9 of the best sleep podcasts to help you doze off

I’m a total convert to sleep podcasts. When things started getting very, very sketchy in March 2020, I stopped sleeping properly. You might well have struggled too. Frustrated one night, I put on BBC Sounds’ Sleeping Forecast and found what felt like nirvana. It was blissful.

Over the next six months I listened to loads of different sleep podcasts, discarding also-rans and adding contenders to my nightly rotations. There are a few different types, and you’ll probably have to shuffle through a few to see which works best for you. The most common style are story readings, either classics or new, specially written low-stakes scenes that aim to lead you gently into dreams – though there are a fair few that deploy mindfulness techniques and immersive soundscapes too

It’s a tricky balance to strike. They have to be interesting enough that you want to melt into the sound-world they create, but they have to be dull enough not to rev you up so much you can’t drop off. They need to be welcoming, but not overfamiliar. Almost by default, they’re oddly sensual experiences – someone is whispering in your ear as you lie in bed, after all – but they must be in absolutely no way alluring. Having said that, Audible got Matthew McConaughey for theirs and that didn’t do them any harm. Anyway: here are seven of the best.

The Sleeping Forecast

The Shipping Forecast is a widely prescribed sedative, but if you’re listening to Radio 4 at 00.47 you’ve got to be conked out pretty quickly before ‘God Save the Queen’ comes thundering in at 1am. Fortunately, BBC Sounds married extracts of it with neoclassical piano pieces in its hour-long piece, part of its Mindful Mix strand.

The smooth, lilting baritone of British-Jamaican announcer Neil Nunes is the perfect voice to hear gently reciting the liturgy of mythic places around the British Isles’ coastline: Fitzroy, Cromarty, German Bight. Producer Freddie Botham told me that Nunes was always his first choice. “There’s something about lower frequencies and Neil Nunes’s voice,” he said. “They are naturally comforting – there’s a womb-like aspect.” Listen now on your podcast app >>

Get Sleepy

From a slightly pokey walk-in wardrobe somewhere in Buckinghamshire, 27-year-old Thomas Jones reads specially written sleep stories in an even, soothing tone. Get Sleepy’s stories come in a few flavours. Some take you to different places around the world, like the Costa Brava or Nova Scotia; others take you to different places in time, perhaps Roman Colchester or Ancient Athens. There are new spins on folk tales and comforting retellings of how crayons or love heart sweets or the Pony Express came into being. It’s just added a new strand, too – The Sleepy Bookshelf, which features readings of classic stories and started with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Listen now on your podcast app >>

Phoebe Reads a Mystery

The title’s a tiny little bit misleading here. What started with a reading of Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles became an anthology of full readings of classic novels including Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Sense and Sensibility and, amazingly, over 44 episodes, Jane Eyre. There’s been a year’s hiatus but the show is back, and also boasts a big back-catalogue to dig into. You’d never think that Dracula could make for a good bedtime story, but it really works. Listen now on your podcast app >>

Nothing Much Happens

Yoga and meditation teacher Kathryn Nicolai narrates little tales of perfectly formed mundanity. You’ll pop to the bakery, wander around a village looking for a gift for a friend’s housewarming, and revisit the first few months of a lifelong friendship. This is a great big cuddle of a podcast, and Nicolai’s whispered delivery is as calming as they come. Listen now on your podcast app >>

The Audible Sleep Collection

This was one of Audible’s biggest sellers in 2020, and it encompasses two strands: stories and meditations. The selling point here, that the stories are read by well known voices, seems a little bit self-defeating. How, you might ask, am I meant to sleep when Matthew McConaughey is reading to me? Me! Matthew McConaughey! A bedtime story! The meditations are more amorphous and rambling, and feature the likes of Diddy giving you affirmations and Nick Jonas rhapsodising about the perfect baseball swing. It is, however, undeniably effective. Listen now on your podcast app >>

Sleep Cove

Another podcast that mixes voyages into the past with factoids and meditative breathing exercises which encourage you to find sleep through mindfulness, this one also adds guided sleep hypnosis episodes into the mix. The idea is that narrator Christopher Fitton leads you gently into a state of readiness for sleep. It’s somewhere between mindfulness and general wellness, a more active experience than whacking on a story and waiting until you drop off. Listen now on your podcast app >>

Send Me To Sleep

Now, this one comes with a warning: narrator and pro voice actor Andrew’s reading style is a bit of an acquired taste. His slightly halting delivery can take a little getting used to, but it clearly works for a lot of people. He reads stories ranging from Ancient Greek fables and Shakespearean adaptations to The Phantom of the Opera and The Time Machine. Listen now on your podcast app >>

Boring Books for Bedtime

Dropping off while someone with a calming voice reads to you from a book that’s just interesting enough to hold your brain’s attention, but not so interesting you want to hear any more than you absolutely have to. Maybe it’s just me, but not all of the out-of-copyright books read here sound boring – PT Barnum’s autobiography? A history of the art of firework making? Oscar Wilde on English art? Sign me up! – but presenter Sharon’s semi-whispered style render everything she reads deeply soothing. Listen now on your podcast app >>

Podcast to Fall Asleep To

This is about as Ronseal a podcast name as you’re ever likely to find, and much like that celebrated wood stain it gets the job done with minimal fuss. Host Jimmy Jo softly and patiently talks about different topics which are, by his own admission, “both unimportant and uninteresting”. Most recently it was pets – specifically his cats, who have become producers on the show. Jimmy Jo’s murmurings have been less frequent over the last year, but there’s a back catalogue of 161 episodes to curl up with. Listen now on your podcast app >>

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Looking for a podcast for children struggling to sleep? Check out our interview with Kerry Keenan, who created Your Floating Bed >>

This article was first published in August 2021 and updated August 2023.