The Best Sleep Headphones for Side and Back Sleepers

The problem with normal headphones in bed is geometry, not comfort padding. Over-ear cups are built to clamp onto the sides of your head while you sit upright; lying on your side pushes your ear and the cup into the pillow at the same time, which is uncomfortable within minutes. Headband sleep headphones fix this by putting the driver flat against the ear opening inside a layer of soft fabric, so the pillow presses on padded fabric instead of hard plastic.

Bluetooth headbands are more convenient night to night, since there is no cord to catch on a rolling shoulder, but they add a battery you have to remember to charge and a Bluetooth connection that can occasionally drop or pop. A wired headband removes both problems at the cost of a cable running to your phone, but no wired headband we found currently clears our rating bar, so every pick here is Bluetooth. If you buy one anyway, keep the phone on the nightstand so the cord stays short.

Look for headband battery life that comfortably covers a full night, not just the manufacturer's best-case number. Rated figures are best-case numbers, and real runtime falls with volume and battery age; a pair rated for 10 to 14 hours has some margin for the nights you fall asleep late or leave a podcast running past when you actually drift off. If you listen for hours before sleep and again after waking, the longer-battery picks in this guide are worth the extra cost.

Because a headband sits closer to your ear than open speakers, and because you may leave it running for hours unattended, volume discipline matters more here than with daytime headphones. The World Health Organization recommends keeping personal audio devices at or below 60% of maximum volume, and estimates that 80dB is a safe exposure level for up to 40 hours a week, dropping to just 4 hours a week at 90dB. The U.S. CDC's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) sets a similar reference point of 85dB as safe for 8 hours, with allowable time roughly halving for every 3dB increase. In practice: keep the volume low enough that you could still hear a smoke alarm or a child, and use a sleep timer if your device has one so audio does not run at volume all night.

Spoken word, ambient tones, and slow instrumental pieces work better for falling asleep than anything with sudden dynamic swings. If you want something purpose-built rather than a random playlist, our long-form sleep recordings are mixed to stay level in volume for the length of a track, which matters more on a headband than it does on a bedroom speaker.

• Want the safest all-round pick: LC-dolida's Bluetooth 5.4 headband.
• Want to spend as little as possible, or need two: the Perytong 2-pack.
• Want a plain band from a big rating base: MUSICOZY (listed at 14 hours).
• Woken by light as well as noise: the LC-dolida 3D sleep mask.