Switching Off with Sleepcasts: Insomniac Listening and Sonic Self-Care

Abstract

Abstract:Meditation apps present mindful listening as sonic self-care: a pathway to managing anxiety, depression, insomnia, and the distractions of other digital media. This essay investigates the collection of audio “sleepcasts” produced by Headspace, a Silicon Valley digital wellness corporation that claims over seventy million users of its meditation app. Sleepcasts are designed to extend media engagement and the productive labor of self-care beyond waking hours and past the threshold of consciousness. As they guide listeners through “night-time journeys” to palliative virtual escape zones, sleepcasts choreograph a sensory fade-out from hypervigilant insomniac listening to oblivious somnolence. I show how Headspace drew on a century-old scientific model of sleep as conditioned performance, blended with the domestic ritual of the children’s bedtime story, to conjure fantasies of restorative travel, fulfilling work, and intimate relationships with virtual caregivers. These sedative audio journeys follow tourist itineraries shaped by colonialism, aligning “mindfulness” with the privileges of cosmopolitan mobility. By tethering sleepcasts to bedtime, Headspace cultivates nightly listening as ritualized self-care that is the mirror image of one’s day job—the labor of rest that makes the next day possible. Meanwhile, listeners remain productive participants in the attention economy even as they fall asleep.