upgrade to premium for some features.
4. Slumber
Slumber is an app that provides a combination of experiences to help with sending you into a peaceful sleep. Whether it’s focused on meditation, or bedtime stories, the app gives you all the comfort that you need to drift seamlessly into sleep. You can also choose background noises to play for up to ten hours following the main track.
5. Calm
Another meditation focused app is Calm. It offers support for everything from managing anxiety and stress, to dealing with sleep and insomnia. The sleep stories section has plenty of bedtime stories for adults read by celebrities with soothing voices. There are a few stories available for free, but you’ll need to upgrade to the paid app for more.
6. Sleep Cycle
If you want to learn how you slept, so you can make some more actionable changes based on what you know, try the Sleep Cycle app. This app tracks your sleeping patterns and offers tips on how to improve your snoozing experience. There’s also an alarm clock built in to gently wake you when you’re in the lighter phases of sleep. This means that you’re less likely to feel groggy.
7. Reflectly
If you like to use routine to improve your sleeping experiences, Reflectly will help to ease your mind before bed and get you in the mood for sleep. This app helps you to think over your thoughts and the experiences that you had during the day, so you can let go for bedtime. Journaling with Reflectly can also help with stress and anxiety, as well as insomnia.
Which app will you be using to improve your slumber? With so many options to choose from, you might decide to test a couple out before you commit to one.
