Could an organic mattress ease your pain?

You would expect those of us who work at Natural Sleep Mattress amid beds topped with luxurious mattresses from the likes of Hastens, Posh + Lavish, OMI OrganicPedic and Pure Talalay Bliss to know a thing or two about natural and organic mattresses. You might not expect us to be sleep experts, however. 

When you think about it, though, it makes sense. When you spend your days surrounded by the best mattresses in Atlanta, you spend a lot of time talking and thinking about sleep. We try to keep up on the latest news related to sleep and something recently caught our eye.

According to a study published earlier this year in The Journal of Neuroscience, a lack of sleep correlates directly with an increase in pain levels.  “Sleep loss increases the experience of pain,” write the study’s authors, including lead author Adam J. Krause, a doctoral student at the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California/Berkeley.

It’s probably not too surprising that the study shows that “acute sleep deprivation pain amplifies reactivity” and lowers our threshold for pain. Sleep deprivation has a negative effect on just about everything we do – from decision making to joke telling.

“Outside of the laboratory setting, we similarly show that even modest nightly changes in sleep quality (increases and decreases) within an individual determine consequential day-to-day changes in experienced pain (decreases and increases, respectively),” the study reports.

What’s obvious to us is that if you are dealing with a painful condition – especially a chronic pain condition – you owe it to yourself to do whatever you can to increase your chances of getting a good night’s sleep. That could mean something as simple as putting the screens away an hour before you turn out the lights (because the light stimulates your brain, when you want it to be unwinding) or turning your thermostat down a couple of degrees at night (that’s because other studies have shown that we sleep better when it’s a cool 67 degrees).

When considering your options, this study should encourage you to, at the very least, consider investing in a new mattress. Pain is often connected to inflammation and sleep can be an important factor in getting inflammation under control. 

Even if you don’t suffer from pain, the study’s findings should be of interest. “Considering the societal rise in chronic pain conditions in lock-step with the decline in sleep time through the industrial world,” the study’s authors say, “our data support the hypothesis that these two trends may not simply be co-occurring but are significantly interrelated.” 

If you suffer from a painful condition like arthritis or still have aches and pains from an old auto accident, you might want to ask your doctor if a new mattress could help. And if you have any questions you think we could answer, we hope you will contact us at Natural Sleep Mattress, Atlanta’s luxury mattress store. We would love to help you get a better night’s sleep.