How to shop for beds

Why are beds so important to us:

In order to sleep well, the human body needs a few things, including warmth, a safe and familiar environment, legs at the same level as your head, and uninterrupted time to sleep. This is why having a bed that is raised from droughts that blow around the floor, has a general design wherever you go, is flat, and is designed to be comfortable enough that your sleep is uninterrupted. This created a new market in the western world: bed shops. And with bed shops, come all the traps and pitfalls of the retail industry, but it doesn’t have to be like that for you. Knowing what bed you’re looking for and not allowing yourself to be bullied into buying a more expensive but less useful mattress.

So firstly, why is sleeping in a good mattress so important anyway?

If your mornings are anything like most of ours, the first few minutes after you wake up aren’t your finest moments. Aside from morning breath, bed head, crusty eyes and grumpiness, you’re not in your best form mentally speaking either, but that’s a normal transitional state from sleeping to wakefulness, and it’s called sleep inertia.

The more poorly you sleep, the longer sleep inertia lasts.

The part of your brain that controls your conscious movements rests while you sleep. Though it’s activated immediately upon waking, our prefrontal cortex (PFC), which oversees decision-making and self-control, takes a while to get going. It can be up to 30 minutes for our PFC to catch up with the rest of our body, sort of like the engine of a car warming up. While the PFC is warming up, your memory, reaction time, alertness and ability to perform various analytical tasks are not quite as fast as they should be.

Why is our PFC so sluggish?

Kennet Wright, a neuroscientist and chronobiology expert, thinks it’s due to melatonin that’s been displaced by the enforced waking through an alarm clock. If your body wake naturally, through the sun or sleep cycles. The less well you’ve slept, the more mixed up your sleep cycles and melatonin are, making you groggier for longer. True sleep deprivation makes you foggy all day, but even an old mattress that disturbed your sleep and stopped the melatonin from doing its job can affect you, and that sluggishness in morning traffic can cost you your life. It isn’t always that serious of course, but sleep, and dispelling sleep inertia, can be as simple as buying a new mattress.

Imagine life without a bed:

Imagine life without YOUR bed. Do you fall into bed every night and feel that delicious feeling when your bed is soft and welcoming and warm under you. Now a bed can only perform its magic while you sleep if it supports your body well enough. Many people sleep on a bed and get accustomed to the bed, and as the mattress sags and grow old, they don’t even notice. You may not even be waking with back pain, if your mattress is sagging, because your back has become accustomed to the mattress even as it has sagged, but your sleep will have suffered. Are you tossing and turning in your sleep? Are you waking up feeling groggy and tired? Your mattress is affecting your sleep, which is, in turn, affecting your everyday life. If you’re in the market for a new mattress, you need to know what to buy, and why. Mattresses can be expensive, but they serve a purpose that sustains your whole life, so the expense paid is worth it, but at the same time, it shouldn’t be exorbitant.

Shopping for a new mattress:

Qualities to look for in a mattress:

Your mattress needs to be comfortable, fitting into your niche between a firm and soft fit that suits you perfectly. It also needs to last for a long time, buying something of this price should at least last a while! It should also support your back, keep your spine in a straight line, and relieve pressure points, allowing you to spend a night without tossing and turning. One of the best mediums to do this is memory foam. Memory foam moulds around warmth and weight, supporting the body while cradling it. It’s a reasonably soft firm, but can be made softer or firmer depending on the mattress. Silentnight mattresses have a layer of latex under the memory foam to make them firmer and bouncier. They are also the most comfortable memory foam beds on the market. Other memory foam beds include Rest Assured, Genessi, and Cloud Nine. Cloud Nine’s memory foam is very firm and Rest Assured is the softest.

Silentnight has two ranges of mattresses. Their more expensive range have thick, luxurious layers of memory foam and are high and extremely comfortable. They make lying on them a pure pleasure. The cheaper range also makes use of memory foam, supporting the back very well for a lower priced mattress, and being comfortably between soft and firm, suitable very anyone. The cheaper Silentnight mattresses make for really wonderful guest and children’s beds, because they don’t last as long as the more expensive ones.

The Mattress Warehouse is having a sale on all Silentnight beds at the end of July, so if you’re looking to get a really wonderful bed at a reasonable price, come to Jozi and buy your mattress! We’ll be selling freely from the street corners, having a Silentnight expo for all to join, come feel the beds, and buy. S