Background sounds
Rain. Forest. Waves. Fire. Wind. Birds. Layer them with the words, or use them alone.
Your mind won't stop. That's exactly what we work with.
Drift plays one word at a time. You picture it. Your brain lets go. Sleep follows.
Clinically tested at Simon Fraser University · Based on peer-reviewed sleep research
You're not an insomniac. Your brain just doesn't know how to stop.
That loop of thoughts at midnight — replaying conversations, running through tomorrow's list, worrying about nothing in particular — isn't a disorder. It's your brain doing exactly what it was built to do.
It's still working.
The problem isn't that your brain is broken. It's that nothing has told it to stop.
One word. One image. Nothing connects. That's the point.
Drift reads you a word.
Lighthouse.Hammock.Pineapple.
None of them are related. None of them lead anywhere. That's not a bug — it's the whole mechanism.
Your brain can't build a worry spiral out of disconnected images. It just... follows. And somewhere in the following, sleep arrives.
This technique is called Serial Diverse Imagining.
Developed by researchers at Simon Fraser University to give the brain something gentle to do — gentle enough to occupy it, meaningless enough to let it drift.
Read the full research“A racing mind, worries, and uncontrollable thoughts are common bedtime complaints. The Serial Diverse Imagining task diverts attention away from sleep-interfering thoughts.”
— Beaudoin, Digdon, O'Neill & Rachor · SLEEP 2016 (American Academy of Sleep Medicine)
The research is real. The effect is real.
Tested against standard sleep therapy.
In a clinical study, Serial Diverse Imagining was as effective as Structured Problem-Solving — the gold-standard cognitive treatment for pre-sleep arousal. The difference: standard therapy must be done 15 minutes before bed. Drift is done in bed, in the dark, while you're already trying to sleep.
Works on the right problem.
Pre-sleep cognitive arousal — the racing mind — is one of the most common reasons people can't fall asleep. Drift targets it directly by shifting attention away from goal-directed thought.
The improvement is significant.
Participants showed large effect sizes across sleep quality, sleep effort, and pre-sleep arousal — even as external stress conditions worsened.
Three steps. No effort.
1
Open Drift.
Choose your session length and a background sound if you want one. Or don't — the words work on their own.
2
Close your eyes.
A word appears. Picture it for a moment. It doesn't matter if the image is vivid or blurry — just let your mind go to it.
3
Let the next word arrive.
Another word. Another image. You're not trying to sleep. You're just following. Sleep will follow you.
Built for the moment you need it most.
Session length
15 to 45 minutes, or no limit. Set it and forget it.
Personalized
Tell us your name and we'll greet you each night. A small thing. It matters.
No ads. No notifications. No feed.
Drift is not a platform. It's a tool you use and put down.
No account required
Works offline. No login. No data collection.
English & Spanish
Full support in both languages.
What people are saying
From App Store reviews
So good!
Didn't expect this to work so well. Once you commit to the instructions, you literally fall asleep in minutes.
Simple but effective
Honestly didn't expect it to work so well. You only have to remember to put your phone on the charger before you use it — otherwise you wake up with a dead phone.
Fell asleep way faster
Really nice minimalistic app and it did the job for me. Amazing!
The questions we get
"I've tried meditation apps. They don't work for me."
Drift isn't meditation. You're not trying to clear your mind — you're filling it with something harmless. That's a meaningful difference for people who can't meditate their way to sleep.
"What if I can't picture things vividly?"
You don't need to. A vague impression is enough. The point isn't visualization quality — it's redirecting attention away from structured thought.
"What if I wake up in the night?"
Start a new session. The technique works whenever your brain is in that restless, semi-active state. It's not only for initial sleep onset.
"Is this just a white noise app?"
The ambient sounds are optional. The words are the core. White noise occupies your ears; Drift occupies the part of your brain that's keeping you awake.
Your brain needs a gentle off-switch. This is it.
Free to download. No account required. No sleep journal to maintain, no breathing exercises to remember, no content library to browse. Just words, one at a time, until you're gone.
Based on sleep science from Simon Fraser University and MacEwan University.