TempoLife › Features › Sleep sounds and stories
Sleep and relaxation sessions
6 guided sessions written out in full with timings — paced breathing with a silent visual pacer, a body scan, a twenty-minute deep-rest session and a sleep story. No account, no autoplay, and no audio pretending to be there.
There are no recordings on this page yet. TempoLife does not host narrated audio for these sessions, so rather than show a player with nothing behind it, every session is published in full as a script you can read, follow or record yourself. Audio versions are planned; when a recording exists, a player appears here automatically.
Paced breathing
Coherent breathing, 5.5 breaths a minute
The plainest of the paced-breathing patterns: in for five and a half seconds, out for five and a half, for ten minutes. No holds, no counting past six, nothing to get wrong.
4-7-8 breathing
In for four, hold for seven, out for eight, four times through. A short, deliberately lopsided pattern for the ten minutes after you get into bed and find your mind still running.
Box breathing, four by four
Four seconds in, four held, four out, four held. A square, symmetrical pattern that is easier to hold on to than an uneven one when your attention keeps sliding away.
Deep rest
Body scan
Fifteen minutes of moving attention slowly from your feet to your head, without trying to change anything on the way. The oldest and most reliable of the wind-down practices, and the one that most often ends before it finishes because the person doing it fell asleep.
Non-sleep deep rest, 20 minutes
A longer lie-down that keeps you just the right side of awake: body scan, a little breath work, then a stretch of doing nothing at all. Twenty minutes in the afternoon, or a first-aid session on a day after a bad night.
Sleep story
The breathing pacer
Every breathing session on this page carries a silent visual pacer: a bar that grows while you breathe in, stays still during a hold, and shrinks while you breathe out. There is no sound, nothing starts by itself, and it runs entirely in your browser. Open any of the three breathing sessions to use it.
A visual pacer is deliberately the safer choice for a page about sleep. A tone that begins on its own is exactly what you do not want in a dark bedroom at 23:00, and a page that autoplays audio is a page you stop trusting. If you would rather have your eyes closed, read the pattern once, set the rhythm, and then stop looking at the screen — the counting is the part that matters, not the animation.
| Session | In (s) | Hold (s) | Out (s) | Hold empty (s) | Breaths/min |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coherent breathing, 5.5 breaths a minute | 5.5 | — | 5.5 | — | 5.5 |
| 4-7-8 breathing | 4.0 | 7.0 | 8.0 | — | 3.2 |
| Box breathing, four by four | 4.0 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 3.8 |
How to choose
If you are tense, breathe. Slow paced breathing gives your attention something concrete and external to hold, which is what a body that will not settle usually needs. Start with coherent breathing; it has no holds and it is impossible to do wrong.
If you are physically tired but mentally busy, use the body scan. Fifteen minutes of moving attention through the body, changing nothing, is a very old answer to a very common problem, and a large fraction of people never reach the end of it awake.
If the problem is specifically thinking — planning, rehearsing, replaying — a story works better than a body scan, because it occupies the language part of your mind that a body scan leaves free to wander. That is why the story on this page is deliberately uneventful.
If it is the middle of the afternoon and you are wrecked from a bad night, use the twenty-minute deep-rest session rather than a nap. It restores something without eating into the coming night the way a long afternoon sleep does.
What this page is not
It is not a treatment for insomnia. The best-supported approach to persistent insomnia is cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, which is a structured programme delivered by a trained person or an approved programme, and it is not a breathing exercise. If you have been sleeping badly for months, the ten minutes you would spend here is better spent asking your doctor about that.
It is also not a sound library. There are no rain tracks, no white noise and no binaural beats here, because TempoLife does not have them and inventing a player for files that do not exist would be worse than saying so.
These are relaxation practices, not treatment, and nothing here diagnoses anything. Do them sitting or lying down — never while driving, cycling or in water. Stop if you feel light-headed. Breath holds in particular are worth checking with a clinician first if you have a heart or lung condition or you are pregnant. Persistent trouble sleeping, loud snoring with pauses, or sleepiness that does not lift after a full night are reasons to see a doctor rather than to try another breathing pattern.
Frequently asked questions
Is there audio?
Not yet. TempoLife does not host narrated recordings of these sessions, and this page will not show a player for a file that does not exist. Every session is published as a full script with timings instead, which is the same content in a form you can read, follow, or record in your own voice. When recordings are made, players appear here automatically.
Does the breathing player make a sound?
No. It is a silent visual pacer: a bar that grows while you breathe in, holds, and shrinks while you breathe out. Nothing plays, nothing autoplays, and it only starts when you press start.
Which session should I start with?
Coherent breathing if you have never done any of this, because it has no breath holds and nothing to get wrong. The body scan if your body is tired but your head is not. The sleep story if the problem is specifically that you cannot stop thinking.
Do I need an account?
No. Nothing on this page needs an account, sends anything anywhere or stores anything about you.
Is slow breathing actually proven to help sleep?
The honest answer is partly. There is a reasonable body of work on the physiological effects of slow breathing — heart rate and heart-rate variability change measurably at around six breaths a minute. The evidence that any particular pattern reliably shortens the time it takes you to fall asleep is much thinner than the internet suggests. Treat these as a wind-down routine that costs ten minutes, not as a treatment.
Source: Zaccaro A, et al. How breath-control can change your life: a systematic review on psycho-physiological correlates of slow breathing. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2018;12:353 · checked 2026-09-02
Source: NHS — Breathing exercises for stress · checked 2026-09-02
Source: Progressive relaxation as a technique: Jacobson E. Progressive Relaxation. University of Chicago Press, 1938 · checked 2026-09-02
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