Sleep, Systems and Innovations in Technology

We all crave a good nights sleep. Over the ages there have been many inventions that have tried to move us further from the hardness of the ground and deeper into the arms of Morpheus.

Ancient Persians filled animal skins with water and created the first water beds. American Indian tribes filled blankets with fluffy soft bull rush seeds to make pillows and beds. Traditional Japanese Futon are two layers (under and topper) made of cotton, wool and feathers. In the Middle Ages in Britain the most common bed was made of a combination of straw and wool and a topper of goose down feathers, similar in fact to the traditional Japanese Futon, but perhaps less capable of avoiding the bed bugs!

Moving on to ‘modern times’ we have the advent of the industrial revolution and the development of the spring bed; again it was a combination of a box spring for the main support and coil spring mattress for the softer support, and yes, a topper built into the mattress of some combination of wool, natural fibers (at first) and goose down feathers. The new technology gave greater support but still gave problems with pressure points and degeneration of support over time.

All of these innovations focused on the feedback of one particular sense, which is the sense of touch. In much later designs of the bed, and in the light of knowledge about how our beds can be a primary factor in orthopedic and other medical issues, we started to think about the purpose of a bed beyond simple sensory feedback.

Enter the space age and developments in NASA to resolve the issue of how to keep the astronauts safe from the incredible buffeting they receive on take off. Memory foam mattresses was the result of that particular solution, and the medical benefits started to pile up as study after study showed that mental and physiological benefits link one to the other. A good nights sleep is not a case of cosseting the senses, it is a case for understanding the human body as a system and how keeping that body well aligned, supported, free from allergens and free from annoyances during its recuperation period builds a significant range of benefits over time. In our lifetime we will amass an astonishing 230,680 hours of time in our beds, as an average. Imagine the body being misaligned for that period and what that would do to a person’s joints and muscles over time.

We are only just beginning to understand that many chronic illnesses late in life are connected to our sleep habits. Mentally we are sleep dependent too. A significant lack of focus and memory has been noted in several sleep deprivation studies, and in fact the human body and mind suffers badly after only a few days without sleep. This is not a 0/1 equation; we suffer from a poor quality of sleep over time too. Memory foam mattresses are a technological advancement that has allowed us to address, perhaps for the first time, the benefits that arise from a constantly comfortable and supportive bed.