Pick a number. A voice says it, then the one before it, then the one before that. You count along until you forget to, which is the part that works.
Your device decides which voices exist, and some of them are strange. Press "hear it" until one sounds like something you'd want reading to you at 3am.
The screen dims itself once the counting starts. You do not have to count along out loud, and you are allowed to lose your place. That is roughly the whole idea.
No science here your grandmother didn’t have. Counting backwards is dull, and dull is the point, because it gives your head one boring job so it stops doing the interesting ones at two in the morning. If it doesn’t work, nothing’s wrong with you. Pick a bigger number.
Short answers, including to the ones we would rather dodge.
Because it is your device's own speech engine, not a recording we made, and the voices phones ship with vary from genuinely warm to deeply peculiar. We filter out the novelty ones, but the rest is down to what your device has.
Open the settings, press hear it a few times, and pick whichever one you could stand listening to at three in the morning. Your choice is remembered.
Counting up is easy enough to do on autopilot while your brain carries on with whatever was keeping you awake. Counting down takes just enough attention to get in the way of that, and not enough to be interesting.
Being slightly boring is the entire mechanism. If you lose your place, it is working.
A hundred is a reasonable default and takes about seven minutes at the middle pace. If you are still awake at the end, start higher rather than starting again, because restarting is a decision and decisions wake you up.
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.