bedtime stories for adults

Bedtime stories are good for adults as well as children.

Sleep is important for health, and yet it seems that everyone I know is having trouble sleeping. Sleep is a $28 billion industry.  70 million Americans are insomniacs and 43 million have Obstructive Sleep Apnea which disrupts sleep.  Americans are currently spending over $40 billion on sleep drugs and other sleep aids. The U.S. economy loses $411 billion in lost worker performance due to lack of sleep.  About one in three people doesn’t get enough sleep on a regular basis which can lead to high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke.  Sleep programs, sleep apps and sound machines are experiencing a surge in popularity.

After you’ve tried counting sheep, 4-7-8 breathing, melatonin supplements, darkening the room, listening to music and pacing, try listening to a bedtime story for adults.

The Calm meditation and relaxation app’s new niche is telling bedtime stories to adults. The program is called “Sleep Stories”.  The author of the stories is a former insomniac, U.K. travel writer and author named Phoebe Smith.  She uses her nature-inspired travels to write soothing, calming detailed stories for stressed-out adults listening to the Calm app. Choose the length you want (they average 20 minutes), a favorite reader if you have one (Matthew McConaughey looked good to me) and a topic or favorite story. Calm offers a 30-day free trial, after that it’s $59.99 a year.  You can also pay $399.99 for a lifetime subscription.

Amazon’s Echo/Alexa will read you a bedtime story if you ask nicely.  Open the Alexa app on your mobile device.  Tap the hamburger icon then tap on Skills. Tap the Categories button, then type the word ‘story’ into search. You can also just ask Alexa to tell you a story and she will choose one from random.  You can pause and resume it or ask for a different story.  You can also ask Alexa to ask for Story Teller for a story and specify the genre. Alexa can also download a book and read it aloud to you.  Maybe Bedtime Stories for Grownups by Ben Holden ($15.56 at Amazon), with lots of British accents, will be the perfect way to get to sleep.

You Tube has a wide variety of bedtime stories for grown-ups.  They vary in topic and length, there’s something for everyone.  There are also a selection of the Calm app’s Sleep Stories to sample.

Sleep With Me is a podcast that launched in 2013.  It is hosted by “Dearest Scooter” as performed by Drew Ackerman.  It is a one-of-a-kind storytelling podcast that uses humor and wackiness.  Each episode runs from 45 to 90 minutes, and new ones are posted three times a week. This is a very popular podcast and was in the top 50 iTunes list for 2015.

Bore You to Sleep, a podcast hosted by Teddy Sands, has many classics from authors like Jane Austen and Herman Melville, read slowly, dully and without much inflection.

Nothing Much Happens is a podcast with stories written and narrated by Kathryn Nicikai.  They run about 30 minutes.

The Snoozecast podcast offers bedtime stories for adults in fiction, folktales, non-fiction, original and poetry. They read excerpts from literature in the public domain as well as original stories. They aim to be boring enough to calm your mind and let you fall asleep without feeling you will miss something.

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