The best boring history podcasts to fall asleep to

Why does boring history work at all?

Because an unoccupied mind goes looking for work, and at midnight the only material available is you. A history show gives attention something to hold that is genuinely interesting and entirely inconsequential — a treaty, a canal, a king who reigned three weeks. Nothing in it can be acted on at two in the morning, which is exactly what makes it safe to stop following.

Sleep With Me

Drew Ackerman has been recording as "Dearest Scooter" since October 2013, and the show now runs past a thousand episodes at around an hour each. The method is unusual: he tells a story badly on purpose, with false starts, tangents and asides that go nowhere, so there is never a thread worth holding.

It is the oldest and strangest thing in the category, and people either settle to it immediately or cannot bear it. Worth knowing before you start: sponsors are read inside the episode, sometimes as a sung jingle, so the first few minutes are not quiet.

Nothing Much Happens

Kathryn Nicolai, a yoga and meditation teacher, has been making these since 2018, and the show passed a hundred million downloads before joining a major podcast network. The stories are fiction, cosy and small — a bakery, a first snowfall — and the design decision that matters is that each one is read twice, slower the second time. If you were still awake at the end of the first telling, the second is quieter.

This is the softest option here, and the least interested in teaching you anything. If what keeps you up is worry rather than curiosity, start here.

Sleepy History

Made by Slumber Studios, the people behind Get Sleepy, and narrated principally by Simon Mattacks with a rotating cast. It is the closest thing to a direct competitor for what we do: calm narration over genuinely true material, mostly British voices.

One thing they do that is worth respecting: they publish a page stating that every story is written and narrated by people, with no synthetic voices. In a genre currently filling up with automated channels, saying so plainly is the right instinct.

The Boring History for Sleep shows

There is not one of these. There are several, with near-identical names, and telling them apart on a podcast app is genuinely difficult. Episodes tend to run two hours or longer, which is the main practical argument for them — a twenty-five minute story that ends at 1am leaves you awake in a silent room.

The quality varies more than in any other row here. Some are carefully made with a human reader. Others are automated at volume, and it shows in the narration. Listen to two minutes before you commit a night to one.

Where Lullable sits, and what it is not

Ours are true, and short of a full night — twenty to forty minutes, on subjects like the Ben Nevis weather observers or the argument over the width of a railway. The one mechanic we have not seen elsewhere is that every story gives its ending away in the first minute, so there is nothing left to stay awake for.

The thing to be straight about, since we just praised Slumber for being straight about it: our voices are synthesised. The narrator names in our catalogue are personas, not people. If a human reader matters to you — and for a lot of listeners it plainly does — Get Sleepy, Sleepy History and Nothing Much Happens are the better choice, and we would rather tell you that now than have you find out at midnight.

Lullable is on the App Store now, so take this page for what it is: the one where we send you somewhere else. If you want one of the four above tonight, take Nothing Much Happens for worry and Sleepy History for curiosity, and you will have chosen well.