Select Comfort Mattress: Oooohhh, my - HAPPY! - back
Written: Nov 14 '00 (Updated Jan 07 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Adjustable firmness for each side; 20-year warranty; lightweight and easy to move; fairly hypoallergenic, since there's not much fabric or filler in it
Cons: None
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| Penguinlady's Full Review: Select Comfort Elite Mattress |
I'm a stomach sleeper. Next to being an axe murderer, it's one of the worst things you can be. My chiropractor doesn't know whether to scold or cheer - she scolds because I'm wrecking my back, and cheers because I pay for her BMW, private school for her kids, and vacations in Tahiti.
OK, so what so awful about sleeping on your stomach? Well, how about FIVE reasons not to do it?
1. It requires you to turn your head at a 90* angle to your spine all night - that kind of torquing can really wreck your neck after a while.
2. With every breath you take, you have to lift your entire torso off your ribcage. If you sleep on your back, your ribs are free to rise and fall without any added weight.
3. It rounds your shoulders.
4. It mashes your face into the pillow, pressing in lines and creases that can cause draggy muscles over time.
5. Worst of all, it causes your spine to cave in, even if you are sleeping on a firm mattress.
OK, those are reasons enough to try to break the habit. And try I did, for more than five years. Every night, I'd climb into bed with a trapezoidal cushion under my knees to help keep my spine straight and a cervical "termpurpedic" dense foam pillow under my neck. I'd lie there, eyes closed, breathing smoothly, for HOURS, it seemed. Finally, in desperation, I'd flip over onto my stomach and fall asleep in five minutes.
When I got married, it quickly became apparent that my husband and I don't sleep well together. We were using my queen-size bed, but he sleeps on his back, hands crossed on his chest - I'm always tempted to tuck a lily into them when I see him like that. I sleep sprawled on my stomach. After so many years of living alone, I remained aware of his presence on the other side of the bed every time I turned over, partly because he's such a light sleeper that any touch awakens him. And we woke each other up each time either of us got up to use the bathroom. So neither of us was getting much sleep, and I was getting up every morning with a backache that was getting worse and worse as time went by. Clearly, we had to do something about this.
In 1999, we spent a weekend with friends and for reasons too lengthy to go into here, I wound up sleeping on their extremely soft and squishy sofa. It was clear that even I couldn't sleep on my stomach on that thing - my spine would have been bent back like a paper-clip. So I settled in, with some misgivings, on my back. And slept like a baby.
Eureka! What was going on here? Well, as near as I can figure out, the sofa was so soft and cushiony that the pillows supported every curve in my back and legs. So maybe a really super-soft mattress was the answer. But who makes something like that? And could my Dearly Beloved sleep on one? Probably not - he was doing fine on our regular mattress.
Last December, we decided it was finally time to buy a new and bigger bed. So off we went. We checked out the best of the inner-spring styles and found that even with a pillow-top, they were too firm for me to sleep on my back. I don't believe that the firmest mattress is always the best - hard surfaces don't conform to your spine and support all of it. So you wind up with pressure points where you touch the mattress, because all your body weight is resting on them: shoulders, hips and tush, calves, heels. And the really good innersprings are waaay to expensive, at $3500 and up.
We looked at the tempurpedic styles at Brookstones, but while they molded to my spine after a while, they weren't very comfortable.
It was while walking through the mall that I noticed the Select Comfort store. It had been there for ages, but I'd never noticed it before. So we toddled in and checked them out.
FEATURES
• Their beds are different from any we'd ever seen before. They consist of a base, analogous to a box-spring, containing baffles placed crosswise and topped by a thin rigid sheet of high-tech material like fiberglass. It's covered by a fabric covering that makes it look like a regular box-spring. On top of that is a heavy fabric "box" without a top. The box contains one or two air cushions, depending on your preference. The cushions fill up the fabric box, and are topped by heavy foam of various densities. On top of that is a zipped-on top. So the entire constructions looks like a normal bed. Under the head of the bed is a pump which increases or decreases the amount of air in the cushions. The pump is controlled by a controller unit.
• There are three styles. The simplest one is also the thinnest, and doesn't have a cushion top. The other two have cushion tops and are about 13" and 17" deep, respectively. We bought the thinner of those two.
• You have a choice of one air cushion or two. If you select one, of course, you and your partner have to agree on the firmness of the mattress, which, for us, would defeat the purpose of buying the bed. So we selected two. They fill the "box" and are separated by a thick piece of foam that runs the length of the bed.
• You also have a choice of controls. You can get one or two, depending on whether you get one air cushion or two, wireless or tethered. We chose the tethered style; with our propensity for losing things, I knew a wireless control wouldn't last the first week.
• You control the firmness of your side of the bed with the controller. The firmness changes in increments of five, from 10 (you bottom out) to 100 (go sleep on a plank - it'll be softer.) You need to be lying on the bed when you set it, because the firmness of any given setting depends on your weight.
WHAT WE LIKE ABOUT IT
• We can both get up in the middle of the night without awakening each other. Since we are essentially sleeping on separate "mattresses," and they are separated by that thick foam strip, there's no movement on my side when he gets up, and vice versa.
• I can adjust the firmness of my side as I want. I've found that if I set the control at 20, the mattress starts resembling a hammock. That, combined with the cushion under my knees, is enough to keep me sleeping on my back, with my spine fully supported and my weight evenly distributed over the length of my body. At a setting of 20, there's no way I can even roll onto on my stomach, let alone sleep that way. Meanwhile, my DB sleeps at 45.
• The entire bed arrived in five boxes. It took us about an hour to set up. When we move, we won't need five strong men to move the mattress. All we'll have to do is deflate the air cushions, unzip the top of the mattress, roll everything up and pack it in boxes. The base will also come apart as easily as it went together. If you don't want to bother with setting it up yourself, the company will send a crew to set it up for you, but you pay extra for that, of course.
• Because there are no innersprings to get squashed, you never have to turn this mattress. In fact, you can't turn it, because it's tethered to the pump at the head of the bad. That was a chore I always hated, and I'm free of it forever.
• Because the inner space is full of air, there is a lot less filler material to get dusty or filled with mites and allergens. True, the pillowtop can get oogy, but that's a lot less fiber than even a thin innerspring mattress.
• I love the fact that we can keep changing the firmness of our sides of the mattress as our needs change. I have nothing against commitment, but when I'm 75, my needs will probably be different than they were at 55. With an innerspring, you're stuck with your choice forever, or until you buy a new one. We won't have to do that; we may need a new pump at some point, but we'll still be able to change the firmness to suit our needs at any given moment. That's a BIG plus.
WHAT WE WOULD CHANGE IF WE COULD
• I would put a quieter pump under the bed. It's pretty silent when it deflates the mattress, but the process of pumping it up involves some audible whirring, and a few clicks as it stops to check the air level. It's really pretty quiet, but if you want to firm up the mattress n the middle of the night, as I once did, it will probably wake up your partner. I don't blame the manufacturer, since no reasonable person would probably do that, but...
• The manufacturer recommends putting the system in a bed-frame with a headboard and footboard. We didn't have that before, so haven't yet gotten one, but we can see that we need it. The mattress is so light that it moves very easily, and can easily slip off the base. Our bed is in a niche, so there's only a few inches on each side for it to travel, but travel it does. It's an easy matter to move it back, though, which I do every week when I change the sheets; just pump up both sides to 50 without lying on it, and it has enough rigidity to move easily. (Trying to put a fitted sheet onto the bed when it's deflated is like trying to stuff a marshmallow into a piggy bank.) If I were designing this bed, I'd put Velcro or something between the base and the mattress, far enough in from the edge that it wouldn't interfere with the fitted sheets.
All in all, we feel that this bed was one of the best investments we've ever made. The Select Comfort people are so confident that you'll love their product that they will deliver it to you for a 90-day trial. If you don't like it, send it back and get your money back. If you love it, which we did, you can pay it off in a few months to avoid interest charges, or pay it off over time.
It was originally priced at about $2000, not counting the frame, which cost an extra $60, but we got it on sale for $1750. That's a lot for a bed, but no more than a really good innerspring mattress. And it comes with a 20-year warranty. The store threw in a wonderful thermal duvet, worth $200, too. We were dubious at first, since it's very thin, but we slept with it all winter, with temperatures in the 40*s and the window open, and it kept us toasty. Ain't technology wonderful!
Best of all, I'm finally learning to sleep on my back. True, I don't sleep as well as I do on my stomach, but my back loves me in the morning - no more pain. So my compromise is that I sleep on my back during the week, and on the weekends, I pump up the mattress to 50, tuck a thin, flat pillow under me, and snore blissfully on my stomach, neck torqued, shoulders rounded, face mashy, and back aching in the morning. But I love having that choice!
I can't recommend this bed highly enough. Try it - you'll love it, and so will your back. You're on your own with your chiropractor, though.
Recommended:
Yes
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Penguinlady
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