Calm Sleep app debuts with personal bedtime plan, earbuds

Calm is doubling down on its Sleep Stories with Calm Sleep, a standalone app built to “make it easy for anyone to build a bedtime routine,” and it’s debuting the product with some branded Calm x Ozlo Sleepbuds that deliver stories and soundscapes directly into your head.

A customized approach that emphasizes doing over the numbers

But instead of drowning you in data points, Calm Sleep focuses on a single concept: repetitive behaviors outpace raw numbers. After a short initial onboarding survey, the app produces a personalized bedtime plan with “sleep-enhancing tasks” — essentially daily recommended doses for specific behaviors like adopting a fixed lights-out time, cutting late caffeine and preparing an environment that is low-light and low-stress for winding down.

Each evening, a graphic Sleep Readiness bar fills up as you check things off your to-do list the hours before bed — it’s like a pre-sleep priming checklist of good habits once your head hits the pillow.

But the suggestions are paired with handpicked content, from wind-down meditations to narrated stories — so that you can make that ritual of cleanliness feel engaging rather than punitive.

That marks a stark pivot from the “insight overload” typical of wearables. The American College of Physicians suggests cognitive behavioral strategies for chronic insomnia as first-line therapy too, and Calm’s model takes a page out of that playbook by emphasizing regularity, stimulus control and light exposure instead of chasing perfect scores.

Sleep stories in hardware form: Calm x Ozlo Sleepbuds

Calm is also partnering with Ozlo — whose team includes alums from the first Bose Sleepbuds endeavor — to co-create a pair of minimal earbuds designed for sleep-time listening. The Calm x Ozlo Sleepbuds are designed to offer gentle soundscapes and long-form stories but with none of the bulk or distractions associated with traditional headphones.

The buds come with a free year of Calm Sleep and current Calm subscribers can get 10% off the buds. Calm says the cooperation will launch later this year, positioning the earbuds as a silent sidekick for guided wind-down sessions and night-long audio engineered to block out ambient sound.

Hardware counts here: For people who are sensitive to a partner’s snoring, city traffic or humming fridge (all common sources of random noise that jostles us out of restful sleep, according to research highlighted by the National Institutes of Health), sealed earbuds can quash those wake-up calls.

Celeb-led storytelling, now on a regimented schedule

Calm’s signature has long been its bedtime stories, narrated by the likes of Harry Styles, Laura Dern, LeBron James and Matthew McConaughey. The company says its stories have been played more than a billion times, and Calm Sleep weaves that library more intentionally into a nightly routine of other content, making sure the length of what is playing matches when you’re likely to fall.

In practice, that might mean a 10-minute breathwork primer at the beginning, a 25-minute narrative in the middle and some quiet ambient loop playing softly even after the voice has stopped. It’s not so much about novelty, it turns out, as repeatability — reinforcing a reliable pattern that your brain connects with falling asleep.

Sync your wearables, without the analysis paralysis

For those who like some data in the background, Calm Sleep can absorb sleep metrics through Apple Health via HealthKit, drawing on devices such as Apple Watch and Oura Ring.

The integration is available now on iOS, with plans for Android support. You’re not micro-analyzing a night’s worth of REM, but nudging behaviors that have been shown to improve sleep efficiency over time.

That approach reflects counsel from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which cautions that about a third of U.S. adults don’t get enough sleep each night (seven hours). Those kinds of tools, which include simply structured routines and managing light, provide evidence-backed levers to nudge the needle for most sleepers.

Why this might work for building consistent sleep habits

Sleep tech has developed into a crowded market, but many tools focus on post hoc diagnostics. Calm is betting that reducing friction — one plan, one set of tasks, one place to listen — will help people stick with a routine long enough to experience real change. There is no form of medicine (barring the use of powerful and addictive psychoactive drugs) that comes close to matching the power of regularity, as sleep scientist Matthew Walker and others have made clear.

An app isn’t a medical treatment for shift workers, new parents or chronically sleep-deprived insomniacs, and clinical care is still important if a problem with one’s sleep persists. But for the vast middle — those who grapple with erratic bedtimes, stress spillover or a noisy environment — pairing habit scaffolding with muted audio might be the pragmatic nudge that helps turn bedtime into a predictable reprieve.

Availability and who should get it, and why it matters

Calm Sleep is launching as a standalone app, with the upcoming Calm x Ozlo Sleepbuds to follow. If you’re already tracking with a wearable but still sleep like crap, this software-plus-audio combo is specifically designed to bridge the gap between information and action.

Bottom line: a tailored bedtime routine, complemented by content you’ll actually use — and earbuds that keep the sound where it should be — may be the most realistic sleep upgrade most of us can commit to.