A lousy mattress damages your sleep, and by extension, your waking life too. There are quite a few reasons a mattress may be bad for you, just as there are a lot of options in the modern mattress world, from latex versions right through to the memory foam mattress.
Whatever your particular medical condition, or even if you’re just annoyed with your current mattress, there’s bound to be something more appropriate for you out there. Let’s take a quick look at the best mattress options for specific problems.
Respiratory Issues
Breathing is something so fundamental to biological survival that it often gets overlooked in favor of other problems. However, the fact of the matter is that vast numbers of people suffer from respiratory issues that affect their sleep.
Those who were born prematurely, people who smoke, those who have been injured, and many others are typically at risk of breathing difficulties. A very worn mattress can play havoc with your breathing during sleep, and you may not even be aware of it.
If you sleep on a bowed mattress, your body will likewise be bent during sleep. This means that your diaphragm can’t freely expand and contract as you breathe, making your respiration more gaspy and snatchy than it should be.
Similarly, your ribcage may become pressurized, leading to a locking of the intercostal muscles that support your diaphragm in cycling air through your lungs. For people with this difficulty, it is advisable to opt for firmer mattresses to straighten things out.
Hypoallergenic Options
Allergies have risen alarmingly across the West and continue to do so. Just as with respiratory problems due to other causes, many such allergies can impact the breathing of many sufferers negatively.
The difference is that the solution lies elsewhere for allergic folks. Having a firm mattress is not in itself going to be a fix, but there are hypoallergenic choices out there that just might do the trick.
Many of the options open to allergy sufferers will tend to also work very well in cases of asthma, so it may be worthwhile to take a look at the same area if you have this respiratory problem.
Back Pain and Spinal Injuries
There are several types of back and spinal problems that affect a large number of people, and we are definitely not offering any medical advice here to sufferers. Our information is of a general kind, and you should get specific advice from a medical practitioner if needed.
With back and spinal concerns, the most commonly given advice is around the straightness of your posture during sleep. For this, mattresses that are on the firmer side seem to be the optimal choice, allowing your back to remain flat through the night.
We Get Softer As We Age
There’s no getting around it. As we get on in years, we start to get a bit softer. Less muscle mass and protective fatty tissue mean that we feel everything right on the bones, as it were.
Just like with sufferers of back pain, the neat trick is often to source a mattress that has a very soft and comfortable upper layer spread over a firm and springy middle. It’s the best of both worlds and really works well for a lot of older people.
Some Final Thoughts
The quality of our sleep is critical in determining the quality of our waking lives in a very pervasive and serious way. Yet, it seems to get sidelined by more important and pressing things in our lives, which is a shame.
The great thing is that nowadays, we can seek out alternatives that simply didn’t exist decades ago, so there’s no excuse for carrying on with a sub-standard mattress that’s messing up your nights.
Feature Image Credit: Pexels
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