Your sleep matters to you. The average human should get at least eight hours of proper sleep to be able to function the very next day – and if you don’t, you’ll end up feeling distracted or tired, which is a disastrous thing in most careers and especially if you work in a high stress career such as a lawyer or doctor. Can you afford to fall asleep at work because you didn’t get a proper night’s sleep the night before – or a proper week or months’ worth of sleep before that? Sleep really matters. If you’re not getting enough sleep, you can’t think, and if you’re really deprived for sleep then your brain will eventually start to shut down. Yes, not getting enough sleep can be a very scary thing, and a cooling pillow could be the answer to your sleepy problem.
Are you sleeping as comfortably as you can and should? Your mattress is a huge part of how comfortably you are sleeping, but let’s not forget about your pillows. Your pillows provide support for your neck, and if your pillows aren’t right then you can experience symptoms that can include insomnia, headaches, grinding in your sleep and many other ones that are bad for your overall health. Have you been experiencing some of these symptoms already? It might be time to consider that your pillows might be the cause of this.
Here’s a closer look at the cooling pillow, just what it is and how it works – and why it’s considered better for you than the pillows you are currently sleeping on. Could your pillows really be the cause of the fact that you feel terrible when you wake up or be the real culprit behind the fact that you’re not getting enough sleep to sustain your daily life?
Why pillows matter
First, you should know that pillows work by supporting your neck while you sleep – and that this is vitally important to be able to function. It’s even just as important as whether or not you experience problems with your neck and skeletal system later in life when you grow older, so this is something that you should be thinking about today instead of in 10 years when it starts to really hurt and affect your health.
Pillows offer support, and you know the feeling that you get when you get a brand-new pillow… It’s the most comfortable, soft and cool feeling in the world, isn’t it? Very few people are able to sleep completely flat and without pillows – so, if you have a bed, your pillows will matter to how you sleep and how you feel the next day.
Yet most people have the wrong pillows for their health, and a lot of people hang onto the same pillows for years – sometimes as much as 10 – without thinking that this might be the cause of their long-term neck pain that they’ve been experiencing for a while now. We’ve established that pillows matter and that you should always have the right ones; you should also replace them regularly – not just because they go flat over time. A lot of people also use pillows for extra support between their knees or behind their backs – pillows are also for sleeping with, not just for sleeping on.
Why pillows need changing
You can’t – and really shouldn’t – have the same pillows for 10 years. First, pillows degrade over time just like anything else and what was once a fluffy, white pillow will eventually turn into something flat, heavy and a little bit gray. Then, you know that it’s not offering the support to your health that you need, and the first thing you will notice is that you start stacking older pillows on top of each other to offer your neck more support – but stacking older pillows isn’t real neck support, and it could be harmful for your health in more ways than just hurting your neck.
Pillows also collect things over time – like dust and dust mites. Do you really want to see a sample of your ancient pillow under a microscope? We absolutely guarantee that you do not want to – most people would scream if they see what their pillows really look like on the inside, and it would be a good excuse for most people to start a massive bonfire and throw all of their old pillows on it. (Those who really want to can look this up through YouTube and then immediately start throwing their old pillows away after they’ve watched us – yes, you’ll want to.)
The downsides to feather pillows
There are many other downsides to pillows that we haven’t yet mentioned. First, if you are someone who prefers feather pillows for their fluffiness and coolness, then you should know that even feather pillows tend to grow old: They also collect mites and dust as time goes on, and this can be just as bad for your health as any other kind of pillow. In fact, feather pillows – especially old feather pillows – will tend to cause allergies in people, and it could be the reason for your stuffy headed feeling when you wake up in the morning: It’s just regular allergies, usually down to your pillows.
Feather pillows also lose the fluffiness they have over time – and sometimes they lose a lot of the volume and weight of the pillow as well. This is all the more reason why you should ensure that you replace your pillows once every couple of weeks instead of once every few years.
The downsides to cheaper pillows
Now let’s talk about traditional pillows – the kind that you usually buy that are stuffed with traditional stuffing – and the kind that most people buy. Even more expensive kinds of pillows of this type generally just turn out to be filled with a somewhat higher quality stuffing and that’s pretty much the only difference – so it might last just a little bit longer, but not really by enough for it to matter in the long run.
Cheaper, traditional pillows collect the most dust and dust-mites over time, and people really should not hang on to old pillows like these for too long – when they lose their original springiness, feeling and color you should toss the pillow before it seriously starts harming your health. Old pillows aren’t healthy and can cause everything from allergies to seriously terrible neck problems later on in life. Toss your old pillows and get rid of them. If you aren’t convinced, you might want to follow the advice that we gave earlier and head to your nearest search engine to look up a video – yes, there are very likely millions of living creatures within your old pillow, and these are feeding on dead skin that comes off of… You guessed it, you while you sleep. Some people have a natural allergy to dust mites – in fact, to what comes out of dust mites – and this can lead to allergies that seem to have no obvious cause. These will go away or at least become under control when your pillows are replaced and your mattress is cleaned.
Turning pillows over and over and over…
Here’s the one problem that everyone experiences with pillows, whether they’re expensive or cheap or old or new… There are even thousands of internet memes that make reference this problem because it happens to literally almost everyone on earth.
Your pillows need to be turned around and around and around throughout the night because the one side gets hot – and uncomfortable. There’s nothing better than the feeling of a cold pillow against your skin while you sleep – and it’s what gets a lot of people falling back to sleep. It really sucks to have to turn your pillow around for the entire night – especially when it’s already a hot night and all you want to do is sleep. Then why does almost everyone on earth do this? It’s because the pillows aren’t right for you to begin with. A pillow can be new or old and you will still be turning it around once it’s gotten closer to your body heat to experience the comforting coolness on the other end – this is especially true on hot nights, or when you have a bit of a fever. What are you supposed to do about that? There is a solution – a cooling pillow.
Cooling pillows
A cooling pillow is a pillow that naturally remains cool throughout the night – which means that you have no need to keep turning it around like you would any other pillow. Doesn’t that sound absolutely ideal? You’ll be glad to know that it exists and that there’s a huge variety of cooling pillows available for purchase – from pillows that are made from bamboo through to pillows that are instead filled with gel rather than the traditional stuffing like cotton or feathers which can cause allergies in most people. Gel, on the other hand, will stay cool – and many cooling pillows are also made of memory foam, meaning they conform to the individual shape you need for the most comfort.
Here are a few cooling pillows we’ve reviewed and recommend:
- Dreamfinity Cooling Gel and Memory Foam Pillow Review
- Sleep Innovations 2-in-1 Ventilated Memory Foam Pillow Review
- Sleep Innovations Cool Contour Memory Foam Pillow Review
- Sleep Innovations Reversible Gel Memory Foam Pillow Review
- Sleep Better Iso-Cool Memory Foam Pillow Review
- Ergonomic Memory Foam Pillow with Breathable Bamboo Cover Review
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