Mattress Buying Guide

I assume you’re reading this guide because you decided you need a new mattress (and not because you’re just curious about what’s going on in the world of mattresses these days). Perhaps your current mattress is hurting you, or you wake up tired. Maybe you just want a bigger size. Maybe you’re moving and don’t want to lug your old mattress from place to place. Whichever is the case, my goal is to help you select the right mattress so you don’t make a mistake and so you don’t pay a penny more than you have to.

A mattress is perhaps the most important piece of furniture in your home. If you get the recommended 8 hours of sleep per night, you will spend at least 1/3rd of your life in that mattress. That means if you keep that mattress for 9 years (which is about the average), 3 of those years will be spent on it. However, many of us don’t think about our mattresses and how it impacts our lives every day.

In this post, I will go over the basics on selecting the correct mattress. Elsewhere on the site, I will go into more detail on each of these topics and more, but this will be enough to get you started.

Choosing a mattress

If you can find a mattress that keeps you in proper alignment while not causing any pressure to your body, you’ve found a good mattress for you. There are some other minor factors to look for. They include motion transfer, edge support, and temperature.

Selecting the right mattress store

Your first order of business will be to choose a store to shop at. Feel free to pick several to shop around at, especially if they’re near each other. There are several types of stores out there. I will give the pros and cons of each.

Negotiating a mattress purchase

The prices of mattresses are negotiable at most retailers and on most brands. In mattress shopping, the general strategy is to play one retailer off of another. Most places have a price guarantee. So if you get a quote from one place, you can take it to a competitor and have them beat the price.

Knowing how much to spend

Many people who I talk to have no idea what a mattress is supposed to cost. They hear specials on the TV along the lines of “pillowtop mattresses, queen size sets for only $299!” and they assume that it’s for a good quality every night use bed, and there are options even less than that.

How to buy a mattress: the major factors

There are two major factors to look for in a new mattress. They are support & comfort.

Support: You want the mattress to hold you in proper alignment from head to toe, so you don’t wake up with a back ache.

Comfort: You don’t want the mattress to cause pressure to your body, which causes tossing and turning, which means you wake up tired.

How to test for support in a mattress:

The most important factor in finding the correct mattress is proper support. You need the mattress to push up on your body to counteract your body weight. So that means get a hard, firm, stone-like mattress, right? Wrong.

Your body isn’t a straight line. Whether you sleep on your back, side, or stomach, your body has curves, and a mattress must come up to support the curves and arches of your body (similar to how a good shoe will have arch support). Consider the image below to illustrate:

You’ll notice that the mattress dips down around her shoulders and hips, but her spine is in proper alignment. If the mattress were too hard, her hips would be pushed up and her shoulders would be pushed up, and her spine would not be straight. If you’re in this position for too long, you can wake up with a back ache.

Additionally, if you keep changing positions to try to keep your back in alignment, you’re not getting into the deeper stages of sleep, which causes you to wake up tired. The same exact consequences occur if a mattress is too soft, and you’re in it like a hammock. You want a mattress to contour to the shape of your body to hold it in its neutral alignment.

How to test for comfort in a mattress:

The second most important criteria to selecting the right mattress is comfort (or as you may hear it called, pressure relief). If a mattress is too hard, it can cause pressure to your body. This cuts off circulation and pinches nerves (ever wake up with a “pins and needles” feeling in your hand?), and will cause you to change positions frequently.

If you’re frequently changing positions, your sleep is fragmented and you don’t get into the deeper stages of sleep (such as REM sleep). This means you’ll wake up tired, even if you thought you got 8 hours of sleep. When you’re trying out the mattress, you should be able to lie in one position without moving around for at least a few minutes. If you can do that, you’ve found a good mattress.

Those are the two main criteria. If you find a mattress that keeps you in proper alignment which doesn’t cause pressure to your body, you’ve found a great mattress for you. To help fine-tune it from there, there are a few other things to consider.

Minor factors

There are several other criteria that you can look for when searching for a mattress.

Motion & Separation: If you share your bed, you want to minimize motion transfer. If your partner gets in or out of bed, or changes positions, you run the risk of being woken up if the mattress transfers too much of that motion to your side of the bed. Try the mattress in the store with your partner, and have your partner switch positions while your back is turned to see how much motion you feel.

Temperature: Another issue some people have is heat retention of the mattress. Most good mattresses these days have features to help mitigate this (advanced foams, phase change materials, ventilation, etc). The biggest risk here is with cheap memory foam mattresses.

Edge Support: You want a strong edge support on your mattress, particularly if you sleep near the edge of the bed, or sit on the edge of the bed often. Most of the average or better innerspring mattresses use the upgraded foam encasement around the edge, but some of the very cheapest mattresses just use a steel rod on the side. Foam encasement is better. Memory foam mattresses don’t often have a separate edge support because of the nature of the foam (it’s designed to take the shape of your body, even when you’re just sitting on it).

The mattress shopping experience

Walking into a mattress store can be an intimidating experience. When you first walk in, you’re likely to see a sea of white rectangles and what you perceive to be a slimy, sharky, salesperson out to rip you off. You might be tempted to throw up your hand, say “I’m just looking,” and run out of the showroom and buy online.

Luckily, the real mattress shopping experience isn’t nearly as bad as I just made it sound, and in this section, you will be better prepared to know best mattress dealers. In this section of the guide, I will walk you through the process of actually trying out the mattresses and selecting the right one, as well as give you some tips to get the best possible price.

[Source : https://www.mattressnerd.com/mattress-buying-guide/ ]