How to Fall Asleep to Music Without It Playing All Night

There's a specific kind of 4am waking that only happens to people who fall asleep to their phone. You surface out of a dream to find that the calm album you chose ended hours ago, autoplay took over, and something with a drum machine is now happening at the side of your bed.

Your battery is at nine percent. You are extremely awake.

Here's how to use one properly, and what's actually worth playing.

What a sleep timer does

It stops playback after a set amount of time. That's the whole feature, and its value is entirely in what it prevents.

With a timer, the music stops and the phone goes quiet. In Zene, you'll find the sleep timer in the full player alongside the other playback controls.

Choosing the right length

The instinct is to set it long — an hour, two hours — because nobody wants it cutting out while they're still awake.

This is backwards, and it's why most people's sleep timers don't help much.

For most people that's 20 to 30 minutes. If you're a slow starter, try 45.

Long timers defeat the purpose: you're asleep at minute twenty and the phone runs for another hundred, which is precisely the situation you installed the feature to avoid.

Two or three nights of adjustment and you'll usually have your number.

What to actually play

The timer solves the mechanics. What you play determines whether any of this works at all.

The rest of the bedtime setup

The timer is one piece. Three other changes can make a bigger difference than people expect.

For daytime, too

Worth knowing: sleep timers aren't only for sleep. Any situation where you want audio to stop by itself works.

That last one is the sleeper hit of the feature, so to speak.

If your music stops before the timer does

Occasionally people find playback cutting out early and blame the timer, when the problem may actually be the phone's background or battery-management settings.

If it happens repeatedly, check whether your phone is restricting the music app when the screen is off. Many Android phones, in particular, include battery optimisation settings that can limit background activity.

The point of it

Sleep is mostly about removing decisions and interruptions from the last hour of the day. A sleep timer removes one of each: you don't have to decide when to stop, and nothing interrupts you at 4am to ask if you're still listening.

Zene's sleep timer is available in the full player for free on Android, iPhone and iPad, and the web.