The Best Apps to Help You Sleep
Today is one of my favorite (and necessary) celebrations - #NationalNappingDay !
Exhausted from Daylight Savings? Take a nap today. Hard to sleep last night? Take a nap today. Just feeling sleepy and feel like lounging in bed? Take a nap today. The possibilities are endless.
When you do finally wake up, here are some apps to help you with Daylight Savings. And I know… keeping your phone in your bed isn’t the best practice to get great sleep, but we’re a technology-driven society (and blog), we think our phones can do some pretty magical things for us.
There’s an app for just about anything, including your sleep habits. From soothing your mind before bed to tracking and analyzing your current quality of sleep, your phone might be your greatest asset on the journey to quality rest.
Sometimes the issue interrupting your sleep is solved with some soothing music to get you in the right mindset for sleep. With Relax Melodies, you can actually create your own sound mixes so they’re perfect for you or use one of their meditations. They have program options for deeps sleep, anxiety relief, dream analysis, and tons of other content to explore.
Sleep Cycle is an alarm clock app that analyzes your movements throughout the night to identify which cycle of sleep you’re in and wake you during the lightest possible phase of sleep, making for a nice and gentle morning. The app uses your phone’s microphone and accelerometer to track movement throughout the night, creating a graph that looks for the ideal moment in your sleep to wake you. You can still hit that snooze button, but you might not feel the need to!
Pillow is your very own sleep assistant. Pillow uses sound and movement to track your sleeping pattern to record your sleep history, creating a profile over time. It can also determine the best time to wake you, and uses data from your wearable tech to better understand your sleep cycles.
Pillow also encourages the art of the power nap (YOU DON'T NEED TO ASK ME TWICE) —it has 3 different nap settings to choose from so you get the perfect amount of midday sleep.
Calm is a meditation app that helps you relieve stress and get better sleep. Along with guided mediation to help keep you nice and relaxed, they actually include bedtime stories for adults. We’re talking amazing titles like “Happy Little Zzz’s” narrated by Bob Ross and “Stephen Fry’s Lullabies” to get you through the night. Calm is a subscription based service that you can even gift to someone in your life who may need a little help getting in the right mindset for sleep.
Sleepio focuses on building a “sleep improvement program” that doesn’t include medical treatment. The experts behind the app aim to use your own lifestyle and history to create a personalized sleep routine that works specifically for you—they utilize over 30 years of research to inform their platform. They claim to help you sleep better, perform better, and feel refreshed.
And HERE'S a bonus: the best app to help you stop sleeping..
If you struggle to wake up in the morning, you need the app that challenges you to sleep if you can–Alarmy creates scenarios that make it impossible to hit snooze. You can choose to shake your phone to get your alarm to stop, take a photo, or solve a math problem, either way you're going to be wide awake after.