Back in the day, I used to have a serious ish with insomnia due to being on an incorrect dosage of epilepsy meds. Oh boy did that suck balls. Flash forward a few years and now I’m generally good sleeper – thank God – but I still have the odd night where no amount of sheep counting’s going to put me down. You see, as a freelancer, I work for what feels like ten zillion different companies at a time and often only finish my day late at night. Slamming your laptop closed round 11 and then trying to ‘switch off’ yourself can be trying.
Anyway, yesterday, I discovered the coolest little app thanks to fellow blogger Ashleigh B who’d mentioned it on twitter. It’s called Relax Melodies and allows you to pick from an array of soothing sounds that range from waves lapping on the beach to birds tweeting in a forest. You can even mix them up and make your own little combos, my favourite being thunder, heavy rain and purring cat!
..
The best bit? You can set it on a timer so that your soothing sounds of choice eventually fade out after however many minutes and then be woken up by an alarm noise of your choosing. How much do we love?
Anyway, if you’re keen to give it a bash, you’ll find it in the iStore. Just search for ‘Relax Melodies’. There’s an an oriental version of the app too. It features a clip called ‘Sushi bar’ which is also awesome. I used to be petrified of the dark as a child so I loved falling asleep to the sound of my uber-social folks having rocking dinner parties at night (they always made me feel ‘safe’) so now ‘people noise’ also kind of does it for me.
Check it out if you’re interested. It’s free and fun and totally changing the way I hit the sack.
Love, love
Leigh
P.S. If there’s an app that’s rocking your world right now please do share via the comments section. I’d luuurve to hear about it.
Lipgloss is my Life 
I use an app called Sleep as Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid.sleep) which pairs via bluetooth to my Pebble Smartwatch (https://getpebble.com/) and basically it monitors your sleep cycles (essentially your movements and sound cues) during the night, and only starts trying to wake you when you’re most awake (you sleep in cycles, so this is usually every 45/90 minutes or so).
So when the alarm does go off in the period you want (say between 6am and 630am), it picks the least annoying time and you wake up more refreshed 🙂
You can also use the app without the watch by just putting the phone on the corner of your bed and letting its built in accelerometer monitor your movements.
It also has other cool features like the app you mentioned, as well as being able to automatically record sounds (so you can check back on any sleep talking you did), as well as a feature to induce lucid dreaming.
Awesome, thanks so much for this. Going to look into it on the weekend.