We love our smart homes. They can do so much cool stuff — from tracking your grocery list to responding to the command "Party Time" by turning up the music and flashing the lights in the entire house. 

You already know that you can coordinate your whole morning with your smart home, that you can control your thermostat, locks, lights, and that it long-since replaced your alarm clock with its gentle morning chiming and friendly greetings.

But did you know that your smart home can help you get better sleep, too? Not only are a smart home's inherent and device-enabled features already possible to be used for sleep, but there are also some pretty cool features specifically designed to help you get a better night's rest with deeper sleep and even optimized wake times to match your REM cycle.

Let's dive right into our top ten favorite ways that a smart home can help you get better sleep through excellent features and a few device integrations.

Home Environment

As you get ready for bed, your smart home can make your house much more welcoming for sleep, both for you and the whole family. It does this by controlling your home environment one element at a time or as part of a coordinated bedtime routine.

Dimming the Lights 

You already know that your smart home can turn the lights on and off, but you can also dim the lights as you wind down for bed. With a clever whole-home routine, you can dim the lights and get your brain in the mood for sleep with your indoor twilight. 

You can also set a separate sleep-time routine that turns out lights in the bedrooms and sets all other home lights to a nightlight setting for those midnight trips to the fridge or the bathroom.

Cooling the House

The temperature of your house can also have a helpful influence on your sleep. Your body associates the feeling of cold with the cool of nighttime and, therefore, time for sleep. As you wind down and get ready for bed, your smart home can drop the temperature, so you're nice and chilly to curl up under the covers. You can even coordinate this with the lights, so they all happen at once.

Peace of Mind

If you have a smart security system, then your smart home will take care of your peace of mind as well. Your helpful smart home personality will respond to commands to lock down the home and will assure you when all doors and windows are secured. This way, you can sleep in peace, comforted by the fact that your smart home would wake you if there were a breach in any of your secured apertures or unexpected movement detected.

Your Sleeping Audioscape

Most of us benefit from an optimal audioscape when it's time to sleep. Familiar sounds help us sleep while unfamiliar sounds wake us up. Some of us also need a little help winding down for sleep but don't want media playing all night, because it will eventually wake us up. Your smart home can handle it all.

Playing White Noise Throughout the House

White noise is the single most useful sound in the world for sleep, and it comes in so many forms — the soft crash of the ocean, the quiet roar of a thunderstorm, or soft computerized whooshing. Whatever helps you sleep, your smart home can play it on an endless cycle or even find new white noise tracks along a similar vein to help you sleep.

Even better, it can play the white noise from speakers throughout the house, so your whole home muffles interrupting sounds and helps the family sleep.

Singing You to Sleep

Alexa does know a few songs, but all smart homes can play an endless selection of soothing music that can help you wind down for sleep. Whether you have a specific sleep podcast, a playlist that you always play at bedtime, or just need something soothing to relax to, your smart home can croon you off to dreamland.

Reading You to Sleep or Playing an Audiobook

Do you miss being read to sleep or sometimes read yourself to sleep? Your smart home can do that, too. Not only can they play audiobooks the same way they play music, but a smart home can also read aloud from an e-book with their friendly computerized voice. So you don't even need a good-quality audiobook, or an audiobook to exist for your favorite reads if you want your smart home to read you to sleep.

Showing Soothing Videos

Or, if you like to fall asleep to documentaries or videos of the ocean, your smart home can do that, too, in conjunction with a smart TV. Plus, with the Fire Stick, any TV can be a smart TV. Your smart home will gladly play through a soothing playlist of videos if that's what you need to sleep.

The Sleep Timer: Read, Watch, or Play Until You Fall Asleep

The cherry on top of your smart sleep soundscape is a cool feature called the Sleep Timer. Rather than being a wake-up timer as you might think, this is a unique feature designed to help you get to sleep by shutting off the media after a certain amount of time.

So, for example, if you ask your smart home to play you soft music or play a video with the sleep timer, it'll stop when the timer runs out, so the media doesn't wake you up when you rise near consciousness between REM cycles.

Sleep Optimization

Finally, there are also some pretty neat ways your smart home can integrate with other devices to optimize your sleep by analyzing how you sleep and actively responding to your environment.

Sleep Tracking Through a Wearable or Smart Pillow

Using a fitness tracker watch or a smart pillow that you snuggle, your smart home can track how well you sleep and when you enter your REM cycles. This data can then be used to optimize your sleep environment and how long you sleep so you sleep more deeply and wake up more refreshed.

Personalizing Sleep-Aid Devices

Then there are special sleep aid devices that adapt as you sleep to help you sleep more deeply. There are some nifty nose-spacer that widens when the user starts to snore. There's a snuggleable pillow that makes deep-sleep breathing sounds that the sleeper will unconsciously and beneficially copy. And there are white-noise generators that get just a little louder when it detects sounds that might wake you up.

Smart homes have become incredibly cool in the last five years, and not just for your activities when you are awake. There are also some fantastic ways that your smart home helps you sleep, as well. Check out our blog for more neat sleep facts, tips, and insights on getting a better's night sleep or contact us today!