I have to admit I am one of those people whose mind starts racing right about the time I am ready to fall asleep. Which leads to me staring at the ceiling not being able to sleep. I think this is not uncommon, especially if you work in tech and keep odd hours or are working on a project. I have taken sleeping pills before, but I don’t like them. When I do use them I usually wake up groggy and out of sorts. I use to have an alarm clock that had some various smoothing nature sounds and white noises and I really liked it. Unfortunately it got broken during a move and I couldn’t find a replacement for it that I liked and could afford, until now. What I found was an application that is available for both the iPhone, iPod Touch and the iPad it is White Noise Pro by TMsoft. . It has 40 ambient sounds, including those from nature, city noises, white noises and others. You can set it to play a single noise or combine noises together to create a mix. My favorite mix is a cat purring, fire, brown noise and a heartbeat. You can set it to play for a specific time period or to a specific hour. When it stops you can have it play an alarm, music from iTunes, or a different mix. You can have the alarm or music fade in from 10 seconds up to 5 minutes. One of my favorite aspects of this application is that when you hit sleep all you see is a digital clock, which you can dim to your liking.
I know a lot of people who use this application not only for sleeping, but also while traveling on a plane or train to help relax. I have tried a couple of other similar applications, but White Noise is the best of them all in my mind and has everything I want. There is a lite version you can try for free. The pro version of White Noise is available for $2.99 in the iTunes store. For me this application is in my top ten must have applications for the iPhone or iPad.