Good Night; Sleep Tight; Get Your Bedtime Playlist Right!

In his 1697 play The Mourning Bride, William Congreve wrote "Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast, To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak." But music has one more charm -- the charm to help you sleep.

According to a recent analysis of several sleep studies, listening to music as you go to sleep "caused significant improvements in sleep quality". The benefits take time to work -- the two studies that showed little to no improvement lasted less than three weeks -- but they do exist. The studies did have some holes in how they were designed, which means they were not conclusive. That is, you can't say "science says sleeping with music will cure all your ills". The best we can say is "listening to music as you sleep helps you sleep better, though how much better or what types of improvements you see can vary", which isn't bad. What's more, none of the studies showed that music made sleep worse. So, according to the analysis, music can help, won't hurt, and is, as this 2008 study concluded, "safe, easy, and cheap".

How, though, do you pick the right music? Should you use headphones, earbuds, or a speaker? Where do you get the music? Hey, I'm glad you asked all those questions! As it turns out, we here at MyButterflyPillow love listening to music as we sleep (and steaming videos and lectures and audiobooks too, but let's just stick to music for now). We have a couple of tips for listening to music as you drift off to dreamland. Let's go!

1. Speakers are better than earbuds or headphones. You know how you move around as you sleep? Try that with a set of headphones on or a pair of earbuds stuck in your ears. If you winced, well, join the club. You're far better off connecting to a speaker, either directly or through a Bluetooth connection. Our Smarter Pillow comes with speakers that will let you listen to whatever you like without disturbing anyone sleeping next to you. Cool, right? 
2. Pick the music you like. This is usually where a web site suggests you listen to classical music or soothing ambient sounds. That's fine if you like those things. What if classical music drives you up the wall? What if listening to rain sounds makes you...antsy? If you listen to music, listen to music you like. That's where you'll find relaxation. However, you should know that you'll get your best results from choosing music with a tempo that most closely matches the average human resting heart rate (60 to 80 beats per minute). Maybe start with the music of Ed Sheeran or anyone else on this Spotify playlist. 
3. Be patient. The analysis earlier in this article suggests it can take more than three weeks to see the benefits of bedtime tunes. Don't sweat it if you don't see immediate improvement. Relax. Enjoy the good music. Remember that good sleep begins with comfort and relaxation. You won't get either one if you're worried about your inability to relax and be comfortable. Don't put that stress on yourself! Just lie back, hit the "play" button, and sleep tight. 

(Photo Credit: minka2507 on Pixabay)

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)

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.