Sleeping Longer Than Needful

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This weekend, I slept in one of the most uncomfortable hotel beds I’ve ever had. It wasn’t as bad as the one in the hotel the military put us up in just before I weighed in at the MEPS, but my back was sore and I was in a bad mood all day.

The bed at the hotel in Salt Lake City was one of those sleep number beds. I think primarily my lack of knowledge about my supposed sleep number accounted for the bad night, that and the other USAF officer candidate with whom I shared a room stayed up watching TV all night.

Many manufacturers make beds meant to help you sleep better, but they all have one major flaw in that they depend on gravity for the goodness of fit. These beds, whether foam or sleep number or water or air or whatever assume you are fit and healthy already in order to meet their promise of a good night’s sleep. They compensate for stress points which are not necessarily the points at which stress needs to be most mitigated.

Consider if you will that if you carry extra weight around your midsection the bed will interpret that as a curvature to maintain. Yet, as you lay in bed, gravity pulls that weight down, throwing off the curvature of the spine and actually exacerbating the aggravation of your back, shoulders, etc. The beds fight gravity and are designed assuming a healthy individual with normal spine curvature.

Your spine naturally curves inward towards your pelvis at the point where it connects to your tailbone. The bed ignores that and assumes a cupping shape under your body, since the soft organs of your gut press down at night. Uninformed but well-intended though they may be, these engineers have tried to tackle a problem that may not have a solution. Is it possible to make a bed that properly supports you, or would it be best to follow the admonition of Ben Franklin: Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. People often sleep far longer than is needful.

All of these posture-pedic accessories assume you are healthy. According to the media, most of us aren’t, ergo these beds may make it seem in a psychosomatic way that you’re resting well when you really aren’t.