Is Your Mattress Messing with You? How it Can Affect Your Health
Your old mattress leaves you tossing and turning throughout the night, and you wake up in the morning more tired than before bedtime. A high-quality mattress gives years of good sleep. But there’s no magic number to tell how many. Manufacturers recommend changing the mattress every seven years, but if you care for it properly, you can use it even for ten years without affecting your health. To prolong its life expectancy, stop kids from jumping on the bed, rotate it every three months, and use a bed frame with center support to prevent sagging.
But even if you care for it periodically, it will still wear out in time. And when it does, it can affect your health (if you don’t change it with a new one).
Here is how your matters can wreak havoc on your body.
Back pain
As it gets older, your mattress starts to sag in the middle, so you’ll no longer sleep on a flat surface, but in an awkward position. Doctors compare it with sleeping in a hole, so you can imagine the effects it has on your back.
Chiropractors state that sleeping on a worn-out mattress causes chronic back pain. How can you tell if this is the case? If you’re turning and tossing during the night because you cannot find a comfortable sleeping position, chances are your mattress is no longer in a top-notch state.
In the long term, back pain makes it difficult to fall asleep and gets you into a cycle of exhaustion and soreness.
The National Sleep Foundation states that 60% of Americans experience sleep problems because of their back pain. A quick fix is to place a pillow under your knees when you sleep on your back to improve aches. But the best solution would be to look for the best selling mattress and get rid of the old one.
Dust mites, body oil, and dead skin are all over the mattress
Did you know that you spend a third of your life in bed? Well, now, you do. Over time, the mattress (even if you use bedsheets) collects body oils and dead skin that are the perfect snack for dust mites.
The average mattress can collect 10 million microscopic bugs. Horrible right? And it’s getting even more disgusting when you remember that after they eat, dust mites poop on the same mattress that you sleep on. Thankfully, you cannot see the buggers because they’re invisible.
But if you suffer from allergies sleeping on a mattress filled with bugs, dead skin, and body oils isn’t very comfortable. If you experience sinus pressure, watery eyes, sneezing, itchiness, and coughing when you sleep in your bed, your matters may be the cause.
Dust mites are also dangerous for people with asthma because they can trigger shortness of breath, chest tightness, difficult breathing, and sleep problems. To prevent these symptoms, change the mattress every five years and cover it with allergen-proof bed sheets that keep dust mites inside the mattress. And don’t forget to wash the bed sheets weekly.
