Six podcasts that will read you a bedtime story

These calming podcasts, from British bedtime tales to soothing mysteries, are perfect for winding down at night. Photo / 123rf

If you’re seeking a respite for your brain at the end of the day, these shows deliver tales that are diverting but uneventful enough to help you doze off.

There’s a lot that may be keeping you up at night. Sleep problems have been on the rise for years and have spiked since the pandemic, alongside other mental health concerns. Bedtime stories are best known as a way to help children wind down, but they can be just as beneficial for the racing thoughts of an adult mind. These six podcasts offer respite for your brain, delivering tales that are diverting enough to keep you focused, but uneventful enough that you can doze off.

Get Sleepy

If you find British voices soothing, this may be a particularly effective bedtime option. The meditative sleep stories that transport the listener to far-flung destinations en route to the Land of Nod are accompanied by ambient music and narrated by Tom Jones, who began Get Sleepy as a radio show in southern England. Five years on, there’s a deep back catalogue with a variety of settings to choose from: you can take a sleepy mental stroll around a Bavarian castle; attend a leisurely tea party in 1920s London; or inhabit the point of view of a fox on the streets of Rome. The notes for each episode include guides on the sounds and vibes to expect (birds, mountain ambience, bodies of water and so on), so you can filter for what you find most relaxing.

Starter episode: A Sleepy Springtime Journey to Welsh South America

Sleep With Me

There’s a phase between wakefulness and sleep known as hypnagogia, during which we may experience hallucinations and our thoughts become illogical and meandering. Sleep With Me, hosted by Drew Ackerman, helps to gently nudge listeners toward this state using stories that are deliberately slow-paced and a little surreal, full of tangents that keep your brain just busy enough to relax. Dating back more than a decade, this is the OG sleep aid podcast, inspired by Ackerman’s childhood habit of listening to radio shows to interrupt his racing thoughts during bouts of insomnia. The subjects of the biweekly episodes run the gamut from rambling recaps of television episodes to stream-of-consciousness fantasy stories, all delivered with the hope that you never make it to the end.

Starter episode: Stuffed Animal Planning

Phoebe Reads a Mystery

Podcast aficionados may be familiar with the dulcet tones of Phoebe Judge from the long-running Criminal, a true-crime series that takes a subtle, cerebral approach to a saturated genre. Here, the focus is on fictional crimes, more specifically the cosy mysteries that Judge reads, chapter by chapter. The series has worked its way through horror staples like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, an array of Sherlock Holmes stories including The Hound of the Baskervilles, and the occasional nonmysterious classic like Little Women.

Starter episode: Lady Molly of Scotland Yard – Chapter 1 – The Ninescore Mystery

Reading or listening to stories before bed can help prepare the body for sleep. Photo / 123rf

Nothing Much Happens

The creator and host of Nothing Much Happens, Kathryn Nicolai, is a yoga and meditation teacher, but perhaps more important, she’s a self-described “architect of cosy”. That remit is at the core of this calming podcast, in which Nicolai reads a wholesome and uneventful bedtime story that’s just detailed enough to keep your mind tethered. Each episode begins with a meditative breathing exercise to kick off the wind-down process, followed by Nicolai reading the same story twice, going a little slower the second time for maximum hypnotic effect. The storytelling and scene building are heavily influenced by the seasons; summer episodes might take you paddling at a lake, while currently it’s all about pie-making and frosty mornings.

Starter episode: Pies and Pinecones

Goodnight, World!

This delightful collaboration between the staple meditation app Headspace and Sesame Street is designed to help restless children drift off – although its whimsical and comforting adventures might help their parents to unwind at bedtime, too. Each 20-minute episode focuses on favourites like Grover, Big Bird and Bert and Ernie as they explore jungles, look around museums and journey to the moon. There are tie-in activities in the Headspace app that can help introduce children to mindfulness, including a bedtime body scan narrated by Elmo.

Starter episode: Bert and Ernie’s Fall Day on the Farm

Boring Books for Bedtime

Reading just before going to bed has been shown to improve sleep quality, but it can be tricky to find the right book that’ll hold your attention without being so page-turning that you’re up all night. As its title suggests, Boring Books for Bedtime does the work of selection for you, delivering chapters from snooze-worthy texts in the public domain. One week, the host, Sharon Handy, might be reading from HG Wells’ A Short History of the World; the next, a guide to Old English country inns, a car instruction manual or a schedule of trans-Atlantic steamer sailings from the 1920s.

Starter episode: The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book, Part 1

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Emma Dibdin

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