SoundSleeper

Generated Noise

Noise

Nature & Mechanical

Nature

Sleep Timer

00:00

⚙️ To keep sounds playing, leave the screen on. Use the sleep timer to stop sounds automatically.

Progressive Muscular Relaxation is a clinically validated technique for calming your nervous system before sleep. Written by Dr James Mackin, NHS GP, and recorded with his daughter Heidi.

Restore Your Sleep: Heidi's Voice

Free preview · first 2 minutes

PMR Vol

Place your phone face-down after pressing play.
The session will guide you gently into sleep.

⚙️ Screen stays on while sounds are playing. Locking the screen manually will pause audio, so use the sleep timer instead.

The 23 action points from Restore Your Sleep by Dr James Mackin, NHS GP. Condensed for the app; the full reasoning and evidence is in the book.

01 of 23

Light

Bright or harsh light in the evening stimulates the brain and can gradually reprogramme your body clock away from sleep. Screens are the main culprit: TVs, phones and tablets are best kept out of the bedroom entirely. A sleep mask or blackout blind is a cheap fix with an outsized effect.

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Sound

Noise disrupts sleep even when it doesn't fully wake you, fragmenting the deep sleep you need most. White, pink and brown noise have all been shown to help the mind de-focus from disruptive sounds, including in studies on noisy hospital wards. This is the whole idea behind SoundSleeper.

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Temperature

Your body needs to drop in core temperature by around 0.5 to 1.5°C to fall and stay asleep, and a warm room makes this harder. Most people sleep best somewhere between 16 and 18°C, cooler than most people's instinct. This is why the SoundSleeper machine includes a temperature monitor.

04 of 23

Rule Out Medical Causes First

Before anything else, it's worth considering whether an underlying condition is driving the problem. Restless Legs Syndrome, thyroid disorders, sleep apnoea, acid reflux, asthma, and anxiety or depression can all disrupt sleep, and treating the sleep alone won't fix these. Unexplained daytime fatigue, unintentional weight loss, or a strong family history are reasons to see your GP first.

05 of 23

Your Circadian Rhythm

A tiny structure in the hypothalamus, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, runs your internal clock to roughly 24 hours and 12 minutes left to its own devices, a little longer than the Earth's actual day. Light, sound and melatonin are what keep it synced day to day. It isn't fixed: give it the right cues consistently and it recalibrates.

06 of 23

Accept What You Can't Control

Night shifts, noisy neighbours, a snoring partner: not everything disrupting your sleep is fixable. Naming what's truly outside your control, and putting your energy into what is, is itself part of the process.

07 of 23

Your Mattress

The evidence on firmness is mixed, though medium-firm tends to outperform very soft or very firm. The clearer finding is that any new mattress beats an old one. If yours is pushing 10 years and you're uncomfortable, that's worth acting on before anything else.

08 of 23

A Tidy Room

This sounds trivial, but there's real evidence that a cluttered space raises stress and anxiety, and it shows up in sleep quality even when you don't consciously notice the mess. It's often the cheapest fix on this whole list.

09 of 23

Alcohol

A nightcap may help you fall asleep faster, but alcohol fragments sleep later in the night, reduces the deep, restorative stages, and disrupts temperature regulation. If you've come to rely on it to get to sleep, that's worth being honest with yourself about.

10 of 23

Caffeine Timing

About a quarter of the caffeine you drink is still active in your body 10 to 12 hours later, and it can take up to 24 hours to clear fully. Certain medications, including the Pill and some antidepressants, extend this further. That mid-afternoon coffee may be affecting sleep more than you'd think.

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Nicotine

Smokers experience more sleep disruption, and it worsens with how much and how long someone has smoked. Withdrawal disrupts sleep too in the short term, but the good news is that following the rest of this guide tends to improve both your sleep and your chances of quitting for good.

12 of 23

Medication & Other Drugs

Many prescribed sleeping tablets help in the short term but rarely provide truly restorative sleep long-term, and can lead to dependence. It's worth a conversation with your GP about whether one should stay part of your long-term plan. Never stop abruptly without medical advice, particularly on complex psychiatric medication.

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Screens & the Internet

Beyond the light itself, the design of most apps, the next video, the next scroll, the next reply, creates a compulsion that's genuinely hard to interrupt through willpower alone. Keeping devices out of the bedroom removes the temptation entirely, which tends to work far better than relying on self-discipline.

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Food Timing

Heavy meals, especially those high in fat and protein, disrupt sleep, most likely because digestion slows overnight and these foods take longer to digest. Aim to stop eating at least 2 hours before bed. If you're genuinely hungry, a simple complex carbohydrate like porridge is a better bet than a big meal.

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Exercise Timing

Regular exercise improves sleep quality, but vigorous activity close to bedtime raises alertness at exactly the wrong moment. Gentle stretching before bed is fine; save anything strenuous for earlier in the day.

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Sex

Unlike almost everything else on this list, sex before sleep isn't a problem. The physical and mental relaxation that follows tends to help rather than hinder.

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Scent

There's decent evidence that a neutral or lightly fragrant environment, lavender in particular, modestly increases deep sleep and next-morning energy. Irritant odours are worth eliminating; beyond that, it's a small but real lever.

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Melatonin (Over 55s)

Natural melatonin production tends to fall with age, which can contribute to disrupted sleep. In the UK it's prescription-only, licensed for courses of up to 13 weeks in over-55s with insomnia. Worth raising with your GP if the rest of this list hasn't been enough on its own.

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Stimulus Control

Use the bed only for sleep and sex. If you're not asleep within 10 to 15 minutes, get up, leave the room, and do something calm and low-stimulation until you feel sleepy again, then return. This retrains your brain to associate bed with sleep rather than wakefulness.

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Sleep Restriction

Counterintuitively, spending less time in bed can improve sleep quality. If you're asleep for only 6 of the 8 hours you spend in bed, restricting time in bed toward that 6 hours, tracked with a sleep diary, tends to raise the proportion of time you're genuinely asleep, often quite dramatically.

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The To-Do List

Writing down tomorrow's tasks, and the vaguer, unresolved ones further out, before your wind-down routine begins helps stop them circling in your head once the lights go out. Simple mental housekeeping, and it works.

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The Bedtime Routine

A consistent, predictable wind-down sequence, the same steps in the same order each night, cues your brain that sleep is coming. It doesn't need to be elaborate: teeth, checking the doors, getting into nightwear, done consistently, is enough.

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Progressive Muscular Relaxation

The technique behind the SoundSleeper machine and app: tensing then consciously releasing each muscle group, paired with slow breathing, to shift your body out of alertness and into the state sleep requires. It's based on Bernstein and Borkovec's standardised protocol, one of the most well-evidenced relaxation techniques in clinical use. Try it now on the PMR tab.

Unlock all 23 evidence-based action points. Plans from £2.99/month.

This is the condensed version. For the full explanations, evidence and references behind every point, the complete guide is in Restore Your Sleep: get the ebook →

"SoundSleeper was built by real people, and so were these sounds. We're genuinely grateful to the Freesound community."
Heidi Mackin, Founder

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SoundSleeper

ℹ How to use SoundSleeper

Save

Save as an app on your phone

For the best experience, add SoundSleeper to your home screen so it opens like a native app: full screen, no browser bar.

On iPhone (Safari): tap the Share button at the bottom of the screen (the box with an arrow pointing up), scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen, then tap Add.

On Android (Chrome): tap the ⋮ menu in the top right corner, then tap Add to Home screen or Install app.

Tip

Layer your sounds

Sounds can be combined and balanced independently. Try brown noise with crickets quietly underneath, then the PMR script playing over the top. Use the Noise and Nature volume sliders on the Sounds page to find your perfect mix, plus a separate PMR Vol slider on the PMR page.

iOS note

Keeping sounds playing

Web apps on iPhone cannot play audio after the screen locks. This is an Apple restriction for home screen web apps. The simplest solution: set a Sleep Timer before you close your eyes. While the timer is running, the screen stays on automatically. If you need to lock your phone, use the native SoundSleeper white noise machine from our bundle instead.

Navigation

Moving between pages

Use the four dots in the top right of every page to jump between Player, Standard, Bundle and this page. Tap any dot to navigate directly.

Good to know

Silent mode & volume

SoundSleeper plays through the media channel, not the ringer, so audio works even when your phone is on silent or Do Not Disturb. Use your phone's physical volume buttons to adjust the overall level, and the in-app sliders to balance Noise vs Nature vs PMR.

Go Deeper

The book behind the app

Everything in the Guide tab is condensed from Restore Your Sleep, Dr Mackin's full evidence-based guide: the reasoning, the studies, and the complete CBT-I approach in full. There's also a dedicated SoundSleeper white noise machine with a built-in temperature & humidity monitor, for anyone who'd like a bedside device instead of their phone.

Get the Ebook See the Machine

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Sleep that
actually
restores you

Better sleep, for less than a coffee a month

The complete
sleep system

Sleep thatactuallyrestores you

Better sleep, for less than a coffee a month

The completesleep system

Sleep that
actually
restores you

The complete
sleep system