Sleep With Me: The Podcast That Puts You to Sleep

Do you ever have trouble falling and staying asleep, while traveling or otherwise?

According to the CDC, about one-third of American adults say they do not get enough sleep each night. For many, this is probably just a product of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. For others, sleep is elusive. That’s the fight Drew Ackerman picked when he set out to create a podcast that could lull people to sleep.

Sleep with Me: The Podcast that Puts You to Sleep is the podcast that tries, and succeeds, at putting its listeners to sleep. As an avid listener of podcasts and as someone who had trouble sleeping in college, I gave SWM a chance as soon as I heard about it. The result has been a nightly listen.

The podcast works like clockwork. Ackerman begins the show with a brief introduction and then runs through the sponsor for the episode. As he points out regularly, getting housekeeping work out of the way early is important when the podcast’s goal is to get its listeners to fall asleep.

Following housekeeping and ads, Ackerman enters the intro of the episode. Each episode contains an intro that lasts about 15 minutes, followed by a longer piece of content. The longer content ranges from original stories about Jeff Bezos and nuns in space, to recaps and twists of television shows like The Good Place and Metástasis, the Colombian remake of Breaking Bad.

The show is quite entertaining at times, but even Ackerman will tell you entertainment is not really the goal. The goal is to let the listener’s mind wander while listening. At its core, Ackerman explains the show is about making the listener feel less alone in the “deep, dark night,“ as Ackerman said.

The podcast has yet to fail me as an active user. If you are someone who has intermittent trouble falling asleep or only has trouble falling asleep in certain situations, such as travel, then SWM may be the thing you have been looking for to help.