Your Mattress Quality Could Affect Your Health. Here’s How.

Wellness experts often talk about the Three Pillars of Health. Ask anyone over the age of 10, and they can probably guess the first two: eating right and exercising. Ask that same group about the third pillar, and suddenly you hear lots and lots of wrong answers.

Still holding your breath? Here’s the answer: getting an appropriate amount of high-quality sleep.

That’s right. You can lift huge weights and follow an incredibly lean diet, but all of that hard work and discipline means little if you don’t balance it out with restful, high-quality sleep.

When it comes to keeping the all-important third pillar upright, adults should aim for 7 or more hours of sleep each night. The tricky part isn’t the quantity of sleep, but the quality. Your Z’s only count if they’re truly restful and uninterrupted. So how do you pull that off? It all starts with your most important piece of furniture: your mattress.

Read on to learn just how your mattress quality could affect your health. If you’re sleeping on a new or next-to-new mattress of the right quality, you may be scoring some health pick-me-ups. If you’re sleeping on a hand-me-down mattress you found uncovered in your grandparent’s cellar, you may be taking a few health hits each morning. More on that, below.

How a Good Mattress Can Improve Your Health

You spend about a third of your life on your mattress. Can you say that about any other piece of furniture? Probably not.

When you put that many hours into one piece of furniture, you want to make sure you’re doing it right. If you: follow the lifecycle of your mattress, choose a mattress that fits your unique needs, keep it fitted with clean linens, and replace it following damage or age, you’re doing a pretty darn good job of sleeping well each night.

Good work gets rewarded. Here’s how your body may respond to a great mattress:

You Get High-Quality Sleep

This one may sound obvious: a great mattress leads to a great night’s sleep. Obvious, sure, but it’s also incredibly important. As mentioned above, high sleep quality is one of the three most important pillars of your health.

If your body doesn’t receive the sleep it needs, things can start to go wrong. Here are some of the risks of losing out on great sleep, according to WebMD:

• • You can develop a higher risk for type 2 diabetes
  • Your mood and temper can dampen, increasing your risk for anxiety or depression
  • You are more susceptible to cold and flu
  • You may be at a higher risk for some cancers, such as breast, ovarian, and prostate cancers

The Right Mattress Can Ease Back and Neck Pain

Oh, I know the feeling. Your alarm goes off, you slide your legs out of bed, and you go to stand up for the day: crack. Oh no, you tweaked your back in the middle of the night. Those plans you made to play flag football tomorrow? Consider them canceled.

Your mattress can be the source of the problem, as well as the source of the solution.

According to Healthline, one 2015 study showed that people who sleep on a memory foam mattress of medium firmness both felt a lessening of pain and fell asleep faster.

To better avoid back pain, it’s important to pick a mattress that falls somewhere between too soft and too firm. Too soft, and you won’t have the key support you need. Too hard, and your pressure points won’t be supported gently enough. If you’re a stomach sleeper with back pain, consider switching to a side-sleeping position to ease the strain on your lower back.

A Great Mattress Can Help You Lose Weight

Whether you’re looking to lose weight or simply maintain your current figure, a great night’s is the right place to start.

According to WebMD, sleep deprivation can lower your body’s ability to produce the metabolic hormone insulin. The less insulin you have, the less efficiently your body can transform sugar into energy.

To learn even more about exercise-free weight loss tips, check out this helpful read.

How an Old or Low-Quality Mattress Could Harm Your Health

If a great mattress leads to great sleep, and if great sleep can improve your health, then the opposite is an unfortunate reality. An old, overused, or low-quality mattress can lead to nights of tossing and turning, hurting your holistic health down the road.

Here’s how your health may respond to an old or poor-quality mattress:

Old Mattresses Can Worsen Allergies

Older mattresses tend to contain dust mites. These microscopic critters like places that are old, dirty, and full of human contact, making your old mattress a kind of hot spot for the little guys.

Dust mites are known to inflame allergies in folks who are especially sensitive to dust. People with asthma are also as sensitive. Old mattresses can cause itching, rashing, coughing, sneezing, and even make it difficult to breathe for these sensitive groups.

If you’re sleeping on your great-grandfather’s rusty spring mattress, do yourself a favor: get rid of it. Don’t feel bad: it’s probably covered in dust mites (and it’s definitely haunted).

A Bad Night’s Sleep May Make It Easier to Get Sick

Allergies aside, sleep deprivation can lead normally healthy people to have weakened immune systems.

People, especially those with busy schedules, tend to barely schedule enough time in their day for 7 or 8 hours of sleep. If you’re sleeping on an old or cheap mattress, those nightly disruptions in your sleep cycle can add up. You may “schedule” your bedtime to range from 11 PM to 7 AM, but low-quality sleep may make it as bad as if you passed out closer to 2 or 3 AM.

When you’re sleep-deprived for this long, your body can have a more difficult time fighting off disease. People who are sleep-deprived may have an easier time getting cold, flu, or other viral diseases.

The Wrong Mattress Could Hurt Your Focus

Have you ever pulled an all-nighter before a big exam? That’s when you skip out on sleep to spend more time doing something else. If you have, you might remember the feeling of sitting in the testing room. As you filled in the question bubbles, your vision could have been blurry and your eyes might have hurt. You may have caught yourself reading and re-reading the same questions, or all-out staring off into space. What happened?

Sleep deprivation can severely affect your natural cognitive processing.To perform the day’s task, humans brains require a certain amount of attention, memory, and capacity to learn. Sleep deprivation can lower your ability to focus, memorize information, and attribute physical or mental information into stored (i.e. “learned”) material.

If you’re not getting enough high-quality sleep, there’s no reason to even put the time into studying.

It Might Be Time to Buy a New Mattress

Thinking about buying a new mattress?Ask yourself the questions below:

• • Is my mattress older than 7 years, or is it past the recommended age of use?
  • Do I often wake up with back or neck pain, even after stretching?
  • Am I consistently feeling tired, despite scheduling enough time to sleep?
  • Am I having trouble focusing every day?

If any of the symptoms listed above are bothering you, it’s important to seek a doctor’s advice to fix the problem. That being said, getting a new mattress could be your ticket to living a healthier life.

Click the link below to check out our helpful mattress comparison site. On our page, you’ll find listings of the top online mattress retailers, complete with stats, reviews, and unique promotions and deals for our site’s users.

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Here’s to better sleep!