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In the snow-capped eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains lies a mystical region untouched by man.
Imagine a soothing voice gently narrating as listeners curl up in bed with their eyes closed.
Tonight, we explore a seemingly timeless place where tropical forests and highlands coexist in perfect harmony.
Are you paying attention? In fact, it doesn’t matter. The story aims to do one thing: put the audience to sleep.
According to the CDC, nearly 70 million Americans suffer from chronic sleep disorders. To remedy this, many adults are returning to a childhood staple: the bedtime story. The above clips are taken from the 45 minute story on the subscription app.
Many of the more than 2,500 meditation apps on the market offer help with evening relaxation. Dozens of podcasts, such as Sleep Cove, and online video channels, including the Soothing Pod YouTube channel, are readily available to guide adults into a deep sleep.
These aren’t your kids’ bedtime stories: grown-up stories tend to be longer, more descriptive, more embarrassing, and often without the moral arc found in children’s books. Celebrities including Michael Bublé and Idris Elba are lending their voices to these soothing tales.
One of these bedtime stories is a genre specific to adults: travel stories. A third of Calm’s 300 bedtime stories (listened to over 450 million times) are about travel, especially adventure travel. In the app Breethe (downloaded more than 10 million times), 45 percent of bedtime stories are related to travel. Half of the top 10 bedtime stories earlier this year had a travel theme.
Why do travel stories reliably lull listeners to sleep?
On the train to Sleepy Land
Travel bedtime stories are audio travel conversations, often in the present, as if we were sitting with the narrator. It could be a day in the English bath, therapeutic waters. Or it could be a visit to the remote and mountainous kingdom of Bhutan. Or a picture-perfect fantasy trip to “see” the Northern Lights in Norway.
Listeners can take part in cruises on the Nile, cruises to Sri Lanka, strenuous treks such as the Camino de Santiago, balloon rides over Cappadocia, Turkey or Route 66 trips. The tales rely heavily on description, occasionally with sound effects such as ocean waves, train tracks, or soft music.
Train stories are especially interesting at bedtime, it seems. Headspace, Calm and Breethe have consistently added their train-themed content. Listeners can travel on the Oriental Express or the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Headspace has a famous track called “Slow Train” that changes the ambient train sounds in the background and constantly changes the details of the speech descriptor. It’s consistently among the app’s five most popular bedtime stories.
“You need movement in a bedtime story — if things don’t change, it’s too dull and the listener gets bored,” said Martha Bayless, professor and director of the Oregon Folklore and Folklore Program. From ancient to modern times. But the movement should be non-threatening and calming. For our time, what is better than train movement?
Trains engage the senses in a gentle way. With rail travel, “the decisions are out of your hands,” says Bayless. “The train is the perfect vehicle for sleep. Just take it where it’s going, enjoy the gentle swaying, the hum, the old-fashioned, soothing style of travel.”
The same isn’t true of audio stories about air travel, Bayless points out: “Imagine trying to sleep with a passenger pressed up against you in the airplane seat!” In other words: stories that are too close to real life can backfire as bedtime stories.
How it works
Bedtime stories can help some people get more restful sleep, according to Rachel Salas, a neurologist and assistant medical director of the Johns Hopkins Sleep and Well-Being Center. More restful sleep helps the body better manage everything from digestion to cognitive performance American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Bedtime stories work on one level because they’re a good distraction that keeps the mind from worrying, running through to-do lists, or triggering anxiety. Selected stories tend to be positive and good (but not too exciting), which eases our troubled minds.
“Mirror neurons,” says Salas, may be one way our brains calm down with travel bedtime stories. Originally discovered in macaque monkeys, these neurons fire both when a subject performs a particular movement and when the movement is observed.
(PGoing out is good for you.– This is the reason..)
According to Salas, these brain cells can compare our own experience with someone else’s. For example, a train journey tale can evoke nostalgia for our own past journeys, even though a particular bedtime story is about something we never got to experience. The comforting feeling of something familiar and romantic helps you relax and fall asleep. Also, Salas notes, the screeching sound of railroad tracks serves as a form of white noise that lulls people to sleep.
For some people, the appeal of bedtime travel stories may be that they open doors to new adventures. While this may seem empowering, it also brings a reassuring reassurance about seeing the world safely.
“From a neurological point of view, it’s not just the idea of traveling and seeing new places, it’s about connecting. We are social creatures by nature. We spent time away from family and friends, away from freedom. Even if you’re not that well-traveled, you can still go to a restaurant or try something new,” says Salas.
Or it could simply be that removing the light and noise from the outside world allows the inner world, our imagination, to take over. The fairy tale of the night is ancient—“as literature grows old,” says Bayless. “In a way, when we listen to bedtime stories, we take ourselves back to the dawn of human culture.
“In the most entertaining travel bedtime stories, nothing happens,” says Bayless. “Bedtime stories are about the lull between adventures, and so is sleep.”
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