The best podcasts to fall asleep to
First, full disclosure: we make sleep podcasts. Six of them, in fact. So instead of pretending to be a neutral judge, this guide does something more useful: it explains what makes a podcast work for sleep, matches each of our shows to the kind of listener it suits, and points you to a couple of shows we don’t make but happily recommend.
What makes a podcast good for sleep?
Most podcasts are designed to keep you awake: hosts spar, music stings, ads arrive at double volume. A podcast you can fall asleep to needs the opposite:
- A slow, steady voice. Calm on its own isn’t enough. The voice has to be unhurried, with no sudden changes in energy.
- Interesting, but not urgent. The story needs to hold your attention gently enough to crowd out your own racing thoughts, without ever making you need to hear what happens next. Cliffhangers are the enemy.
- Consistent volume. No jolts, no laughing fits, no ad reads that arrive louder than the story.
- No stakes for you. The best sleep content is about somewhere else, someone else, some other time.
Everything below is built around those rules, and read by people (how we make our shows).
If you want to be told a story: Get Sleepy
Get Sleepy is our flagship: cozy bedtime stories for grown-ups, told slow and soft by host Tom Jones and a rotating cast of gentle narrators. With 1,100+ episodes and new stories most days, there’s always somewhere new to drift off to: a slow train through the mountains, a quiet seaside village, a walk through autumn woods.
If you’re curious by nature: Sleepy History
Sleepy History tells true tales from the past (the history of chocolate, lost cities, quiet mysteries) in a supremely calm voice. History turns out to be the perfect sleep genre: fascinating enough to hold you, finished long enough ago that none of it can worry you. We wrote more about why history helps you sleep.
If you love books: The Sleepy Bookshelf
The Sleepy Bookshelf is Elizabeth Grace reading beloved classics (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Pride and Prejudice, Anne of Green Gables) gently adapted so you can drift off and never lose your place; every episode opens with a recap, so sleeping through a chapter costs you nothing. If you’re more audiobook than podcast, we also keep a guide to the best audiobooks to fall asleep to.
If you’re putting kids to bed: Snuggle
Snuggle is calm bedtime stories for kids, toddlers, and the whole family: cozy recurring worlds and gentle adventures, with a new story every Sunday. It’s the one show on this list designed to put two generations to sleep at once.
If voices keep you awake: Deep Sleep Sounds
Some nights even the gentlest story is too much. Deep Sleep Sounds is pure, carefully mixed sound with not a single spoken word: rain, ocean waves, white and brown noise. The feed is free; Premium drops the ads and unlocks eight-hour episodes that run until morning.
Shows we don’t make but like anyway
Two long-running favorites from elsewhere: Sleep With Me, whose rambling, deliberately pointless bedtime stories have lulled insomniacs for over a decade, and Nothing Much Happens, which does exactly what the title promises, beautifully. Different flavors from ours, and some nights a different flavor is what works.
A few tips, whatever you choose
Use your podcast app’s sleep timer (usually a crescent-moon icon on the Now Playing screen) so playback stops once you’re under. Keep the volume just above a whisper. And if ads keep jolting you awake, that’s what Premium fixes: every one of our shows, ad-free.