The Spanish have the right idea. The siesta is an important part of daily life in hotter countries like Spain, and allows you to recharge ready to face the afternoon. But why should it be restricted to just hot climates? In the stress filled world we live in, filled with targets, deadlines and the like, wouldn’t we all benefit from a little nap in the afternoon? The creators of Pzizz certainly think so.
Pzizz is a program designed to help you sleep. It does this by creating a unique blend of sounds made up of music, sound effects and spoken words. Each nap you create is theoretically unique, thus ensuring that your mind never gets bored with what it hears. The program allows you to export your ‘nap’ to your mp3 player, or burn it to CD so you don’t need to be in the same room as your PC when you sleep.
The software comes in two flavours – energizer, designed for the daytime nap, and sleep for those who need a little help switching off at bedtime. Installation is easy, all it takes are a few clicks of the mouse and you’re ready to create your first nap.
The user interface won’t cause any problems; the main controls are like a standard media player – play, pause, stop. There are also buttons that allow access to more specialised features like setting the length of your snooze and creating the right balance between voice, music and sound effects, plus the export button that allows you to transfer the nap you’ve created to the media of your choice. In November, version 2.0 was released and that simplified the controls making them even easier to use and giving the program a look not dissimilar from a miniature version of iTunes. This month version 2.1 has been released with a few new tweaks based on user requests and it’s nice to see a company that responds so well to feedback.
So now for the big question – Does it work? Well I’ve tried the energiser version for several weeks and have found a definite benefit from a 30 minute sleep during the day. My preferred time would have been during my lunch hour at work (2pm-3pm) but as I rarely get an uninterrupted break I resorted to using it when I got home (somewhere between 5.30pm and 6pm). This set me up for a more productive evening, rather than just sitting in front of the TV. I found I was doing chores that I would normally leave until the weekend, which had the added benefit of freeing up more of my ‘free’ time.
Could the same effect be achieved without the use of the program? Probably: put on some relaxing music and you may well doze off, but will the same CD work every time? Your mind would get bored and consequently it would be dwelling on other things and you would switch off and sleep. The beauty of this program is each nap is unique, it’s like an infinite amount of chill out CDs and it even tells you gently when it’s time to wake up; no blaring alarm to drag you rudely back to reality.
At $30 for each module (or $50 for both) it doesn’t cost the Earth either. If you get home from work feeling stressed, you could do worse than give this a try. You may find that you get more out of your free time if you spend 30 minutes of it sleeping.
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