This is a follow-up to our post 'We Believe in Restorative Sleep.'
A conceptual catastrophe exists in the world of retail mattress sales and promotion. Colloquial wisdom holds that firmer mattresses are more supportive and that softer mattresses give superior pressure relief. Indeed, by sheer intellectual default, many salespeople help to create or perpetuate this mistaken framework in the very language we use to present mattresses. EG: ‘This pillowtop mattress has a firm coil system for support, and the plush pillowtop layers provide comfort’. This sets up a dichotomy that comfort and support are opposites, meaning choosing the right mattress becomes about deciding how much comfort to sacrifice for support, or vice versa.
This dichotomy is false. No mattress can be comfortable and unsupportive. This claim holds only if one ignores how you feel waking up after a night on a ‘comfortable, but unsupportive mattress’; we take this phrase to be a contradiction in terms.
There is one basic material property that unites the concepts of comfort and support, to show us that these are merely different aspects of an inseparable whole. The material property we need, in a broad sense, to achieve optimal posture and comfort is elasticity. Highly elastic materials, all else equal, give mattress producers much greater control over comfort and support. A high degree of elasticity ensures that the materials are not only flexible enough but also resilient enough to provide good support. This expands the range of appropriate firmness choices without risking poor posture or comfort.
A properly supportive mattress needs to be flexible enough to conform to the body's complex shape. It must provide support for as much of our body as possible. A supportive mattress does not simply ‘sag’ and allow our centre of gravity (typically pelvis and hips) to sink excessively. The mattress needs sufficient resilience (support factor) to resist this sagging in order to achieve optimal posture. The alleged pressure relief of ‘soft’ mattresses can be wiped out by inadequate resilience, creating postural distortions as more body weight from other areas of our body angles toward this centre of gravity and increases pressure.
Using the most elastic materials available reduces the likelihood of these problems, not only in new mattresses but also in mattresses broken in from years of use.
If you're starting your journey, we highly recommend reading about our exceptionally elastic Berkeley Ergonomics Cairo, Berkeley Ergonomics Copenhagen, and Harrison Spinks Nesfield mattresses.
You may also read more about The Elastic Bed Principle in our Spring Mattress Buying Guide.
