Mattresses and Overheating (Video)

Do you wake up sweating in the middle of the night? Kirk Forsyth of Gardner Mattress talks about overheating, a common problem of many mattresses.

What can I do about overheating at night?

I would recommend a mattress that you don’t sink into quite as much. Something that has a lot of natural fibers, a lot of cotton, maybe cotton and wool, cotton and horsehair, those types of things. Generally why people get hot sleeping is that most mattresses in name brand products use a lot of foam to upholster with. And when you do that, you tend to sink into the mattress a lot, which insulates your body, and materials like high density polyurethane foams, latex even, memory foams, can absorb that and trap that heat, your own body heat, around you. I mean, you and I, healthy human beings, are 98.6 degrees. That’s a very warm day. So if we’re wrapping a blanket around that and making us stay in that temperature, you’re going to struggle sometimes with heat.

What mattress materials help the most with airflow and staying cool at night?

Natural fibers, they just tend to breathe better. They don’t retain the heat as much. Thirdly, you don’t…when you make a mattress with those materials, you have to compress them. And that’s where our hand tufting method comes in. So when we tuft a mattress, we pre-compress the materials, and thus when you lay on them, you don’t sink into them. You’re more on top of them. So trying to fit you for comfort with that, we use different springs as opposed to lots of foam to get you into the right comfort level that you prefer.