The Best Music To Play Before Bed For Longer, Deeper Sleep

Never underestimate the power of a good night’s sleep—or the lengths people will go to achieve it. In a world awash with bedtime supplements, sleep tonics, and light-blocking glasses, setting ourselves up for shut-eye can start to feel like a full-time job (and an expensive one at that).

One thing that’s often missing on people’s growing laundry list of sleep tools? Music. Listening to certain types of sounds is a simple, low-cost way to promote faster, deeper sleep. Here’s the science of how music helps you sleep, the best sounds for bedtime, and how to use them to build an effective and enjoyable nightly routine. 

Music helps you sleep how, exactly?

Listening to music primes the body and brain to sleep in a few different ways. One of the most important is by reducing a common barrier to sleep: stress. 

It’s no surprise that feeling stressed before bed can make it more difficult to fall asleep. Research shows that it can also reduce the amount of time we spend in the most restorative stages of sleep, like REM sleep and slow-wave sleep.

Certain music has a positive effect on both the physiological (racing heart, blood pressure) and psychological (anxiety, nervousness) symptoms of stress thanks to the way it triggers hormones like dopamine and impacts the parts of the brain involved in emotional processes.

Pressing play before bed seems to be effective for many different groups of people: from teenagers to older adults, healthy populations to those with preexisting sleep conditions. A number of randomized controlled trials (the gold standard of scientific research) on thousands of participants have come to the same conclusion: Music can improve overall sleep quality in those who suffer from insomnia compared to no-music controls.

Certain sounds can also help block out the distracting noises that would otherwise wake us up, helping us stay asleep for longer.

What sorts of sounds are best?

Clearly, bedtime routines don’t have to be silent. But what types of sounds are best for achieving different sleep outcomes? Here’s an overview depending on your goals:

-- For winding down from a stressful day:

To start to relax after a busy day, you’ll want to look for music that meets you where you are. The Iso Principle (a core theory of music therapy) states that in order to change your emotional state, you should first listen to music that matches your current mood and then transitions into the mood you want. In the case of sleep, that might mean playing a track that starts out with a faster, more staccato rhythm and then becomes slower, smoother, and more relaxing, depending on how stimulated your brain is before bedtime.  

Try these tracks: Spiritune makes it oh-so-easy to work the Iso Principle into your nightly wind-down routine. Just open the app, tell it how you currently feel and how you want to feel, select  the sleep category icon and then allow us to use the principles of neuroscience and music therapy to craft a personalized track that will get you there. As one Spiritune user, an NYPD officer, writes, “The app’s personalization helps me unwind and fall asleep faster, even after a long, intense shift. I wake up feeling more refreshed and ready to take on the next night.”

-- For falling asleep quickly:

Music that’s soft, smooth, and paced at a slower tempo—typically around 60 to 80 beats per minute—can help create a soothing environment as you wind down for sleep. While classical music is a common favorite, sleep music is deeply personal, so opt for tracks within this tempo range that resonate with you. Spiritune offers a science-backed, ready-to-go option that removes the guesswork. If you prefer curating your own playlist with familiar songs, consider these gentle tracks. Just a tip: lyrics can sometimes pull focus, so instrumental songs or tracks with subtle, non-distracting vocals are often best.

Give these tracks a try: “Holocene” by Bon Iver, “Space Oddity” by David Bowie, and “River” by Leon Bridges are a few popular songs that tick off the quiet, smooth, slow-tempo boxes.

--For staying asleep and sleeping more deeply:

As every light sleeper will know, our brains stay responsive to outside noises as we snooze. It’s a valuable evolutionary trait in theory, but in practice, it can be a real pain when the sounds of an air conditioner or car traffic wake you up night after night.

Broadband noises can help mask these distractions using different frequencies of sound.  “White noise” is a common catch-all term, but different colors of noise have frequencies of their own. As Spiritune’s neuroscience adviser Daniel Bowling, PhD tells mindbodygreen, pink noise and brown noise (which are both more weighted toward low frequencies) tend to be more effective than true white noise (which has higher frequencies that are more likely to wake you up or worse, even cause stress). 

Give these tracks a try: Invest in a noise machine that lets you test out a few different “colors” of noise to see which one suits you best. Spiritune also programs different variations of pink noise into our Journey to Sleep tracks—another shortcut to longer, deeper sleep.

‍Other tips for optimizing your sleep with music medicine:

1. Commit to consistency: Research shows that music medicine is most effective when it’s implemented consistently over four weeks or so. Try to get in the habit of playing your sleep-optimized tracks at roughly the same time every day. Over time, hearing the music should instantly prompt you to relax.

2. Make it personal: Instead of forcing yourself to listen to the songs you feel like you should find relaxing, play ones that you genuinely like and have positive associations with. And remember: What works for one person won’t necessarily work for someone else. If you’ve tried to play music before bed to no success, there’s nothing “wrong” with you. This particular tool may not be as effective for you, and that’s okay—others will be!

3. Use for naps too: Finally, you can also use music to optimize shorter sleeping periods, like mid-day naps. Research on women found that playing relaxing music before 90-minute naps helped them fall asleep faster and improved their self-reported sleep quality. 

Listening to calming, personalized music consistently before bed has been shown to reduce stress, improve sleep quality, and block out disruptive noises—all the more reason to press play before you hit the hay. And check out Spiritune’s sleep category - it’s our second most popular listening program!

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