History Sleep is a sleep app for iPhone that plays the world's most boring audio to help you drift off. Its library draws on hand-picked history, lectures and radio archives, including BBC Radio, C-SPAN hearings, NASA recordings and university lectures. Titles are grouped by category, with examples such as a Department of State hearing, an air traffic control hearing, Moby Dick, Walden and talks on maintaining a lighthouse in the 1800s or brewing ale in a Saxon village.
It is meant for adults with a racing mind at bedtime who find music or meditation apps too stimulating, and for people who want to stop scrolling videos in bed. Shift workers, light sleepers and anyone who already falls asleep to podcasts or audiobooks may like the idea of content chosen to be calm and unremarkable. Users who enjoy history, classic literature or government proceedings can pick topics that are mildly interesting but never exciting. It is available on iOS, and listeners describe it as unhooking the brain.
At bedtime you open the app, pick a category such as medieval life, ancient civilizations, classic novels or government hearings, and press play. A listener who normally ends up watching videos on a phone can swap that habit for a slow lecture. Someone who wakes in the night can restart a calm recording without turning on a bright screen for long. Travelers can use it to fall asleep in unfamiliar rooms, and people who like audiobooks can try a reading of a long classic. Playback starts within seconds.
