I am a 128lb 5’5 female, I sleep 80% on my back and 20% on my side. I always had pocketcoil mattresses but I started to have back pain in 2019 so I tried to buy a new mattress. I don’t like memory foam mattress due to the heat retention, so under the suggestions from friends and family I thought I would give latex mattress a try because it is more contouring to the body.
I have bought four 2" dunlop latex toppers (one 20ILD, two 30ILD and one 40ILD), one 2" talalay soft topper and a 3" medium firm Novafoam memory foam topper (MF), along with a cotton zipped cover with Joma Wool quilt layer inside. In the past two years, I have tried different combinations with these toppers (from 3 toppers stacks to 6 toppers stacks) to make a DIY mattress, so far I haven’t found one that I can sleep through the night without pain. The best combination so far from top to bottom is talalay/20/30/40 or talaly/20/MF/30/40. I feel fine when I get into the bed initially but I would wake up 4-5 hours later with pain on the back, sometimes even tailbone area, and after turn to the side, I would have pain in the shoulder, back of the armpits and hip area. I can’t sleep past the 4 to 5 hour mark in bed. My feet muscle feel tense when I step onto the floor. I think my body may be misaligned and I may need some lumbar support because I feel my hip sinks too much throughout the night. I have tried all the combinations that I can think of, I don’t know what to do now.
It sounds like you’ve fallen into the “topper stack” trap, which is a common hurdle in the DIY world. At 128 lbs, you aren’t heavy enough to compress a thick 6-inch core, but building a mattress entirely out of 2-inch toppers can create a “pancake effect.” Instead of one cohesive unit that supports your spine, you have multiple layers that can shift and slide, often leading to that “hammocking” feeling where your hips sink too far while your upper back stays propped up. The fact that you wake up with tailbone pain after 4 or 5 hours is a major clue. Tailbone and lower back pain for a back sleeper almost always points to a lack of primary support. Even though the bed feels fine initially, as the materials warm up and soften over those first few hours, your pelvic area is likely dropping out of alignment. Those tense muscles in your feet are a tell-tale sign of “guarding”; your body is literally trying to find stability all night because the surface beneath you feels too unstable.
For someone who is 80% a back sleeper, you need a much flatter, more stable surface than what a stack of five toppers can usually provide. Your shoulder and armpit pain when you turn to your side suggests that while your hips are sinking too much, your shoulders aren’t sinking enough. You’re hitting a “firmness wall” because of the way those denser Dunlop layers are stacked. Before you buy anything else, I would try simplifying the stack drastically. Try just the 40 Dunlop on the bottom, the 30 Dunlop in the middle, and the 2" Talalay on top. Skip the memory foam and the 20 ILD Dunlop for a few nights. This might feel “too firm” when you first lie down, but it will provide a much more stable platform for your spine. If that feels too hard on your shoulders when you flip to your side, you can try adding the 20 ILD Dunlop back in under the Talalay, but keep that memory foam out of the equation for now. It is likely the culprit behind the heat and the late-night sinking.
Since you mentioned you always preferred pocket coil mattresses until the pain started in 2019, your body might just miss that “active” support that only springs can provide. All-latex builds have a very different “push-back” than coils. If simplifying the toppers doesn’t stop the 4-hour wake-up call, you might consider using your best latex toppers over a dedicated pocket coil base. It would give you the contouring you wanted from the latex without the “sinking into a hole” feeling that’s currently wrecking your sleep. You might also try testing your favorite stack with the zipped cover left open just to see if the wool quilting is adding too much surface tension and creating a “drum effect” that makes the layers feel harder than they actually are.
Thanks so much for your insights and recommendations, Nikki, it all makes sense, much appreciated!
I have now tried the stripped down version of the 3 layers and 4 layers configurations you suggested with and without the cover, they turned out to be too firm for me, I can’t even past 3 hours mark now before waking up with pain on my back and tailbone when I sleep on my back and pain on the arms and thighs and back of armpits when I sleep on my side. I even tried to put part of the 2" talalay on the shoulder area of the bed and 2" 20ILD dunlop on the remaining lumbar and foot area of the bed, mimicking a zoned layer to allow shoulder to sink more, I then put a wool blanket on top to minimize the gap between the two pieces. However, it’s still too firm. I think 2" is not enough cushion for me.
Over the span of nearly 2 year trial, my body has become super sensitive now with the push back from the latex, some days I can’t even sit on the chair without burning pain on the back of my thighs and butt. Some nights I seek refuge on my couch, the cushions of which are made of high density foam, initially it feels better than the latex but then it gives me back pain in the morning (the couch is over 10 years old) and it sleeps hot when the weather gets warm. I really don’t want to give up and waste all the money I put in the latex mattress, I was hoping to find a solution eventually but it seems just not suitable for me. Wish I had found you and done more research before I purchased the mattress. I learned a lot about latex over the past two years but sadly it’s a hefty price to pay.
I think I have to start looking for a pocket coil mattress again which can give me the support and cushion I need. The DIY latex mattress I bought is a ready made mattress from the manufacturer. The so-called DIY is that you can swap the layers to adjust firmness. It sounded like a good idea but I didn’t know the nuance between the body weight and layering. I am not handy, I am not able to build one from scratch so I need to buy a pocket boil mattress from the store. I noticed over the years, the pocket boil mattresses have gone through a lot changes, there are micro coil layer in some mattresses on top of the traditional pocket coils now and there are all sorts of pressure relief materials too. On top of that, my body is super sensitive now, it feels bruised and pins and needles under my own body weight, I don’t know whether I can trust how I feel when I test the mattresses in the store, it seems nothing is comfortable to me now.
Could you please give me some guidance as to what I should be looking for, such as how thick the pressure relief layer, what kind of pressure relief material and what kind of support (coil counts, the gauge of the coils) would be suitable for my weight and back and side sleeping combo? Given my current situation what I should feel when the mattress is the right one for me? Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you!
You could try a layer of standard polyfoam on top of the latex. It helps a lot to understand the nature of different foams. Latex is always trying to be bouncy, and the only way to make it not bouncy is to make it even softer. But polyfoam just is what it is, it feels like the firmness that it is because it is not bouncy.
However, memory foam is the opposite of bouncy, it completely caves underneath, especially with warmth.
So by interlayering your options, you can modify the responsiveness to your desired level. Even placing a 1" layer of memory foam underneath a piece of latex will lower the responsiveness a bit, because what that layer is pressing up against when you lay on it is the opposite of bouncy, so it can’t reverberate and transmit the energy back to you.
Foambymail has standard super soft polyfoam and it’s very cheap. I’ve used it to make the very top of my diy mattress feel plush and it really worked.
People with more experience in bedding can tend to write off polyfoams, but i think they can be very effectively used.
Thanks so much for your suggestions, Gene! I completely agree with you about the nature of different foams through my own experience. I didn’t like the bounciness and push back of the latex after a few months so I bought a 3” medium memory foam topper last year. I didn’t put it on top because my body just sank right into it and reached the top layer shortly and I don’t like the envelop feeling. I experimented putting it beneath various firmness layers instead, i.e under the Talalay, 20ILD Dunlop, 30ILD Dunlop, trying to dampen the push back of the latex and change the overall firmness, but it caved in under the body weight and heat over time and I woke up after 3-5 hours with pain.
I’d like to give the super soft polyfoam a try, because I like what I feel with my couch cushions which I think are made of the similar material. If it works, it will save me thousands of dollars to buy a brand new pocket coil mattress. My only concern is whether it will give me the correct alignment, as Nikki pointed out that my shoulder and armpit pain when I turn to the side suggests that while my hips are sinking too much, my shoulders aren’t sinking enough. Will the 1” super soft polyfoam do the trick? What are your thoughts? Thank you.
The super soft is so soft, it’s barely even there. So it won’t try to pretend its going to hold up your weight like memory foam, it’s simply there to add a plush top layer. It has near zero hold up, so there’s not a chance of it causing misalignment till you start putting probably over 4 inches on the top.
Thanks for the explanation, Gene. I just realized I mixed up two situations. The original setup with 5 layers of latex and memory foam toppers created the pancake and hammock effect which led to pain due to misalignment. After simplifying it to 3 all latex setup with soft Talalay on top of 30 and 40ILD Dunlop, the mattress became more stable. However, it now causes body pain due to the pushback of latex which requires more pressure relief.
I understand the 1” super soft standard polyfoam will provide plushness to the mattress and alter the overall feel, but like you said it is barely there, is it sufficient to provide enough pressure relief to eliminate body pain so that I can sleep through the night? I would really appreciate your insight. Thank you.
Understand what is happening is the same as bouncing a rubber ball off the floor. Think about all the things you could put on that floor that would help the ball from bouncing and why it works. That is what you want to figure out how to do with your setup. If you tried to bounce a rubber ball on a piece of memory foam, it stops immediately. If you bounced it on a piece of medium polyfoam, it might bounce a small amount.
You could order a couple of 1/2" pieces of polyfoam from foambymail and put that under each layer of latex. They would compress to about 1/4" under the weight, and that would relax the responsiveness of the setup.
There’s also the 2.5" HD36 eggcrate topper, about $50 that you could then put in place of the soft latex, convoluted side down. In its convoluted form, that translates to a soft ILD.
The super soft foam is 12ild, and yes it does offer pressure relief. You have to be careful not to have too thick of a soft top layer, but you could get a few 1" layers and try anywhere from 1" to 3" on the top and see how that feels.
I’m just giving options. If you were to order all that stuff i think it’d cost about $100 shipped. Then you swap out the layers till the light bulb clicks.
You may need the alignment of the firmness of the medium on the top, but to settle down the response you’re close to the weight where youre not heavy enough to press through the soft layer of latex into the support. So maybe the 1.5" hd36 eggcrate would be the right height. The only way you can know is to get everything and try everything. I know its a big investment, i went through it too and took some losses.
