Best Apps to Help You Fall Asleep Quickly and Peacefully

With the whole wide world of tech sleep solution ahead of you. In can be hard to sort the what from the chaff. Here is our round up of the five best apps to help you get to sleep.

Probably the biggest name in sleep apps, Calm has over 100 million downloads and over 1.5M+ 5-star reviews. Perfect for those who love ASMR. This app features a great deal of whispered stories to play as you drift off to sleep. A personal recommendation is Harry Styles’ narrated piece where the singer’s dulcet tones talk you through a series of peaceful rhyming couplets. With audio programs taught by masters in their fields, celebrity guest narrators, and music, meditation and videos to help you connect to your body, there is something for everyone on this sleep app. (Celebrity guests include Regé-Jean Page, Stephen Fry, and Lebron James, so there is almost certainly a voice for you). The app is free to download, but the premium costs £30 a year, with a free week's trial.

A cross between meditation, ASMR and mindfulness, this app is perfect to help you settle into your body before bed. Headspace is uses science-backed meditation and mindfulness tools, to help create life-changing habits to support your mental health. The app is proven to reduce stress by 14% in just 10 days. They help you to create the conditions for a more restful night’s sleep with sleepcasts, music, and other unique audio experiences. Plus, there are multiple other benefits to Headspace, including help with focus, movement and waking up. This is a subscription service app, but if you already pay for Spotify, you can get both for a reduced price.

This app is self-described as ‘the world's most advanced sleep and power nap system to fall asleep fast, stay asleep, and wake up feeling refreshed.’

Pzizz is an NHS-recommended sleep app that focuses on calming the mind, to reduce the anxiety or ‘racing thoughts’ that can sometimes cause insomnia. Music, voice and sound effects all combine to help you sleep. Whether this is napping in the daytime or just sleeping through the night. They use ‘psychoacoustics’, the branch of psychology concerned with the perception of sound and its physiological effects. Pzizz can help manage your sleep automatically throughout the night and wake you up gently with your own personal alarm call. The app is free, but does feature some in-app purchases.

Escape into nature with the Portal app. I have saved my favourite app for last. Portal is a white noise app. Featuring sounds taken from different places – it’s a portal to different parts of the world. If you struggle to sleep in silence, this app will play soothing nature sounds. The best feature for me, other than the wide variety of sounds available on the app, is they can be played simultaneously with other sound apps on your phone. This means you can have soothing classical music playing from Spotify while you listen to, for example, the sounds of a Scottish loch. We’re now spending over 90% of our time indoors. The people at Portal believe that shouldn’t mean that we miss out on the benefits of nature.