Choosing the right air mattress bed for your needs | Health and Air Mattress Beds

Do you look as happy as she does after a night of rest on your current mattress? One recurring question I’ve seen pop up in any number of variations is, “are air mattresses good for your back?” The simple answer is that it depends on the air mattress, but for the purposes of this post, I’ll assume we’re talking about everyday use air bed mattresses and I’d like to expand things beyond just back health to include numerous other health concerns.

In my post on Select Comfort and Sleep Number Beds, I promised I’d come back to the health benefits of air bed mattresses and, so, here we are with a question stemming from that statement. What specifically are we concerned with when we ask about health and air mattresses?

When you lay out all the negatives associated with poor sleep habits, it becomes clear that good sleep and health are intricately intertwined. Consider just a few of the health and life problems attributable to lacking or poor quality sleep:

• Headaches
• Weight gain
• Irritability
• Diminished sexual performance
• Erectile dysfunction
• Poor performance at work or school
• Poor concentration and diminished cognitive function and recall
• Stress
• Depression

Now for all the items on that list, the last two are key. From stress and depression spring any number of additional ailments. By that I mean that very real illnesses can result from either stress or depression.

If you look at a mattresse’s contribution to a good night of sleep as the first link in a chain of events, the affect that mattress has on your sleep can have a significant impact on your health and happiness. A poor mattress as the first link in the chain leads to poor sleep in the second link. Get to the third link and perhaps you find yourself performing poorly at work. Already stressed by poor sleep, your stress levels are further compromised by a boss who is unsatisfied with your performance. Already irritable from poor sleep and work, your job performance further compromises patience and you find yourself yelling at your wife or children for the littlest things. I could take this chain all the way out to a subsequent divorce if I wanted to.

While the example above may be a bit extreme, it isn’t outside of reason nor is the cause (poor sleep) something to trivialize or ignore. How your day starts (or, more accurately, your night of sleep ends) does have a very real impact on your entire day. The link between sleep and quality of life is a very real, well established scientific fact.

As this post is getting a bit long, we’ll make this a two-parter. I’ll elaborate on the elements of quality sleep a bit here and then we’ll get into specifics in our next post. So we’ve defined the ways in which poor sleep can hinder your quality of life but what can a good mattress do to alleviate these problems?

As measured in a Stanford University study, one element of “good” sleep is how fast an individual dozes off on a particular mattress. Think of this as the tossing and turning quality of a bed where, due either to poor comfort or a brain that simply won’t shut off, the subject has difficulty falling asleep.

Additional metrics under quality of sleep cover several elements such as tossing and turning, achievement of REM sleep, time asleep without waking, over-all comfort and restfulness.

Finally we have the physical elements which include back pain, neck tension, joint pain, hip pain and discomfort in pressure points (shoulders, hips, buttocks, etc).

 We’ll continue this post in a later part 2 segment that will go into a bit of detail on how air bed mattresses stack up to conventional mattresses relative to the metrics listed above. Stop back soon for the continuation. Sleep well and sweet dreams in the meantime.

As promised, you can read more about the Select Comfort Sleep Number Bed Health Benefits in our continuation by clicking the link.

Related posts:

1. The Sleep Number Bed - Health and Air Mattress Beds In a continuation of our first post on Health and...
2. Select Comfort and Sleep Number Beds In my previous post on everyday air mattress beds I...

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