Naps: Endangered species in modern life?
Submitted by Merlin on October 31, 2006 - 10:22am.
TheStar.com - The modern world killed off the nap
What a bouquet of coincidence.
My Make column on napping is overdue, and yet right before dashing off to steal a rejuvenating 20-minute nap, I take a spin past del.icio.us/popular to find this little gem:
A good nap is one of life’s great pleasures, and the ability to nap is the sign of a well-balanced life. When we nap we snatch back control of our day from a mechanized, clock-driven society. We set aside the urgency imposed on us by the external world and get in touch with an internal rhythm that is millions of years old.
A nap distils the sweetness of a whole night’s sleep down to a few minutes. Ideally, it starts on a soft bed, in a dark room, with a warm blanket. At first your mind lingers on what you’ve done that day, and what you still need to do. Then your thoughts start to unravel a little, become less coherent, more dreamlike. You feel your breathing deepen, your body relax. You lose yourself; you’re asleep. After a few minutes you gradually become aware again of the bed, the room. You open your eyes, gather your thoughts, throw off the blankets. You’re a new person.
So nicely put. And, with that, Pzizz and I will say night night for now.
- Merlin's blog
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I'm a pzizz owner/user who...
I’m a pzizz owner/user who doesn’t think it’s the best thing in the universe. I use it occasionally, and think it’s marginally better than picking a suitably-timed Ambient track to plug the headphones in for. What it’s useful at doing is clearly marking out a time that is for ‘napping’ and not for other things. The voice only very occasionally creeps me out once I got used to him and, for me, the words are as useful for what they prevent than what they bring. The positivity of them is probably doing something to my brain on a lower-than-conscious level; fair enough. But they do keep me from being able to establish a train of thought and concentrate on work and things I want to leave behind for those 20 or 30 minutes. My brain now knows that when he starts talking, I’ve got to let go of the junk I’ve been working on, and I can come back to it soon.
I’m glad that I’ve got pzizz, but I’m real glad I didn’t spend a lot and buy the machine. And if the software broke and I had to rebuy it, well, I’d have to think about it.