Great iPhone apps to help you sleep, relax and meditate

Listening to music or relaxing sounds is a great way to drift off to sleep at night and ensure you get a good rest. You will wake refreshed the next day. There are some excellent sleep apps to help you snooze.

Automatically stop music when you fall asleep

If you like listening to music in bed at night, this tip can ensure that you get a good night’s sleep by silencing it after a certain length of time, hopefully, when you are asleep. There are many good sleep benefits and it is worth making an effort to get your eight hours of rest.

You don’t want to leave music playing until you wake up the next day, so here’s how to switch it off automatically after you fall asleep. You can do this by making use of the timer function of the Clock app and you might not have realised it can do this trick.

Choose your music

You might want to build a playlist in the music app of the sort of music that will send you to sleep. That doesn’t mean boring music, but soothing and relaxing sounds that don’t make you want to jump up and start dancing around.

Start the music playing in the Apple Music app. You should play the music through the iPhone’s speaker. If you use the earphones and fall asleep in bed, wired ones are going to get tangled up when you move around in your sleep and wireless ones will probably drop out. The speaker is plenty loud enough when the phone is on the table next to your bed.

Set a timer

• Open the Clock app and select Timer in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen.
• Set the length of time the music is to play for, such as 30 minutes.
• Press When Time Ends and a list of alarm sounds is displayed. Swipe down to the bottom of the list and select Stop Playing. Press Set in the top right corner.
• Press Start, close your eyes and relax. The music will stop when the timer is triggered.

Sleep music is not the only way to get a good night’s rest and there are some great sleep apps to help you doze off in the evening.

Rain Rain Sleep Sounds

Price: Free | By: Tim Gostony | Size: 101 MB | iOS: 11.3 or later

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Does the sound of rain relax you and make you want to close your eyes and fall asleep? If so, then Rain Rain Sleep Sounds for iPhone is right up your street. It has a large collection of rain audio tracks such as Rain Rain Original, Rain Rain 3D, Rain on a Window, City Rain, Rain on a Tent, Summer Rain, Thunderstorm and more.

It is not just a collection of rain sounds and there are many more sounds like Crackling Fire, Ocean Waves, Harbour Seagulls, Birds in Rainforest, Slow and Gentle Streams. There are also dogs snoring, cats purring and there are even home appliances like a dishwasher, washing machine and clothes dryer. That seems a bit weird, but if it makes you relax or fall asleep then go for it.

The app is free, but there is a paid version and the main difference is the collection of sounds. There is a choice of 49 for free, but over 100 if you choose to subscribe, which costs $3.99 a month.

There are some additional features and the sound can oscillate, fading in and out. Sounds can also be mixed, for example, a dog snoring with rain on a tent. Perhaps you can imaging you are camping with your best friend. The sound can also be hard or soft.

There are timers and you can choose to play the sounds for anywhere between 15 minutes and 25 hours. It’s doubtful anyone wants to listen to rain for over a day, but the shorter times are useful. A sound can be set to fade out after 30 minutes for example, by which time you are hopefully asleep.

You can also set a bedtime reminder and set it to automatically switch off at a certain time during the evening or night.

This is a great app with lots of soothing sounds for falling asleep or meditating and all the options you need.

Relax Melodies: Sleep Sounds

Price: Free | By: Ipnos Software | Size: 534 MB | iOS: 10.0

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Relax Melodies: Sleep Sounds offers more than just sounds to send you to sleep and there is meditation, breathing and even bedtime stories. To access everything the app has to offer, 160+ guided sleep meditations, requires a subscription and it costs $59.99 a year. However, I counted over 50 items that can be accessed for free, which is pretty good.

Select the Composer and there are Sounds and Music tabs. Sounds are organized into categories like ASMR, Brainwave, Sci-Fi, Baby, Animal, Nature, Water and many more. Select a category and you can then select a sound. For example, Water includes River, Rain, Ocean, Waterfall, Fountain, Urban Rain, light and Heavy Rain and so on.

Whatever sound makes you want to sleep, you will probably find something similar in the sound library. Sounds can be mixed and you can start with one and add another and another. In fact, some of the items in the Sounds collection are mixes, such as Orchestral, which mixes soothing orchestral music with rain. The possibilities are endless.

Open the Music collection and there are soothing sounds that are designed to relax you, like Dreams, Fairies Land, Sweet Melody, Astral Blessings, and more. Few are free, but you do get access to some.

There is a large collection of bedtime stories, although won't you miss the end if you fall asleep listening to them? They last from 20 to 40 minutes and they could be useful to get you into the right frame of mind for sleeping if you listen to them late at night.

There is a timer that enables you to quit the app automatically after a certain length of time. For example, it can be set to turn off after half an hour when you are soundly asleep. There is also an alarm setting to enable you to be woken to sounds too.

This is another excellent app for helping your fall asleep and also to meditate with. Any of the sounds or music can be used for meditation and there are also breathing exercises and sleep moves - exercises to get you into the mood for sleep. It is recommended.

Rain Sounds HQ: sleep aid

Price: Free | By: Phase4 Mobile | Size: 79 MB | iOS 9.0 or later

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This is another sleep aid app that uses rain sounds to help you drift off into the dream world. While other apps have expanded into other types of sounds that can induce sleep, Rain Sounds HQ sticks to rain. The library does include Birds Chirping in Thunderstorm, Bulls in the Rain and Small River in Scotland, but that's as far as it goes.

The sound collection is like someone went on a world tour and whenever it rained, they recorded it. There are sounds like Rainstorm in North Carolina, Rainstorm in California, Light Rain in Sweden, Rain in Paris, Downpour in Canada and so on. Sometimes there is a river, a tent, a forest, a camper van and so on.

Up to six sounds can be mixed and your mixes can be saved. This isn't as useful as with other apps because there isn't a lot of variety. You could mix Rain on Umbrella with Light Rain in Milan, Italy for example, or add Missouri Thunderstorm to Light Rain in the City.

A timer is available to stop the app when you have fallen asleep and it ranges from five minutes to 12 hours.

Rain Sounds HQ is free and there are 75 rain or river sounds to help you fall asleep. It's like a subsection of Sleep Sounds HQ from the same developer, which has 600 sounds covering a broad range of subjects. There are some ads, but they don't get in the way. If the sound of rain makes you relax , want to sleep or meditate, this is a good app to try.