What makes us feel comfortable when we snuggle in for a good night of sleep? There are several interesting distinctions regarding the marketing of beds, blankets and pillows. Some advertisements about Beds acknowledge that sleepers differ in what they want in their sleep environment. Some like the bed hot and others like it cold. Goldilocks lives! Some like hard pillows and others like soft pillows. Some like a cluster of billows of all shapes and sizes; others like just one “perfect” pillow of the right size, shape and amount of softness. Even sheets come with advocates of silk, cotton, flannel – and breathability. If nothing else, these ads encourage us to think about and identify some of our sleep environment preferences – but not all of them.
In this essay, I continue my report on the preferences noted by our Pathways to Sleep survey respondents to many elements of the sleep environment, including bed, sheets, blankets and pillows. As we have found, some of the other elements of the environment have as great or even greater an impact than the heavily marketed elements – and they cost much less (or are free to us).
As I have done in previous essays in this series on quality sleep, I provide some suggestions in this essay about the sleep environment and begin by offering a chart summarizing findings from my Pathways to Sleep project. This chart lists some of the sleep environment pathways, as well as ratings by experts and users, as well as costs and accessibility. In each case, a rating of “3” is high and a rating of “1” is low. A “v” indicates that this pathway is controversial (wide variation in ratings—high variance score).
