In my experience, listening to audiobooks is surprisingly effective at helping me fall asleep. Even if I wake up in the middle of the night and other methods fail, audiobooks consistently work for me.
Ways to obtain free audios of books
- Download audiobooks onto a smartphone
- Download from LibriVox that offers recorded audios of books that are already in the public domain
- Apps such as ‘Free Classic Audiobooks’ serve as frontends for LibriVox audiobooks.
- Use the Assistive Reader in Amazon Kindle App for books with Enhanced Typesetting
- Some books are available on YouTube. Use Youtube2MP3 or similar tools to generate the audio files.
Notes
- The effect diminishes with repeated listening of the same book.
- LibriVox recordings can be annoying because of the disclaimers (see pt #1).
- Kindle uses text-to-speech, so the voice is a bit robotic.