Very common question patients ask me is what mattress is best to use? This is a very important question. We spend a lot of our life in sleep and if you got a wrong mattress it will mess you up! I always tell to my patients forget how fancy your car, your clothes or your house is. Get your mattress first!!! Good quality sleep increases productivity and improves your pains. Let me share my experiment I did on my self to understand how it all works. At one point in my life I felt discomfort in my back in the mornings and it kept on getting worse over time. Sounds familiar? Keep reading =). So I started to suspect that something is off with my mattress. Over years I heard that when people get their backs hurt they would sleep on wooden board to make spine better. I wanted to see it for my self, thus I decided that no matter how I feel I will sleep on the lightly carpeted wooden floor. I got to tell you first 2 weeks was HORRIBLE! Every time I would go to sleep I would feel ache in my back and I would wake up 100 times per night, because I loved sleeping on my side and my stomach yet it was impossible to comfortably sleep in my favorite positions. It took about 2 weeks for me to change that pattern and learn to sleep on my back consistently. At this point I have noticed that my back stiffness in the morning was going away. At the end of 4 weeks I felt GREAT! Every morning I would wake up and feel good, where as before I felt like I was “hit by a truck”.
What can we take away from this experience?
If you buy hard mattress then your back will be healthier because every night gravity stretches your muscles just a little bit more and overall your stifness goes away, but trade off is comfort and you will most likely will wake up more frequently. If you buy a soft mattress it will most likely be more comfortable and you will sleep better, but it will make you more tight over time. You see, we go through the day and muscles become tired, when they are tired, they are tight. When you are tight and lay on soft mattress, it absorbs your tightness and keeps you like that. During the night, because you are not moving muscles become even more tight and it gets worse and worse as time goes on.
Soooooo, what mattress do you buy? The one that works best for you! Just remember the harder the mattress the more healthy it is. The softer the mattress the more comfortable your sleep will be. It is up to you to figure out what works best for your back and sleep.