I’ve owned pzizz for a year and half now. I’m not a big user of pzizz - sometimes I’ll use it twice in a week to get to sleep, but then I’ll go months without thinking about it. In particular, middle-of-the-day “naps” are pretty rare. There was a time when I did sneak out to my car once or twice during work to see how that would go, but I don’t have a nap habit. Overall, I like it, but I’m a little concerned about some of the pseudo-science included in the product.

pzizz appealed to me because I have occasional fits of insomnia, and I’m also interested in taking sleep seriously. You can’t glean much about their product from their wikipedia page, but they’ve been enthusiastically endorsed by Merlin and Gina. The people who put pzizz together appear to share my enthusiasm for sleep, so I was happy to support their work.

It basically just generates audio files. They sell the modules that can generate either daytime “energy” naps or night-time “sleep” soundtracks for $30 each, but it’s $50 for both, and the authors don’t appear to want to branch out into new kinds of modules. The soundtracks, then, are mixes of music, effects, and a guy who talks gently. (We’ll get to the guy.) You don’t have a ton of options beyond how long the program is and the balance of background / guy. You can play the program immediately, export it to iTunes, or generate a file to be burned to CD. You’re supposed to listen to “energy” during the day (although I’m not sure if you’re supposed to actually sleep - there is an alarm at the end in case you do), or “sleep” as you fall asleep for the night.

The background noise is nice: pretty traditional relaxation stuff, with oceans, new-age synth melodies, and jungle noises. I’ve created soundtracks with no guy at all, and burned CDs for the kids. (They didn’t latch on to the idea.) The sound effects as the program goes on are less busy, and this is probably where the program uses brainwave entrainment - binaural beats, claimed by others to be useful in meditation, learning, boosting creativity, and relaxation. Others are skeptical. I imagine the effect is most pronounced if you’re using headphones with the primary audio source, but I’ve read elsewhere that the digital frequencies get all jumbled when the program is transferred to CD, so I’m sure the compression to MP3 ruins the magic, too. It is relaxing, and it’s nice that you can generate another mix when you get conditioned / bored with the one you burned.

My main issue might be the guy. I do find him relaxing: he says that things are really great, if they aren’t already, and reassures you that sleep is inevitable. That’s positive. But he also says things in kind of a stilted way, introducing pretty sensible observations with long-winded clauses that don’t necessarily put my mind at ease. Like, “it’s always a good idea to find a position for yourself that’s comfortable right now.” That’s a gentle, soothing way to say “get comfortable”, but it doesn’t make any sense. He also says things like “dreams are just dreams, they aren’t real…” which is, as far as I’m concerned, creepy.

Why does he go on like that? Because he’s trained in Neuro Linguistic Programming. NLP is another shadowy pseudo-scientific discovery, embraced by life coaches and self-helpers. (It’s about programming your brain with positive lanuguage patterns, but publicly available details about it get very sketchy / contradictory after that.) It’s possible, I suppose, that the people responsible for pzizz just thought NLP-tuned chat and encouragement would be pleasing in their product, but it’s certainly also a possibility that pzizz started its life as a method for delivering NLP-based self-help under the guise of taking more naps. It would be great if pzizz’s documentation or support site addressed any of this, but it doesn’t.

I don’t want to come across as a critic of pzizz. It’s a good product. I don’t want to say that binaural beats don’t encourage relaxation, sleep, or promote healthy brainwaves in the night, but I’m pretty skeptical about that. I’m very skeptical about NLP, and I’d love to know more about why pzizz is associated with it. And I worry that there’s not a discussion of these topics online, aside from the skeptical chat about the two separate features.