Is it Time to Change Your Pillow? Let's Find Out!

Well, she has the pillow part right,
but she seems short four walls.

When was the last time you replaced your pillow?

Most people don't pay much attention to their pillows. We might swap one out if we spill something on it, the dog chews it up, or the cat uses it as a claw-sharpener. Beyond that, though, we just don't think about how old our pillows are. Then again, we might run to the other extreme, buying a new pillow every couple of months because the last one we bought was too soft or too hard or too big or too small or too...wrong. Just wrong. So we need another one that turns out to be just as wrong as the last one, but in a completely different way.

The general rule is you should replace your pillow every six months or so if you have one of those $5 Walmart or Target cheapies. If you have a good memory foam pillow, you can go as long as 36 months -- three whole years! -- before you'll need a new one. For most pillows, you can go a couple of years before you should replace it.

But how do you know?

At this point most web sites would give you a whole bunch of tips with links right back to their own pillows, because they're trying to sell you their pillow just as hard as they can. We're not like that here. Oh, don't get us wrong. We do want you to buy a My Butterfly Pillow. We'd love to sell a couple billion of our Smarter Pillows to everyone, everywhere. But we're not going to spam you with links to do it, nor are we going to be super-annoying about asking you to look us over.

We'll just give you a few tips we hope you find helpful, or at least entertaining:

• If your pillow squashes flat every time you put your head on it, it's done and you need a new one. The easy way to tell if you have a dead, flat pillow is to try to fold it in half. If you can fold it easily, it's time to retire it. 
• If your pillow smells...unpleasant, get a new one. Normally, you can wash a pillow cover (and you should! Often!), but over time sweat and makeup and drool and spilled wine gets through the cover into the material of your pillow itself. That stuff can make you very uncomfortable. Worse, it can make you sick. Don't do that to yourself. Just get a new one. 
• If archaeologists keep trying to break in and steal your down pillow because they suspect the feathers inside it came from an actual dinosaur, get a new pillow. But make sure to sell them you old one, because it's probably valuable! 
• If you can't remember the last time you got a new pillow, get a new pillow. Pillows are not that expensive -- not even the really high-quality pillows like you might see for sale at certain helpful pillow-based websites (*coughcough*). If that's not enough, let us say two more words to you: dust mites. Ew.
• If your pillow is made of wood, stone, or jade, please get a new pillow. Also, you may be an ancient Egyptian or Chinese Empress. Check on that, too.

Just remember, your choice of pillow is every bit as important as your choice of mattress, sleep wear, and blankets. Make sure you have a pillow you really like and that you replace it when it no longer gives you the rest you deserve!

I guess when I mentioned the four walls, I
should have specified an actual house.

(Photo Credit: Engin_Akyurt one and two on Pixabay)

Side-Sleeping and the Pregnant Woman: What You Need to Know

How important can your sleep position be if you are pregnant? In some cases, it can literally be a matter of life and death.

I know. That seems like one of those grand click-bait proclamations designed just to get your attention. It's not. Here's why.

In 2014, several groups who work to reduce the number of infant deaths in the UK and New Zealand got very concerned about some still birth studies done a few years earlier. There were three such studies, all of which pointed to a direct connection between the likelihood of stillbirth and a mother's sleeping position, especially late in her pregnancy. None of those studies were conclusive, so in 2014 the groups sponsored a study called the Midlands and North of England Stillbirth Study (MiNESS). The study took three years to complete, surveyed over a thousand women, and compared those who had experienced a stillbirth with those who had a live birth. Here is what it found:

Mothers who went to sleep on their back had at least twice the risk of stillbirth compared with mothers who went to sleep on their left‐hand side. This study suggests that 3.7% of stillbirths after 28 weeks of pregnancy were linked with going to sleep lying on the back. This study also shows that the link between going‐to‐sleep position and late stillbirth was not affected by the duration of pregnancy after 28 weeks, the size of the baby, or the mother's weight...

This is the largest of four similar studies that have all shown the same link between the position in which a mother goes to sleep and stillbirth after 28 weeks of pregnancy.

The reason for that involves one of the major veins in your body called the inferior vena cava (IVC). The IVC begins just above your waist and runs along your spinal column to your heart. Its job is to bring blood in need of oxygen to your heart, where it can fill up and head back out through the aorta. it's called "inferior" because it services the lower half of your body, just as its partner the superior vena cava handles your upper half.

Good so far? Okay. Here's where it gets tricky.

When a woman later in her pregnancy sleeps on her back, the weight of the baby in her uterus presses down on the IVC and restricts the flow of blood. Less blood going to the heart means less blood coming from the heart. Not only can that be fatal to the baby but it can also harm the mother due to low blood pressure (a condition with the sufficiently dreadful name of aortocaval compression syndrome). It's important to note here that not every woman experiences this condition and you should always -- ALWAYS -- talk to your doctor if you have even the slightest medical concern. With that in mind, if you're pregnant (especially if you already have sleep-related conditions like sleep apnea), we'd like you to talk to your doctor about side-sleeping. More information from a qualified medial professional is always a good thing to have!

The important takeaway here is that, for women in the third trimester of their pregnancy, side-sleeping is a no-brainer idea, recommended by many, many doctors and it may just be a thing for you. If you do adopt the Sleep on Side mentality, you will need the right equipment -- a comfortable mattress and pillow that will not only let you sleep well but will also help you stay on your side so you can get the best and most healthy rest for you and your new baby.

We may just have something to help.

(Photo Credit: pedroserapio on Pixabay)

The Good-Sleep Basics: Seeking Firmness and Loft

Mount Pillowmore (Some Assembly Required)

How did you sleep this week? Good? Bad? Did you wake up a couple times with a crick in your neck and the vague rumbling of a headache that'll probably last until mid-day? Did you have to stretch your shoulder because you got your arm trapped above your read underneath your own personal Mount Pillowmore? Did it take you a half-hour to get comfortable because you couldn't quite finish your Pillow Dance?

Before we go any further, let's be honest here. We are a pillow company. We make and sell an excellent pillow in which we have an amazing amount of confidence. We use our own pillows, love them to pieces, and want to get them under the heads of lots of people. That doesn't mean, though, that we care more about selling you a pillow than we do about making sure you get the right one for you.

So. First things first. Roughly 70 percent of us (according to a couple different surveys) are what we call side-sleepers. The other 30 percent of us split between sleeping on our back or our stomach (About 15 to 20 percent for the first and 10 to 15 for the other, depending on the survey). Our pillow is made to best-serve the side-sleeper. If you sleep on your back, our Smarter Pillow will be great for you, but it's not the optimal choice. If you sleep on your stomach, you're probably better-suited to a softer pillow with less "loft" or height. That doesn't mean you shouldn't consider our pillow, just that our Smarter Pillow is made for the particular demands of side-sleepers.

And what, exactly are those demands? First, you need a pillow with at least a medium level of firmness. If your pillow is too soft, your head will sink too far into it and you'll wake up with a stiff neck. That, of course, assumes you don't wake up in the middle of the night to fluff up your pillow or to grab another pillow and jam it under the one that's collapsed. Your pillow has to be firm enough to support your head but not so firm that it hurts your ear. Oh, hey. Did I mention that a certain pillow made for a certain style of sleep has a certain special feature that makes life better for your ear? You may also want to know that memory foam is "very good" when it comes to holding that firmness you want. No particular reason. Just seems to us like a thing you may want to know.

Now that you have an idea about how firm your pillow should be, you'll need to consider the height of your pillow. Pillow professionals call that "loft". When you go to Pillow Professional Palavers, they all stand around using words like "loft" nodding knowingly to each other. They can nod, of course, because their necks do not hurt. They have chosen the proper pillows with the proper "loft". The rest of us, who are not snooty Pillow Professionals who smoke pipes* and bandy around arcane technical sleep technology terms, simply call it "height". You want a pillow high enough to support your head all night but not so high that it makes you uncomfortable. The idea height, at is happens, appears to be 10 centimeters or a little less than 4 inches. Don't take my word for it! You can look right here at this 2015 study in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics! If you can keep your head supported roughly four inches off your mattress through the night, you're probably going to have a good sleeping night.

The question, though, is how you keep your head supported at that height given that even firm pillows tend to settle over the first 10-20 minutes your head is on them. Now, if a pillow maker took that into account and put some sort of riser-type device on the pillow that not only kept the pillow at a good height but left room for you to put your arm under the pillow as well...

...but nah. You couldn't possibly get a Smarter Pillow made with such a clever device on this Earth, could you?

Awwwww! Side-Sleeping Kitty! I bet his pillow has proper
loft and a clever riser because he is a good sleepy kitty!

(Photo Credits: manbob86 and StockSnaps on Pixabay)

*To the best of my knowledge, no one at My Butterfly Pillow smokes a pipe. There might have been brief and unfortunate candy cigarette outbreak, but I couldn't swear to it. At all.

The Pillow: A Brief Tale of Snakes, Hairdos, and Feathers

An Ancient Egyptian headrest from the Middle Kingdom
via the The Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, E.210.1900

Have you ever wondered why we even have pillows? That is, what happened in our history that we suddenly needed something under our heads as we sleep? Historians have found references to headrests in Mesopotamia that go as far back as 7000 B.C., which make them a far more recent invention than mattresses, the oldest of which dates back 77,000 years. Why do we have them?

It turns out, the first pillows had little to do with comfort. As best we can tell, they were chunks of stone with a curved indentation where you could rest your head. You used them when you slept on the ground to keep bugs and snakes out of your ears, which seems like a pretty good sleep strategy. "Keep bugs and snakes out of your ears when you sleep", the ancient Mesopotamian pillow merchant would say. "I'm going to carve that into a plinth and put it outside my market stall!" You would, of course, nod politely while you tried to remember what, exactly a plinth was.

We have found other ancient pillows, in Egypt and China. The Egyptians used wooden or stone headrests in their tombs, to keep the heads of the dead elevated, lest demons crept into their ears. As you can see, ancient people had some real concerns about various things crawling into their ears. The Egyptians were the first to decorate their pillows, often with carvings of gods or incantations from the Book of Coming Forth by Day, which we know from many old movies as the Book of the Dead. Here is a particularly useful incantation:

Doves awake thee from sleep; they alert thee to the horizon. Raise thyself, (for) thou dost triumph over what was done against thee. Ptah has overthrown thy enemies. It has been commanded to act against him who acted against thee. Thou art Horus the son of Hathor, the fiery Cobra, of the fiery Cobra group, to whom a head was given after it was cut off. Thy head cannot be taken from thee hereafter; thy head can never be taken from thee ...

Not only is this proof against ear-snakes but also against anyone who might want to steal your head. Thanks, headrest!

The ancient Chinese made their pillows from either jade or ceramics. Early on, historians believed they were used in tombs, in similar ways to how the Egyptians used them. Later, though, they came to learn that they were used most often by the living, not only to keep the head comfortable during sleep, but as a way for women to protect their ornate and complicated hairdos. They were not built for comfort, though I imagine if you used them the right way, they were better than cracking your head on a curved rock. Still, they were lovely and I imagine you'd be quite proud to lay your head on one of these beauties, even if they didn't come with an incantation against beheading.

Over time, people learned they could put padding on a headrest, or make them small enough to be comfortably portable (headrests in the ancient Egyptian style are still in use in East Africa today). Europeans appears to have pioneered the stuffed pillow, which date back at least to the 15th century. People stuffed those pillows with feathers or straw or some other plant, to make them softer. After that, the quest for the most comfortable pillow began in earnest. People sat on them, slept on them, kneelt on them, used them to whack each other upside the head, propped books or food trays on them, piled them up around themselves and named them Fort Pillowmore...

...or perhaps that was just me.

Once we humans started stuffing pillows, we also started making better stuffing for them. Nowadays, we have everything from synthetic down to medical grade polyurethane and it doesn't look like we're dong looking for the perfect pillow (though we have a suggestion). No matter which pillow you choose, we feel confident in one thing.

At least you didn't get a snake in your ear last night.

She's just here to keep your hairdo straight.
via the Victoria and Albert Museum.