A good night’s rest is a blessing that transcends life’s other necessities. Our minds cannot function unless we’ve had a peaceful sleep. There have been several studies that show People who sleep less than the recommended 7 to 8 hours every night have a higher risk of chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease, obesity, depression, diabetes, and even dementia.
Unfortunately, our hectic routines, inner chaos, and catching up with deadlines makes it extremely hard to get the recommended number of sleep hours. Not to mention, taking our minds off of things such as our favorite movies, tv shows, and video games makes the quality sleep hour quite cumbersome.
Every minute that we spend on social media lying in our beds deprives us of the essential time we need to rest our mind and body.
Quality of sleep is another matter entirely. We may lay down in our beds, calculating how much time is left until we have to wake up. The constant stress of our future leads us astray. We ruin our present moment as a result of anxiety.
Not to mention everyone’s sleep needs and sleep cycles are quite different from everyone else. Therefore we need more customized plans to help keep track of our routines and sleeping habits. This task is easier said than done.
We all need help sometimes. Luckily for us, there are plenty of great sleep apps on the market. Today I will help you narrow down the plethora of sleep apps to a few that in my opinion are the best sleeping apps and best sleep tracking apps available.
1. Relax Melodies: Sleep Sounds
Relax Melodies labels itself as a sleep meditation app. This essentially means the app is designed to calm the nervous system for a blissful sleep experience. The app creates custom soundscapes with more than fifty calming sounds.
These sounds include white noise, sounds of nature, sounds of water, and meditation music. All of these helps users relax their bodies and calm their minds. After using this app, a person is more at ease with themselves and feels closer to nature. The app is great for people suffering from stress and anxiety, insomnia, and tinnitus.
The premium version offers 100 sounds, but the free app is more than good enough for most people. The app has more than 30 million downloads and is available for free on Android.
2. Sleep as Android: Sleep cycle tracker, smart alarm
Sleep as Android is an all in one, immensely popular sleep app that offers an abundance of amazing features. These include sleep cycle tracking and smart wakeup. Sleep tracking is exactly what it sounds, while smart wakeup is a smart alarm clock that helps you wake up peacefully in an optimal environment.
It is regarded as one of the best sleep tracking apps for Android, as the smart wake up uses phones or wearable sensors to monitor the user’s vitals. This feature is only available for purchase, but users can try it for a two week trial period.
It also offers plenty of lullabies to help you fall asleep faster. Its best feature, in my opinion, is Sleep Score. This feature does in-depth sleep analysis which means it rates one’s quality of sleep regarding duration, deficit, deep sleep percentage, the presence of snoring, sleep efficiency, and any irregularity in sleep.
All these features result in one of the best sleep tracker apps for Android. For these reasons, it is one of the best free sleep apps, but to get the full experience you will need to make in-app purchases.
3. Calm
Calm considers itself mainly as a meditation app. But it is a complete package and is often mentioned in the lists of best sleep tracking apps. Having used it for both meditation and sleep improvement, I can safely say this app is an all-rounder.
It is one of the best mindfulness apps for beginners. Mindfulness is being in the current moment, throwing all your troubles of the past, and worries of the future out of your mind. Since the app lays so much focus on meditation, with practice, one can learn to be at ease with oneself for the majority of the day.
The feeling of calmness itself is enough to help one sleep quicker. Guided meditation sessions are available in timeframes of 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, or 25 minutes. A person can choose the timeframe depending on how much stress or anxiety one wants to relieve and schedule.
Calm’s meditation guides are so powerful that it appears on several top free sleep apps and meditation apps. It is available for Android devices for free. But to get the full experience, you will need to buy a subscription.
But it’s worth it, if you don’t believe me, take a gander at the 200,000+ 5-star reviews on Calm’s website.
4. Headspace
Headspace is another meditation and mindfulness app, similar to Calm. What sets it apart from Calm is the bare-bones, minimalistic, and clean user interface. It does primarily focus on meditation to clear one’s mind of life’s meaningless clutter. While doing so, it also helps one concentrate on breathing and relaxing techniques.
It’s even been proven to improve focus. But since we are talking about the free sleep apps, Headspace is no slouch. Headspace has perfectly curated sleep meditation exercises, which help users fall asleep faster and deeper.
It also offers a variety of peaceful sleep noises, to help you relax and prepare for bliss. It is available for free on Android. Headspace also contains in-app purchases for some premium features.
5. Pzizz
The special thing about Pzizz is the mesmerizing user interface and astonishing music. Both the audio and the visual experience feels enough to calm down the most restless souls among us.
Its main weapon is the calming music that helps people fall asleep quicker. And users do not have to worry about the music continuing in the background. The music slowly fades away with time, right as one is falling in peaceful slumber.
There’s also an option for narration in both man and a woman’s voice to soothe your senses. If that’s too overwhelming for you, you can easily turn it off.
6. Runtastic Sleep Better
Runtastic has a suite of apps meant to improve our lives. It has several exercise apps that are effective. Today we will be looking at the sleep improvement app from Runtastic.
It is one of the better free sleep tracking apps currently available on the market. Users can monitor the sleep cycle, keep track of their dreams, boost sleeping habits, analyze their sleep patterns, and have a better waking up experience with Sleep Better.
The app is highly intuitive, has a nice clean interface, yet offers so many features. The app gives users comprehensive stats about their sleeping habits. These include graphs that show the efficiency of sleep, sleep duration and average sleep hours in a month.
Runtastic also helps users track what sort of dreams they had, i.e., good dreams, bad dreams, or no dreams. Because of these reasons Runtastic often appears on best free sleep tracking apps lists.
Final Word
My personal favorite on this list of best sleep tracking apps has to be Calm, because of its perfection of digital meditation. But in my opinion try all of these apps for a few days, to see which one suits you best.
One of the best sleep tracking apps, in my opinion, is Sleep as Android, because of its massive list of useful features.
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