Why You Can Trust CNET Trouble Falling Asleep? Your Amazon Echo Can Help You
Use Amazon's Alexa to help you get the best sleep of your life.
Your Amazon Echo can help you get some much-deserved rest.
We've all been there: You're exhausted all day while working and have to take care of all your home duties in the evening. You feel like you could immediately fall asleep, but as soon as you hit the sheets, insomnia hits. Now you're stuck tossing and turning for hours on end, and once again, not getting enough sleep. This is when it's time to use your Amazon Echo to help ease your mind and drop off to sleep.
Alexa can help you fall asleep with guided meditation and relaxation sounds to clear your head. It can even read bedtime stories to your little ones to help them fall asleep.
Keep reading to get started on your journey to relaxation and peaceful sleep. For more sleep tips, find out what your sleep language is.
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Guided meditation can help calm your mind
Before bed, you should really think about easing your mind from all of the day's stresses you've encountered. Meditation is a great form of stress and anxiety relief that can help you relax and calm your thoughts enough to lull you into sleep.
Your Amazon Echo has guided meditation built-in, so all you have to say is "Alexa, open Guided Meditation." There's a meditation of the day, so you'll always have a new one to follow along with.
Use rain sounds to fall asleep
If you easily fall asleep when it's raining outside, then you'll love this one. It puts me right to sleep. Just say, "Alexa, play rain sounds" and your Echo will immediately conjure up the sound of a shower.
It'll continue playing until you tell Alexa to stop. But if you don't want rain sounds playing all night, you can always create a routine to make it stop at a specified time.
Make your meditation space inviting.
Launch the Sleep Sounds skill
If you want to fall asleep to a different sound every night, this is a good skill to use. It has over 125 sounds to choose from, including thunderstorms, ocean sounds and crickets. When you're ready for a snooze, just say "Alexa, tell Sleep Sounds to play thunderstorms," or whatever sound you want to hear. You can set a sleep timer so it won't play all night by saying "Alexa, set a sleep timer for three hours."
To download it, open the Alexa app, go to your Skills section and type "sleep" in the search bar. Scroll until you see the Sleep Sounds skill. Select it and tap Launch.
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Echo has a built-in night light
Not everyone can sleep in a pitch-black room, but a TV can be distracting when you're trying to snooze. If all you need is a little light, then put your Echo's ring light to use. Just say "Alexa, open night light" and the top of your Echo will start glowing and pulsing. It'll glow for five minutes unless you give it a specific amount of time.
This is especially useful if you find yourself needing to get out of bed at night because it offers just the right amount of light. When you're ready to turn the night light off, just say "Alexa, stop."
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An Echo can read your kids bedtime stories.
Help your kids fall asleep with a short bedtime story
If you're busy finishing up work or home errands, you can have Alexa read short bedtime stories to your little ones. You'll have to enable the skill in the Alexa app (there are several to choose from). The Short Bedtime Stories skill offers 11 different stories that can be customized to include your child's name.
Once the skill is enabled, you can say "Alexa, open bedtime stories and play all stories" or "Alexa, open bedtime stories and play Little Red Riding Hood." If there's a story your child doesn't like, they can say "Alexa, next" to skip and move on to the next story.
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