Quality Over Quantity
By Sophie Hecht from the Space FoamTM team
Wouldn’t you love to have the best sleep of our life every night? In a perfect world, you would lay down in the most comfortable feather bed, let your head sink into a pillow, sleep the perfect amount of hours through the entire night, and wake up naturally to the sun shining and the birds chirping. Sadly, our reality looks more like this: crawling under the covers only to find yourself sweating after just two long minutes. After about an hour of twisting and turning, you get up to flip your pillow over to find the colder side. Then you flip it again. And again. And again. You finally manage to fall asleep, but then proceed to wake up every two hours because of a discomfort in your neck or sweat dripping down your face. Finally, you decide to get out of bed at 7am and start your day, exhausted and cranky. Though you were in bed between 11pm and 7am, you were only asleep for no more than five hours.
At Space FoamTM, we did some research on the effects of sleeping less than five hours a night, and the results were not pretty. The two most common results are exhaustion and crankiness. Almost everyone can attest to it. When you don’t hit the hay until late because your were working and you have to wake up at 6am to drive your kid to school, you don’t quite feel like yourself. You have a shorter attention span and you are noticeably grumpy.
On a more scientific scale, your brain is not as sharp, you think much slower, and your memory worsens. If you constantly sleep few hours throughout the night, it is much harder to pick up new skills and create memories. Many believe dreaming and having a long, uninterrupted REM cycle (the time in your sleep when your brain and body are energized and dreaming occurs) help form memories that happened to you during the day. If you don’t give your brain enough time to sleep, your body will not be able to perform these actions.
A common myth about sleep is that the quality of your sleep does not matter and that the total amount of hours you slept is most important. This could not be more false. Scientists, doctors, and sleep experts have all agreed that with regard to sleep, quality is much more important than quantity. It is healthier for the body and the mind to receive six hours of uninterrupted sleep as opposed to eight hours of interrupted sleep. The consistent six hours lets your body fully relax, replenish, and restart your body for a productive day. On the other hand, waking up every few hours disrupts your natural cycle and your body is not able to fully recover from your long and difficult day.
Your next question might be, “I understand that sleep is important, but how do I prevent myself from waking up in the middle of the night?” We answered that question for you in developing our new Space FoamTM pillow. The number one issue we found with people who can’t sleep continuously is temperature. They wake up because they are sweating under the covers and they spend minutes flipping the pillow to try to find a cold spot. To solve this, we made the Space FoamTM pillow out of our IceFibreTM material, which stays cold throughout your entire slumber. Secondly, we found that other memory foam pillows would keep their shape too much and after you move (which an average person does nine times a night), your pillow doesn’t move with you and becomes uncomfortable. That is why we made our Space FoamTM pillow bounce back with 5 times better recovery, so you won’t wake up with a neck cramp because your pillow was being difficult. With the new Space FoamTM pillow, you can have the best, most relaxing sleep of your life, every night.