10 Guided Sleep Meditations to Cozy Up With Tonight

The best guided sleep meditation audio will help relax your mind and body and facilitate a faster onset and duration of sleep. Sounds good, no? Worries and fears always seem to creep into our minds in a major way right as we settle into bed. But if you’re tired of waking up with anxiety, there is something you can do to combat that. 

“Any meditation that is focused on sleep will generally be helpful,” says Abhinav Singh, M.D., and the medical director of the Indiana Sleep Center. Although, the doctor adds, “not trying too hard is the key.” 

It’s cause and effect, simply put. According to Dr. Singh, most guided sleep meditation promotes relaxation, which in turn helps anchor a busy mind: “Anytime you can achieve this, you will be in a better position for allowing sleep to come to you.”

There are a lot of different sleep apps out there, but guided meditation for anxiety is a unique—and incredibly low-lift—way to try and get a better night’s rest. So how do you choose the best guided sleep meditation for you without, as Singh says, trying too hard? 

Here are 10 of the most recommended, highly rated, and accessible ones. Relaxation meditation apps can be helpful for a variety of things, but the ones below will be especially useful around bedtime. Sweet dreams.

Mindful

The recommendation for mindful.org comes from Tamara Teragawa, registered yoga teacher and lead yoga teacher for Xponential+. Before bed, she’s a fan of self-guided mindfulness meditation and short body-scan meditation (a practice that brings attention to your whole body as a way to focus the mind). She finds both on the site, but here is a free example of a night meditation created for sleep specifically.

“Good sleep is just as important as eating healthy and exercising regularly to achieve optimal health,” Teragawa explains. “When your body tells you it needs rest, slow down and make a solid sleep routine priority, and notice how much better you feel and perform in other areas of your life.”

In addition to the bedtime meditation, she recommends also exercising, getting into a bedtime routine, and avoiding your phone and television before you hit the hay.

Headspace

Teragawa also recommends Headspace for deep sleep guided meditation. There’s a 12-minute one you can sample here.

“These types of meditations can be a short, three- to five-minute routine or stretch out to 45 minutes or longer, depending on what you are looking for,” she says. “They allow you to slow down, connect to your breath and body, and recognize what you need to truly help relax.”

A free trial for Headspace lasts two weeks if you select the annual membership for $69.99. A monthly membership, which comes with a seven-day trial, costs $12.99 each month.

Calm

Calm is a free-to-download app that offers a free weeklong trial membership and then costs $69.99 a year or $14.99 a month. (There are also lifetime memberships available for a onetime fee of $399.99.)