We sell pillows. And now we are writing an article about what influences your sleep more than a pillow does. That sounds contradictory, but it is not: anyone who sleeps badly should start where the lever is greatest.
1. The temperature in the bedroom
Probably the most underrated factor. As you fall asleep, your body lowers its core temperature by one to two degrees — a cool room speeds that up, a warm one slows it down.
The National Sleep Foundation names a range of around 15.5 to 19.5 degrees. Evaluations across millions of nights show that with every degree warmer, sleep efficiency drops measurably, and above about 24 degrees the quality falls off clearly — less deep sleep, more waking during the night.
2. Regularity
Going to bed at the same time and getting up at the same time — at weekends too. The effect is unspectacular and works slowly, but it is one of the best confirmed of all. Two hours of lying in on a Sunday shift your rhythm about as much as a flight across two time zones.
3. Light in the evening, light in the morning
Bright light in the evening shifts the body clock later. Daylight in the morning pulls it earlier. If you stand in a brightly lit bathroom in the evening and drive to work in the dark in the morning, you are working against yourself twice over.
4. Caffeine — earlier than you think
Caffeine has a half-life of about five to six hours. The coffee at 4 p.m. is still half active at 10 p.m. Many people fall asleep anyway — but deep sleep suffers, without you noticing.
5. Alcohol
The classic mistake. Alcohol lets you fall asleep faster and then massively disturbs the second half of the night — REM sleep in particular. You have fallen asleep, but you are not rested.
6. The mind that will not switch off
The most common reason for lying awake is banal: you are thinking. What helps against that is less a product than a habit — closing off the day in writing, putting open points off until tomorrow, reserving the bed for sleeping and not for brooding.
And where does the pillow come in?
Honestly: not in first place. A pillow does not straighten out an irregular rhythm and does not cool an overheated flat.
It does, however, have one advantage over everything on this list. The six points above require you to change habits — and that takes weeks. A pillow you swap once, and it works the same night. It is the easiest point on the list, not the biggest.
That is why we build pillows and not guidebooks. And that is also why we say openly that a pillow does not solve everything. What it can do and what the research gives us is set out in our article on the state of the studies.
Source
- National Sleep Foundation on the optimal bedroom temperature, summarised at the Sleep Foundation
- Evaluation of more than 3.75 million nights on the relationship between room temperature and sleep quality, SLEEP, 2020. Read the abstract
