A ring that grows while you breathe in and falls away while you breathe out, with a sound that follows it rather than playing underneath it. Both of them slow down as the session goes on, and then quietly stop being there.
The breath slows as the session goes on and the sound thins out with it, so by the end there is very little left to follow. You are not meant to stay with it the whole way.
It starts at roughly five and a half breaths a minute, which is slower than most people breathe sitting still, and eases down to about three and a half by the end. Nothing is asked of you beyond staying somewhere near it, and drifting off the pace is not a failure, it is the direction of travel.
The sound is the pacing rather than a bed underneath it: filtered noise that rises as you draw in and falls as you let go. It holds its volume for the first part of the session and then thins out across the rest, so by the end there is almost nothing left to follow. If you are still awake for that part, it did not work, and that is allowed.
Short answers, including to the ones we would rather dodge.
Because the point is to end up somewhere slower than you started. It opens at about five and a half breaths a minute and eases down to around three and a half by the end, which is slow enough that most people stop actively following it, which is rather the idea.
Something that keeps pacing you at full volume is something you have to keep listening to. The volume holds for the first part of the session and then thins out over the rest, so it lets go of you rather than the other way round.
You are not supposed to still be awake when it finishes.
No, and chasing it is worse than drifting off it. If the pace feels wrong, breathe near it rather than exactly with it. Forcing a rhythm that does not suit your lungs makes people tense up, which is the opposite of the errand.
No. Not doctors, not sleep scientists, not therapists, not qualified in any of this. We are people who could not sleep, got interested in why, and started building small things to try on ourselves.
So read everything here as somebody's experiment rather than as advice. Where we mention research we have tried to describe it honestly, including the parts where the evidence is thin, but we are reading it as curious amateurs and you should treat it that way too.
If you genuinely cannot sleep, night after night, for weeks, that is worth taking to someone qualified. Insomnia is treatable and the treatment that works best is not a website.
Honestly, it depends on the thing and on you. Some of what is here leans on techniques with real evidence behind them, some of it is closer to a nice idea that helps because it gives your head something dull to do, and we try to say which is which on each page.
What we will not do is tell you something is clinically proven when it is not. A sleep site that oversells itself is just another thing keeping you up.
There are no accounts, so there is nothing to log into and nothing tying any of this to you. Your settings, the voice you picked, how long you say you take to fall asleep, live in your own browser and never leave it.
The one exception is deliberate: if you queue a sound or leave an email address, you have sent us that on purpose, and the queue is public by design so everybody sees the same list.
There is no catch and no paywall, mostly because there is nothing expensive to pay for. The sounds are generated in your browser rather than streamed, so there are no files to host and no licences to buy.
If that changes we will say so plainly rather than quietly putting a wall in front of something that used to be free.
Not medical advice. If you really can’t sleep, go see someone real. We just have the rain sounds.
Have a nice sleep, bro.