Feeling Overwhelmed - phoenix, anyone, help request

[phoenix]

Hi mjgh06,

@"mjgh06" post=55488

First off, I really do appreciate all your knowledge and thank you for responding. The more I read through the site information and your posts to my question, I become more confused. As an example, the website here states - [quote]The only way to truly know the quality of any mattress is to know the construction, materials and components, that are inside it … [/quote] But when I asked for assistance that I couldn’t find the material specs for the mattress I currently own, your response was to disregard them - [quote] #2Unless you have a great deal of knowledge and experience with different types of mattress materials and specs and different layering combinations and how they combine together and can translate them into your own “real life” experience that can be unique to you (which would only be a very small percentage of people) … I would tend to avoid using individual specs such as layer thicknesses or ILD numbers or other complex combinations of specifications[/quote]

There are three parts to assessing the “value” of a mattress purchase that are independent from each other.

1. The first is “comfort” and PPP (how well you will sleep on the mattress) and this is the part that requires your own personal testing or sleeping experience. This is the part that only you can “feel”.

2. The second is the quality and durability of the materials in a mattress (how long you will sleep well). This is the part that you can’t feel because lower quality and less durable materials can feel exactly the same as higher quality and more durable materials … they just don’t maintain their comfort and/or support for nearly as long and the loss of comfort and support isn’t covered by mattress warranties (see post #174 here).

3. The third is how a mattress compares to the other options you are considering based on the combination of #1 and #2 along with all the other parts of your personal value equation that are most important to you (including the price of course and the options you have after a purchase).

The specs you need to know to assess the quality and durability of a mattress are listed in this article because these are the ones that can affect the durability and useful life of the mattress. These are “quality specs” and are important to know.

Specs such as ILD or other specifications that affect the firmness or feel of the mattress are “comfort specs” and these are the ones that are not important to know because your body will tell you what you need to know about whether a mattress is a good “match” for you in terms of comfort and PPP and complex combinations of “comfort specs” are much to complex to use as the basis for deciding whether a mattress will be suitable for you to sleep on.

But I get confused reading the article and your responses in that the article states - [quote]No matter what your own unique body shape, sleeping positions, and circumstances may be, the two basic functions of every mattress are to relieve pressure on the pressure points of the body and to keep your spine and joints in their natural alignment in all your sleeping positions. [/quote] So why is this part not standard? This should be a standard regardless of the person’s height, weight, body shape, and sleeping positions as stated. All personal preferences aside. Let’s talk basics - what is the basic need of a mattress to provide these two basic functions?

I’m not quite sure what you are asking here but Posture and alignment and Pressure relief are the two of the three "P’s in PPP (Posture and alignment, Pressure relief, and Personal preferences) and this is the part that only you can “feel” that you need to assess based on your own careful testing or if that’s not possible by actually sleeping on the mattress. There are too many individual and unique differences in people’s body type, weight distribution, sleeping positions, health situations, sensitivities, and physiology for anyone to be able to predict with any certainty which combination of materials or which type of mattress will work best for you. Only you can feel what you feel on a mattress or know how well you sleep on it and how you feel in the morning when you wake up. Good testing is the most reliable way to predict this but if you can’t test mattresses in person then you would need a conversation on the phone with a knowledgeable retailer or manufacturer who will do their best to help you decide which of the mattresses they sell would have the highest chance of success but once again they only go by “averages” and the information you provide them so your actual sleeping experience will be the only way to confirm whether your “best efforts” and their guidance were “close enough” that you end up sleeping well and “symptom free” on the mattress you chose because not everyone fits inside the “averages”.

The second priority is the specs of the mattress.

Outside of PPP … the second priority is the quality/durability specs that affect the durability and useful life of the mattress … NOT all the specs. If you can’t find out the quality/durability specs you need I wouldn’t buy the mattress because there would be very little value in buying a mattress that works well for you or even feels “amazing” when it is new and for a few months or even for just a few years before the lower quality materials soften and break down prematurely and you lose the comfort and support that is the reason that you purchased the mattress and you are no longer sleeping well on the mattress and need to buy a new one.

This is one of the reasons that dealing with a retailer or manufacturer that is knowledgeable and transparent about the type and quality of the materials in the mattresses they sell can be one of the most important parts of a successful mattress purchase and unfortunately not all areas of the country have knowledgeable and transparent retailers. Sometimes you may need to “push” them to find out the specs you need to know and sometimes they won’t even then because even though it’s their responsibility to provide you with the information you need to know to the best of their ability … they are often just commissioned salespeople that are only interested in “:selling” you anything you are willing to buy and they have little knowledge about mattresses or the materials inside them outside of the “marketing stories” that have little importance.

As you can see in this article one of the reasons that I would avoid most of the largest manufacturers completely even though they dominate the industry and the top 5 manufacturers alone control about 3/4 of the market share in the industry (see here and here) is because they don’t generally provide the specs you need to make an informed choice even to the retailers that want them to be able to provide them to their customers and in almost all cases if you somehow are successful in finding out the quality specs they will only verify that they are using low quality materials that would be a weak link in the mattress anyway.

[quote]I seem to be in an endless circle here where I need to know the specs of my current mattress to have a starting point for the two basic function of any mattress that will fit my height, weight, body shape, and sleeping positions. By knowing the little I do about my mattress, I would state that I need individually wrapped pocket coils as a core and a comfort layer of thin gel-infused memory foam of 5lb per cu.ft encased with edge support coils. I am trying to narrow down what I need before feeling the mattress. I am not at all concerned with personal preferences but only the pressure points and proper spinal alignment that will adjust as I move - turn over from side sleep to back, etc.

This is where I am requesting assistance.[/quote]

Without knowing the ALL the specs of your current mattress you won’t be able to duplicate it (and not just the few specs we’ve been discussing) and if you can’t purchase the same mattress then the only way to know whether another mattress will “feel” the same to you or provide similar comfort/pressure relief, and support/alignment will be based on your own personal experience.

In other words … if you can’t buy the same mattress then I wouldn’t try and duplicate it based on specs because you won’t be able to.

Your best chance of success is to follow each of the steps in the tutorial one at a time and not to focus on information and specs that either wouldn’t be relevant or helpful or that you won’t be able to find out anyway.

I think that your first step is to fully realize and accept that if you can’t buy the same mattress again then you won’t be able to duplicate it based on specs and you will need to find another mattress that is just as suitable for you to sleep on regardless of the materials inside it and that also uses good quality materials that won’t soften and break down prematurely.

The next step would be to decide on the types of mattresses or materials that you are most interested in including in your research (see this article)… Since it seems that the mattress you did best with includes at least some memory foam in the comfort layers it would make sense to focus on mattresses that also have some memory foam in the comfort layers for your next mattress as well (unless you have also slept well on other types of mattresses that you are familiar with).

Then the next step is to either do some local testing (after you have checked their websites and made some initial calls to confirm that any local stores carry the types of mattresses you are interested in testing and can provide you with the information you need to make an informed choice) or if you aren’t able to test mattresses locally such as in your case then to begin the process of looking at online websites and talking with knowledgeable and experienced online manufacturers that sell the types of mattresses that you are most interested in. In this case since you won’t be able to know for certain whether the mattress you purchase will work well for you in “real life” until you sleep on it I would also make sure that you are comfortable with the options you have after a purchase to either make changes to your mattress or to exchange or return it and the cost involved just in case your choice doesn’t work out as well as you hoped for and in spite of everyone’s “best efforts” you don’s sleep well on the mattress you ended up choosing.

Phoenix