6 Mobile Apps to Help You Sleep Better

Most of our sleep solutions on this blog have catered towards lifestyle changes, all of which we’ll continue to enthusiastically endorse until science proves them wrong. While these changes have worked amazingly for our team members, we understand that improving our habits doesn’t always come easily. That, and we’re living in an age where technology influences everything. Fortunately, there are plenty of apps to help you sleep! While it’s true that one major sleep tip is no screens right before bedtime, just a few minutes with the right screens that are later set aside can make a difference in the right direction. Apps that help you sleep typically offer guided meditations, soothing sounds, and other audio that’ll whoosh away your stresses and help you unwind.

Deemed as “the world’s happiest app”, Calm offers multiple ways to help you destress and unwind for proper sleep. One unique way are its video lessons on mindful movement and gentle stretching. It also delivers the appropriate music and nature scenes to help you calm any jittery nerves that are keeping you up. If you’d like to escape to a fictional world, you can listen to its audio stories.

If you’ve read a few of our articles, you probably know by now that sleep comes in cycles. Waking up during some of those cycles feels like more of a struggle than waking up during others. Sleep Cycle tracks your sleeping patterns and figures out how to wake you up during a phase where it won’t hurt as much. Don’t forget to check out their actual website, which contains plenty of interesting, educational content on sleep as well as international surveys of which countries get the best and worst sleep and which ones snore the most!

Just like Calm, Sleepiest delivers several audio stories and soothing sounds such as “Gentle Stream” to help lull you to sleep. Need something a little deeper? Try its guided meditations. Many of its users find themselves sleeping an average of 32 more minutes each night, which may not sound like a huge number but could make quite an impact throughout the day. One of its most distinctive features is where you can create your own sounds! You can mix sounds such as heavy rain and dreamy instrumental music.

This one isn’t explicitly aimed at sleep, but rather at focus and relaxation. If one of the reasons why you’re getting to bed late is an inability to focus on your work throughout the day that drags your working hours apart, this might be a life-changing option. Noisli claims that its sounds help “mask annoying noises in order to keep you sane, improve your focus, and boost your productivity.”

Power nappers and science enthusiasts, you may want to take a look at this one! Pzizz is quite technologically advanced, using algorithmically remixed sounds to help you sleep and incorporating artificial intelligence to personalize sounds for you. You can customize a soothing voiceover such as changing its gender or volume like you would on a GPS. Pzizz is also a fantastic option if you’re traveling somewhere where the internet might be spotty: it can be used offline!

You’ve probably noticed that listening to the serene sounds of nature is pretty popular in electronic sleep aids. If you can’t get enough of the nature sounds from the above apps, check out the Nature Sounds app. This app is devoted to playing a wide variety of nature’s calming music such as rain on windows, waterfalls, or warm campfires. You can turn on a timer so the app will turn off automatically and save your battery life. Oh, and don’t worry about spotty internet -- you can take this one offline as well. Once you’ve chosen one or more apps to devote the few healthy minutes of pre-bedtime screentime to, don’t forget to complement it with the right bedding. Lull is currently having a $250 off sale of all memory foam mattresses with a 365-day free trial, so you’ve got plenty of time to enjoy the power of a sleep app and a cooling memory foam mattress with a lifetime warranty.