Ever since I moved to a Brooklyn garden apartment, I’ve been impressed and tormented by the volume and variety of sleep-destroying night sounds. Ambulance sirens, clanging bottles, yowling horny cats, screeching angry rats, unholy combinations of angry cats and horny rats, revving motorcycles, cars with drivers resolutely dedicated to making sure everyone on the block hears their favorite midnight jam—it’s a lot of noise.
So I turn to podcasts when I want to sleep. The BBC’s In Our Time, with deeply researched roundtables about history, philosophy, and literature, steered by soothing, posh voices, was an early favorite for relaxing. When it came to actually dozing off, though, I had a problem. I was too interested in what those fancy Brits were saying! I needed something even more boring than a 52-minute discussion of Middlemarch, because my terrible brain would apparently rather listen to a detailed explanation of Middlemarch’s politics than go to sleep. I craved something truly, madly, deliberately not compelling. Rule 34 of the internet holds that if something exists, there’s porn of it. At this point, Rule 35 should be that it also has a podcast, and of course, there’s an entire genre of podcasting devoted to helping people snooze.
The biggest name in the sleep podcasting biz is “Dearest Scooter,” also known as Drew Ackerman. The 40-something former librarian runs Sleep With Me, a bedtime-stories podcast in which he lulls listeners into slumber by telling off-kilter, rambling yarns, which are sometimes based on television shows and always very, delightfully weird. (There’s an episode in which Elon Musk and Dan Harmon team up to help find a dog at Christmas.) Ackerman’s slightly raspy, long-winded delivery is like listening to a drowsy professor fond of loopy digressions really go for it, and his stories putter along according to a goofy dream-logic. He began the show in 2013, and has fine-tuned the content over the years. “Listeners helped me refine what I talk about and make it more ‘sleepy,’” he told me. “So: Don’t talk about snakes. Don’t talk about spiders.”
Ackerman’s enthusiasm for sleep podcasts comes from his own troubles with sleep, which began as a child. In addition to enjoying telling bedtime stories with his sibling, Ackerman cites the longtime cult radio host Dr. Demento (a proto–Weird Al figure) as inspiration. “Sunday nights were the worst, but during the two hours listening to the Dr. Demento show, at least I’d forget everything else. It never put me to sleep, but it made me feel safe and secure,” he said. “That’s really where the podcast came from.”
Ackerman has been successful enough to make sleep-podcasting his full-time job. (He also hosts Sleep to Strange, a truncated version of Sleep With Me, as well as Game of Drones, which sets itself apart from the pack of Game of Thrones recaps because it’s meant to be dull.) While Ackerman does have some editing help now, he’s been a solo host for hundreds of episodes. His DIY ethos is shared by Harris (a pseudonym), another popular podcaster who hosts Sleep Whispers and Sleep With Silk. For his popular nature-sounds series on Sleep With Silk, Harris records the majority of the audio himself, venturing out into the woods and even bringing his equipment on vacation to capture stormy days at beaches and summer-night cricket chirps, and then meticulously editing out any jarring or unexpected noises to create a consistent soundscape. “It’s just me,” Harris said. “I built a closet studio.”
In addition to nature sounds, Harris’s Sleep With Silk series offers tracks with background noises, binaural beats, soothing voices, and ASMR triggers. His Sleep Whispers podcast, meanwhile, also offers bedtime stories like Scooter does, although Harris tends to deliver whispered readings of other people’s writing or summarize research for his “Whisperpedia” episodes. (I fell asleep to a recent installment about the diet of Komodo dragons, which was unexpectedly pacifying.)
While Ackerman and Harris work from home on these podcasts as labors of love, their intimate productions are reaching wide audiences. “As of this month the podcast has been downloaded 70 million times across all our episodes,” Ackerman said. The Sleep With Silk series, meanwhile, has been downloaded more than 3 million times altogether, according to Harris, while Sleep Whispers receives an average of 8,000 downloads a month. “I can’t believe there’s this many people downloading these podcasts, especially since I wasn’t doing any advertising,” Harris told me. Both podcasters say fan feedback has largely been positive, although they have each created modified versions of some podcasts for fans who want to loop the audio without hearing their introductions.
Sleep is a big business now. Sometimes it feels like mattress startups will stop at nothing until their ads appear on every damn podcast. Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global, which focuses on calming people down, has several in-house podcasts, while mattress company Casper has its own print magazine, Woolly. In this atmosphere, sleep podcasts seem primed to blow up. But while they’re definitely adjacent to a growing industry, these are still very much passion projects. Harris now produces extra-long episodes for superfans, which they pay for, bringing his podcast some additional income, but his focus is not monetization. “Currently, right now, I don’t have any sponsors in the normal episodes,” he told me, categorizing his business model as a hobby. The Dearest Scooter podcasts sometimes do have ads, but are more focused on keeping audiences happy. “Because people are going to sleep, it’s more of a Patreon, listener-supported member style,” Ackerman told me. “We have some ads, but the sleeping demographic is not as appealing to advertisers as the awake one.”
I can imagine some advertisers eventually trying out subliminal spots, though. The best sleep podcasts help people bridge a normally anxious time to relax and cede control to the body. Using bedtime stories told in low, rumbling tones, or peaceful soundscapes, audio calms instead of excites. My friend Kat, who also loves Sleep With Me, credits both Ackerman’s delivery and content with her own contentment. “His voice is so soothing and calm, and his pacing is such that it lulls you to sleep,” she told me. “And the topics aren’t interesting enough to stay awake for. It’s perfect.” Production on these podcasts is crucial, too; both Harris and Ackerman are meticulous editors, keen to eliminate any jarring noises, anything that might stir the senses. “There really should be a steady sound. When someone is relaxing and falling asleep to sound, it needs to maintain a rhythm to it. I can’t disrupt the pattern, or the brain comes out of the relaxation state,” Harris said. “I can spend 30 minutes cutting out one tiny sound.”
For podcasters like Ackerman and Harris, having people zone out to their sounds is the dream. This isn’t a feeling shared by all podcast makers, naturally; my beloved In Our Time did not return a request for comment when I asked how the team felt about its popularity as a sleep aid. When I asked one of The Ringer’s podcast producers, Zach Mack, he noted that he would be happy if the podcast had been specifically designed to fall asleep to, but we do not currently offer such products. However, my podcast cohost, Justin Charity, is totally fine with the idea of our Damage Control getting used for snoozing. “I love the thought of someone falling asleep to our podcast,” he told me. (For the record, Charity likes Abnormal Mapping for his own nighttime listens.)
It’s probably a good attitude to have, since regular podcasts are frequently used as sleep aids. While there’s no metric for measuring how many listeners are asleep, when I’ve asked around for the top sleepytime podcast choices, mainstream podcasts often came up. There were other In Our Time devotees, but also a surprisingly varied selection—my friend Jackson swears by Food on Franklin, a deadpan podcast about Brooklyn eateries, while my friend Asher had an incongruous pick. “I genuinely started typing this before I recognized the irony, but Waking Up With Sam Harris,” Asher told me, citing a provocative philosophy podcast. Meanwhile, two friends both recommended ASMR cooking YouTube videos as their night distraction of choice. Even Harris, whom one might think would listen to his own podcast to unwind, has an unexpected sleep aid of choice. “One of my favorites is a Korean podcast. I don’t speak or understand Korean, but on one of the episodes, she whispers on it. Whispered Korean is my recent sleep thing.”
Any podcast could be a sleep podcast, after all, if the listener is tired enough, or the host’s voice tickles all the right parts of the brain needed to relax. But part of the charm of choices like Sleep With Me and Sleep With Silk are how much effort and care has been spent on audio meant to be ignored. They may have invented the most generous form of media: art designed for audiences to abandon.