The quality of your sleep has an effect that spreads out into most areas of life. Your relationships, job performance, and general sense of well-being are all affected.
Sleep depends on a number of behavioral and dietary things, but is also dependent on the quality of your mattress. An old mattress can start to seem like a great friend, getting to know you and adjusting to the shape of your body.
We get used to our mattresses and forget that they lose quality over time and contribute to a number of health issues. As we’ll note in this article, a bad mattress contributes to a lot more than the quality of your sleep.
Health Problems Caused by a Bad Mattress
You’ll be surprised by the kind of things that a bad mattress can do to you. The price tag of a new bed could seem daunting at first, but we’ll show you why it may actually save you a lot of money in medical bills in the long run.
1. Increased Stress
A study instructed 60 people to sleep on new mattresses for one month, followed by one month of sleeping on their old beds.
The results found that participants had significantly higher stress levels during the month they were sleeping on their previous beds. This could have been due to a number of things, but it was most likely the response that participants’ bodies had to the new bed.
Things like back pain and poor sleep can contribute to stress.
2. Allergic Reactions
You may have heard that mattresses gain weight over time. This is, in large part, due to the fact that we shed skin every night while we sleep. Yep, a lot of that extra weight is our dead skin.
Dust mites love to dig around in that skin. In addition to skin and mites, a lot of bacteria and other materials build up in old mattresses. All of these things can contribute to allergic reactions and difficulties in the immune system.
Mattresses are typically made of synthetic materials, some of which can be irritating to the skin. If you’re looking for organic mattresses, Citrus Sleep has some options that won’t irritate your skin with chemicals and other products.
3. Direct Connection to Back Pain
As mattresses lose their original form, they begin to shape in ways that can actually be damaging to our backs.
That leads to a lot of lower back pain which, in turn, leads to stress in our daily lives. It’s suggested that you swap out your mattress every five years to avoid back pain specifically.
4. Weight Gain
There are many things that poor sleep can lead to. One of those things is overeating.
First, waking up intermittently throughout the night provides you with the boredom and anxiety that can be quickly improved with a late-night snack. Further, a lack of sleep decreases your will power and decision making skills.
We’ve all been hungry and too tired to make ourselves a meal. We then go out and pick up a burger from the closest fast food restaurant. Sound familiar?
5. Night Sweats
Waking up sweaty lately?
It could be that the material your mattress is made of is contributing to a lot to the night sweats you’re experiencing. A lot of older foam mattresses hug parts of your body and retain the heat you release while you sleep. That heat builds up, coming back to you and leading to sweatiness.
Some people toss and turn as they try to sleep on bad mattresses as well. The stress and movement of trying to fall back asleep in different positions can also lead to sweating in bed.
That heat and discomfort directly tie into a lower quality of sleep as well.
6. Joint Pain
Firm mattresses can lead directly to joint pain. The harder your bed, the more pressure there is against the joints you’re laying on, like your shoulders, hips, and knees.
Over time, that resistance can lead to joint pain. You may only feel your joints aching, but even that can have adverse effects on the body.
7. Neck Pain
Old mattresses also tend to be lumpy and uneven. Unevenness can lead to spinal issues that contribute to back, and more specifically, neck pain.
If your trunk is not aligned with your neck, you’re likely to wake up with a general stiffness. Additionally, any position which leads you to flex your neck muscles as you sleep will lead to pain in the region.
8. Poor Sleep
All of the items above have touched on the idea of poor sleep and its effect on the body. It can’t be overstated, though, how important sleep is for a healthy, functioning body.
Everything from memory retention to the reparation of heart blood vessels is affected by sleep. When your sleep suffers, you put yourself at risk of developing heart disease, stroke, diabetes, high blood pressure, and anxiety disorders.
That’s right, anxiety disorders and sleep have a co-morbid effect. One fuels, and can cause the other. Those who have anxiety tend to have difficulty sleeping for a number of reasons.
Trouble sleeping can lead to a number of physiological responses that cause anxiety. Additionally, the stress of drowsiness can lead to environmental issues that contribute to severe anxiety. Things like productivity, emotiveness, alertness, and motivation all suffer when you lose sleep.
Those are all things we need to maintain in our daily lives, and our failure to be productive and maintain relationships can lead to depression and anxiety.
Ways to Improve Sleep
Your sleep is affected by a number of things. The time you go to bed, the food and drink you consume before bedtime and the amount of physical activity you partake in all have an effect.
Another essential thing to keep in mind is the regularity of your sleep. Getting to bed at 10 pm one night and 3 am the next is going to throw a wrench in the normal swing of things.
Sleep isn’t Everything
There are other areas of your life to streamline as well. While sleep on a bad mattress affects almost everything in our lives, those things in our lives require attention as well.
Visit our site for more tips to improving your life and achieving being well.