Many of us struggle to get those precious hours of sleep to rest and recharge. As mentioned elsewhere on this website, there are many suggestions to help assist us with getting a better night’s rest.

One of the tips that deserved a dedicated page is sleep tracks. Many people find listening to tracks with guided visualisation designed to encourage mental wind-down, or basic white noise to the round of rain or pebbles, incredibly helpful.

There are a range of apps that can be downloaded to provide these features: Headspace, Calm and Sleep-Cycle are some major examples, and I offer a very brief review of them all below.

Sleep Cycle

As a bonus to sleep aid offerings, Sleep Cycle also provides sleep-state tracking and generates reports correlating sleep quality with factoring entries that you might select, such as ‘daylight’, ‘workout’ and ‘tired’; these entries can be customised so that you can keep track of the events that might be improving or reducing your ability to gain a good night’s sleep. Sleep Cycle alarm clock I have used for almost a decade, and will continue to use it nightly for as long as the app exists; it has wowed me and provided insight into the daily happenings that were particularly holding me back.

Headspace

Headspace alternatively offers a range of courses around mindfulness and meditation, and even has one around sleep that provides further education around how the messages we give ourselves throughout our waking day can and does impact us when we try to sleep, if there is any reason to download this app, it would be for that reason. In addition to this, Headspace also offers guided mindfulness wind-downs to assist with falling asleep, and as a user of this app for over a year I can thoroughly hand on heart say it has helped to reduce my insomnia in general and has provided me with simple tips that have been so effective when applied to my routine.

Calm

Calm is another app, which in my opinion holds the best features of bed-time stories that gently help to wind down the mind and drift off to sleep but offers much more than this in a similar respect to Headspace.

There are many other options out there, but these are the three I have used most regularly and have been the ones that I have stuck with in my battle against insomnia; the ones I would recommend to others to try.

For more information on getting a good night’s rest if you’ve not read it already can be found under Sleep: Starting to set the scene. For further information about meditation please see here.