Morphée sleep aid device
I encouraged my partner, who had also been sleeping badly of late, to try the Morphée with me, although you can plug in headphones if your other half prefers silence before slumber.
We began our Morphée journey with a body scan, a soothing voice which draws attention to various areas and encourages you to relax your muscles and reduce tension. Initially, I have to admit it felt a little silly, lying in the dark with a stranger’s voice filling the room, but as the eight minutes went on I adjusted and ended the session feeling ready to nod off, at a time when I’d normally be headed straight into an endless, all-consuming scroll through TikTok until my eyes eventually droop.
The following night we tried a breathing exercise, again led by a confident yet calming guide whose increasingly slow pace encouraged our own inhales and exhales to follow suit. Halfway through, I was sleepy, but not quite asleep, when I heard a gentle snore emerge from the other side of the bed. The Morphée had worked its magic, and I wasn’t far behind.
Since then we’ve experimented with many of the various other settings – the relaxing music is reminiscent of that you’d expect to hear when you’re face-down on a massage table (and who hasn’t been lulled into a little nap during that time?), while the cardio coherence cleverly helps you to reduce your number of breaths and therefore your heart rate, gradually drawing you into comfortable state of tiredness.
Read more: Best mattress 2021: Memory foam, pocket sprung and hybrid mattresses reviewed
The benefit of upwards of 200 tracks to choose from is that even if you don’t consider yourself much of a meditation person, you’ll likely find something to suit, though some options will inevitably please you more than others. While exploring the nature sounds, which represent audio from around the world, we found the Burmese cat in a Paris apartment a little grating, despite being cat lovers by day, but adored the thunderstorm in Japan.
Many are essentially more advanced or interesting versions of white noise, and white noise itself is an option on nature sounds dial number eight, so if you’ve been toying with buying a white noise device to help you sleep, the Morphée represents an upgrade with a far greater choice of activities.
Couldn’t I do all of this through a meditation or white noise app on my phone, you may find yourself asking, and the answer, in short, is yes. But the more I used Morphée I realised that the true impact of it, in my case at least, was that it forced me to put my phone down and focus on nothing but my own thoughts and sensations – a rare luxury in our constantly plugged-in world.
I don’t need to find myself reaching for my Morphée every single night (the phone addiction will likely require far more effort to cure), but when my mind is restless I like knowing that it’s on standby to help me switch off. With its clear, crisp sound quality, a stylish finish and plenty more variants to work my way through, it’s already earned a spot on my bedside table that I can’t see it relinquishing anytime soon.