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.