[App Friday] Trouble sleeping? Pzizz helps shake away insomnia with dreamscape

Before we entered the digital era, falling asleep used to be easy. But the constant presence of blue light from smartphones, combined with mounting work and study pressures, upturned our biological sleep cycles. 

The COVID-19 pandemic worsened the situation with anxiety, depression and uncertainty due to lockdowns adding to insomnia. 

According to a study published in the National Center for Biotechnology Information, one in two adults said they do not sleep properly. About 57 percent of people in India reported poor sleep quality, compared to 31 percent before the pandemic.  

Such lack of sleep could lead to bad moods, underproductivity, and lethargy, among other things, while long-term effects could be even worse. 

Founded in 2015 to solve this problem, Pzizz app uses dreamscape that combines “psychoacoustics” with narration to put the mind at rest. The app currently has over five lakh downloads and carries a three-star rating on Google Play Store, with eminent personalities including author JK Rowling, and NBA (National Basketball Association) player Roy Hibbert counting as its users.  

How does it work

The app can be downloaded from both Google Play Store and Apple App Store. 

Upon downloading, Pzizz gives you the option to sign up either using your email address or start using the app as a guest. 

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The navy blue and golden user interface is easy to use. On the app’s home screen, users could set reminders for bedtime, nap time, and focus sessions. This writer chose bedtime as the app was being used to see whether it actually puts one to sleep. 

Once you set your bedtime reminder, the app also asks the time you’d want to wake up in the morning. This acts as an alarm. 

After these selections, the app fades into a page, which has a short quote. For this writer, the quote was: “The cold is quite, a peaceful cacophony. No thoughts can move here.” The quotes are designed to instantly put your mind to rest. 

It also plays an audio clip of a woman’s voice guiding you through the relaxation process. The background music consists of instrumental music and sounds of sea waves crashing – all meant to calm you down. 

If you follow exactly what the audio says, you will surely fall asleep.

You can also pause the audio by clicking on the pause button at the bottom of the page. You also have the option of changing the voice of the person, and music playing in the background. In case you do not want the music or the voiceover to stay on, you can make the change in the setting. 

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Other than helping you sleep at night, Pzizz also helps in taking power naps and doing focused meditation. While these might not seem like the app’s best use cases, it is quite useful in case you are having a very hectic day and want to just rest your head. 

Verdict

Pzizz has an extremely easy log-in process and the user interface is also kept simple to serve the purpose of relaxed sleep.

The colour combinations are also extremely calming and so are the voices in the audio clip. Having the option to change the voiceover and the background music does help in cutting out the monotony of falling asleep to the same voice every day. 

Pzizz also has a timer, which could be adjusted to switch off the narration and background score. This lets a user wake up only when the alarm goes off the next morning. But other than that, you would definitely be snoozing in less than 20 minutes of using the app.  

It was also featured in Healthline’s ‘Best Insomnia Apps’ for both 2018 and 2019.