What Mattress Is Best, By Science?

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Sleep is critical to good health—and yes, even in later years.

  • Today’s main feature gives a rundown of the whys and hows, before focusing on a single issue we haven’t covered previously: what kind of mattress is actually best, by science?

  • The short and simple answer is, for most people: a medium-firm memory foam mattress—but do check out the above-linked main feature, for details, nuance, and a promising new alternative!

• When did you last have your hearing checked? It’s easy to let things slip away from us, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

  • Today’s sponsor, Hear.com, are offering the most cutting-edge dual-processing technology in hearing aids that isolate and separate speech from background noise, now with their latest most advanced device yet!

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

🤫 A WORD TO THE WISE

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

Simple Lymphatic Massage for the Head, Face and Neck  (6:42)

Dr. Alex Hui demonstrates:

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Prefer text? Here’s our article on looking after lymphatic health:

The Forgotten System Against Cancer & More

Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖

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❓️ THIS OR THAT?

Vote on Which is Healthier

Yesterday we asked you to choose between apples and bananas—a win/win choice, but ultimately we picked the bananas (click here to read about why), as did 28% of you!

Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

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🛌 MAIN FEATURE

The Foundations of Good Sleep

You probably know the importance of good sleep for good health. If not, here’s a quick refresher:

• Why You Probably Need More Sleep

• How Sleep-Deprived Are You, Really?

• The 6 Dimensions Of Sleep (And Why They Matter)

You should also definitely check out this quite famous book on the topic:

Why We Sleep – by Dr Matthew Walker

What helps, to get that good sleep

We’ve covered this a little before too, for example:

• Safe Effective Sleep Aids For Seniors

• Sleep Better With Better Air

• How To Nap Like A Pro (No More “Sleep Hangovers”!)

How to level-up from there

One of the biggest barriers to good sleep for many people is obstructive sleep apea:

Healthier, Natural Sleep Without Obstruction!

We covered (in the above article) a whole lot of ways of mitigating/managing obstructive sleep apnea. One of the things we mentioned as beneficial was avoiding sleeping on one’s back, and this is something Mayo Clinic’s Dr. Somers agreed with:

Back Sleeping, And Sleeping Differently After 50

“But side-sleeping is uncomfortable”

If this is you, then chances are you have the wrong mattress.

If your mattress is too firm, you can get around it by using this “five pillow” method:

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If your mattress is too soft, then sorry, you really just have to throw that thing out and start again.

The Goldilocks mattress

While different people will have different subjective preferences, the science is quite clear on what is actually best for people’s spines. As this review of 39 qualified scholarly articles concluded:

Read in full: What type of mattress should be chosen to avoid back pain and improve sleep quality? Review of the literature

Note: to achieve “medium-firm” that remains “medium firm” has generally been assumed to require a memory-foam mattress.

How memory-foam works: memory-foam is a moderately thermosoftening material, designed to slightly soften at the touch of human body temperature, and be firmer at room temperature. This will result in it molding itself to the form of a human body, providing what amounts to personalized support for your personal shape and size, meaning your spine can stay exactly as it’s supposed to when you’re sleeping on your side, instead of (for example) your hips being wider meaning that your lumbar vertebrae are raised higher than your thoracic vertebrae, giving you the equivalent of a special nocturnal scoliosis.

It will, therefore, stop working if

• the ambient temperature is comparable to human body temperature (as happens in some places sometimes, and increasingly often these days)

• you die, and thus lose your body temperature (but in that case, your spinal alignment will be the least of your concerns)

Here’s a good explanation of the mechanics of memory foam from the Sleep Foundation:

Sleep Foundation | What is Memory Foam?

An alternative to memory foam?

If you don’t like memory foam (one criticism is that it doesn’t allow good ventilation underneath the body), there is an alterative, the grid mattress.

It’s very much “the new kid on the block” and the science is young for this, but for example this recent (April 2024) study that concluded:

Read in full: Effectiveness of a grid mattress on adults' sleep quality and health: A quasi-experimental intervention study

However, that was a small (n=39) uncontrolled (i.e. there was no control group) study, and the conflict of interest statement is, well, interesting:

…which is a fabulous way of distracting from the mention in the “Acknowledgements” section to follow, that…

Purple is the company that invented the mattress being tested. So while this doesn’t mean the study is necessarily dishonest and/or corrupt, it does at the very least raise a red flag for a potential instance of publication bias (because Purple may have funded multiple studies and then pulled funding of the ones that weren’t going their way).

If you are interested in Purple’s mattress and how it works, you can check it out here ← this is a link for your interest and information; not an advertisement or an endorsement. We look forward to seeing more science for this though, and echo their own call for randomized controlled trials!

Summary

Sleep is important, and while it’s a popular myth that we need less as we get older, the truth is that we merely get less on average, while still needing the same amount.

A medium-firm memory-foam mattress is a very good, well-evidenced way to support that (both figuratively and literally!).

A grid mattress is an interesting innovation, and/but we’d like to see more science for it.

Take care!

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📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Stress Resets: How to Soothe Your Body and Mind in Minutes – by Dr. Jennifer Taitz

You may be thinking: “that’s a bold claim in the subtitle; does the book deliver?”

And yes, yes it does.

The "resets" themselves are divided into categories:

1. Mind resets, which are mostly CBT,

2. Body resets, which include assorted somatic therapies such as vagus nerve resets, the judicious use of ice-water, what 1-minute sprints of exercise can do for your mental state, and why not to use the wrong somatic therapy for the wrong situation!

3. Behavior resets, which are more about the big picture, and not falling into common traps.

What common traps, you ask? This is about how we often have maladaptive responses to stress, e.g. we're short of money so we overspend, we have an important deadline so we over-research and procrastinate, we're anxious so we hyperfixate on the problem, we're grieving so we look to substances to try to cope, we're exhausted so we stay up late to try to claw back some lost time. Things where our attempt to cope actually makes things worse for us.

Instead, Dr. Taitz advises us of how to get ourselves from "knowing we shouldn't do that" to actually not doing that, and how to respond more healthily to stress, how to turn general stress into eustress, or as she puts it, how to "turn your knots into bows".

The style is... "Academic light", perhaps we could say. It's a step above pop-science, but a step below pure academic literature, which does make it a very pleasant read as well as informative. There are often footnotes at the bottom of each page to bridge any knowledge-gap, and for those who want to know the evidence of these evidence-based approaches, she does provide 35 pages of hard science sources to back up her claims.

Bottom line: if you'd like to learn how better to manage stress from an evidence-based perspective that's not just "do minfdulness meditation", then this book gives a lot of ways.

Click here to check out Stress Resets, and indeed soothe your body and mind in minutes!

Wishing you a wonderfully restorative weekend,

The 10almonds Team