Struggling to sleep? While there are apps to calm you with sounds, a French gadget could help, too.
Hitting the pillow and closing those eyes for a restful sleep isn’t the sort of thing that comes naturally to everyone.
You’d think it would just be easy, and you could slowly guide yourself to a recharging slumber, but that’s not quite what happens. Sometimes, you stall.
For some, falling asleep isn’t easy, and may need to be guided, pushed, and eventually prodded in the right direction. It’s where sleep apps that provide soothing and calming sounds kick in, and even where sleep gadgets become a possibility. There are options out there for people struggling to sleep, and in Australia recently, there is at least one more.
French company Morphee has released two similar gadgets made for slightly different people who have trouble sleeping: adults and kids. Both are modelled on the same concept, but essentially come in slightly different clothing, with the Morphee and My Little Morphee (or “Mon Petite Morphee” if you want to keep things French) arriving in the country to provide an app-free approach to sleep guiding working in a way that is actually quite similar to what sleeping and calming apps do.
The standard Morphee doesn’t look like any standard media player, even if that’s close to what it is. Instead, the Morphee is a very specific one, including relaxing nature sounds and guided meditations with no screen, specifically letting you pick those sounds by dialing them in, almost literally.
In the adult Morphee, the circular device includes a speaker and a headphone jack, giving you the option of how you listen, plus three dials to select the type of meditation you want, the option available, and the time you want to listen to it, with volume and playback controls found in buttons around the gadget.
Think of Morphee as a preset meditation and sleep speaker with dials to let you select what will put you to sleep, offering over 200 sessions to calm you down.
It’s a similar idea for kids, with My Little Morphee taking that idea, but applying it to the little ones, offering stories in a soothing voice based on animals in different places. There are only two dials on this one, with it kind of resembling an olive green boom box, only it’s not designed to boom, but rather quietly bump along.
One dial on the Little Morphee covers the type of place you want to be and the other then type of story, whether it’s about an animal — offering a calm meditation story about an animal in that place — or a relaxing set of sounds played from that place. It can mean the difference between hearing a story about an animal at the lake or hearing water sounds from the lake.
Overall, the idea with Morphee is to fall asleep in much the same way as sleeping apps can do, but without a screen, and making it all just speaker based, a concept that started back in 2016 when the two creators worked with sleep professionals to come up with a way to help people sleep without a phone screen.
Locally, Australians can expect to find either model at the same price, with Amazon, JB HiFi, Officeworks, and Temple & Webster retailing both the Morphee for adults and the My Little Morphee for kids for $149.
