Great Products: Sleep with Me Podcast — The Podcast That Puts You To Sleep
This is my first entry in a continuous series on products that I find great. I will be starting with a podcast I enjoy, but have not heard a large majority of its content, as intended.
What is the Sleep With Me Podcast about?
The Podcast That Puts You To Sleep | A Lulling, Droning, Boring Bedtime Story to Distract Your Racing Mind.
It’s fairly self-explanatory that this podcast helps people who struggle with falling asleep.
Let’s take a look at a few facts on the struggles people have with sleeping.
27 percent of people in a new Consumer Reports survey of 4,023 U.S. adults said they had trouble falling asleep or staying asleep most nights, and 68 percent — or an estimated 164 million Americans — struggled with sleep at least once a week.
Americans spent an estimated $41 billion on sleep aids and remedies in 2015, and that’s expected to grow to $52 billion by 2020, according to Natana Raj, an analyst with BCC Research in Wellesley, Mass. The rub is that certain solutions don’t work as well as claimed — if they work at all.
Sleep drugs are arguably the most significant concern. About one-third of the people we surveyed had tried either a sleep drug (such as Ambien, which requires a prescription, or Sominex, which does not) or a dietary supplement (especially melatonin) at least once in the previous year.
Forty-one percent of people who use over-the-counter sleep aids reported taking them for a year or longer, and 48 percent use the drugs several times per week. Most concerning: The way people misuse sleep drugs can be dangerous, our survey found.
There is a huge, HUGE market in regards to sleep remedy products. With the rise of electronics (such as phones), people are spending more time in front of a screen at later periods in the night, which throws off sleep patterns. There’s a number of other reasons that sleep troubles continue to grow, and the article I linked to above has some good insights into why that is the case.
Back to the Sleep With Me Podcast.
It just works.
For all my life, I’ve always struggled to fall asleep quickly. Whether it took an hour or two, it would be frustrating.
I’ve used a number of sleeping remedies (such as blue lights for the morning, blue light blocking glasses at night, humidifiers, white noise machines), and while they have improved the quality of sleep, they have not addressed the issue of falling asleep quickly.
Within 20–30 minutes of putting on a Sleep with Me Podcast episode, I have fallen asleep.
What I find interesting about the podcast is that if it works as intended, you miss out on a vast majority of the podcast.
You’re fast asleep by that point. Drew Ackerman, or Scooter as he goes by on the podcast, releases three podcasts a week, ranging from 60–120 minute episodes. He may do TV episode recaps (such as Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, or, as of writing, Star Trek: The Next Generation), or he will ramble about…well, it’s really hard to say, because he just drones on and one, and I’m already asleep. Just as intended.
Here’s an article that I found from The New Yorker that gives great insight into the podcast: THE PODCAST THAT TELLS INGENIOUSLY BORING BEDTIME STORIES TO HELP YOU FALL ASLEEP
Drew Ackerman, a.k.a. Dearest Scooter, the forty-two-year-old creator and host of the popular podcast “Sleep with Me,” has an ingenious intuition for this narrative balancing act. In the three one- to two-hour-long episodes he releases each week, he keeps his voice gravelly, at the bottom of his vocal range, and so slow that his upstate-New York accent takes on a tinge of Southern drawl. His sentences are mazelike constructions that turn on countless “if”s, “or”s, and “so”s; he drifts off into pointless tangents, or doubles back to ask himself if he really means exactly what he just said. His plots are equally labyrinthine: a recent few episodes centered on a magical female pirate named Lady Witchbeard; another imagined a secret war between See’s Candies and Whitman’s Samplers.
These zany tales are downloaded roughly 1.3 million times each month; last year, the show broke iTunes’ list of top-fifty podcasts.
But the brilliance of Ackerman’s technique is the way in which he calibrates his monologues to grab you ever so slightly: he seems always on the verge of being funny or interesting or profound, but, like narrative tantra, he never quite lets himself go all the way.
Though most listeners say they nod off long before the end of his tale, Ackerman is superstitious about the importance of bringing each and every one full circle, like any good bedtime story — of providing the familiar comfort of narrative wholeness.
The article is a great read and gives some insight into Drew’s thought process, including why he records long podcasts, even though most people have already drifted off to sleep within 30 minutes.
Here are some comments from an article on the podcast by The Washington Post: This podcast is so boring it puts people to sleep. And that’s why insomniacs love it.
The podcast makes money through advertisements, and Patreon (while writing this, I made a pledge on Patreon…it’s likely a product I’ll write about in the future).
If you have trouble falling asleep, or staying asleep, then give Sleep with Me a listen. Download an episode, close your eyes, and drift off.
Originally published at www.pmpaul.com on May 11, 2017.
