The Best Apps to Help You Sleep

While keeping your phone in your bed isn’t the best practice to get great sleep, we’re a technology-driven society and sometimes 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.

Relax Melodies 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 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 utilizes 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 Pillow is your very own sleep assistant. Much like with Sleep Cycle, 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—it has 3 different nap settings to choose from so you get the perfect amount of midday sleep.

Noisli Similar to Relax Melodies, Noisli allows you to find soothing and relaxing tones to help keep your mind mellow and sleep attainable. You can create and save your favorite sounds and set a timer to fade so it doesn’t play all night. Noisli isn’t just for sleeping, but works well for concentrating on work or some afternoon reading.

Calm 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 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 the best app to help you stop sleeping?

Alarmy If you struggle to wake up in the morning, you need the app that challanges 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.

Share this story

Shelly Weaver-Cather
Shelly Weaver-Cather

Shelly Weaver is part of the Content Team at Tuft & Needle, leading the writing and editing of our blog. Not quite a Phoenix native, (They take that sort of thing super seriously.) Shelly has spent most of her life in the Phoenix Metro area and has no plans of leaving anytime soon. She made the unexpected jump out of wedding photography and onto T&N’s team in 2016, and found a passion for the people that keep the lights on. She still finds herself shooting in her free time, though these days there are less bridal portraits and more masterpieces of her first child, Duke, a lab-pit mix with an unparalleled love for both T&N mattress hogging and couch destroying.

More posts from shelly

Related Posts

How to Help Allergies: Create an Allergy-Friendly Bedroom with T&N

Tis the season of longer days, warmer months, and beautiful, budding flowers. But with the appearance of bright blooms and the end of winter weather comes a less-loved, age-old trade-off: allergies...

Read more

Ask the Sleep Nerd: How to Turn the Winter Blues Into the Best Night’s Sleep

The winter season always starts with a bang. The holidays are in full swing, celebrations await around every corner, and the year’s latest chapter finally comes to a close. However, once the lights...

Read more

Three Essentials for Your Journey to Sleep Better

If you were stranded on a deserted island, what three things would you bring?From creating calming sleep routines to choosing a mattress that fits our needs, each night we do our best to chart ...

Read more