Once I realized that my experience with the 6-inch incline wasn’t just a one-night fluke, I became really curious.
My original goal had been pretty simple: I wanted to sleep more comfortably and stop waking up because my hip or shoulder was bothering me. I wasn’t setting out to study inclined sleeping or become particularly knowledgeable about it. I just happened to try something that made a noticeable difference for me.
But once it did, I wanted to know more.
I started searching for information about sleeping inclined and quickly discovered that there was much more to the subject than I had expected. I found discussions about different ways of creating an incline, different incline heights, full-body incline versus simply elevating the upper body, adjustable bases, bed risers and under-mattress wedges.
That raised a lot of questions for me.
Why had changing the angle felt so different to me? Was my experience common? How much actual research had been done? Were some of the benefits I was reading about supported by good evidence, or were they mostly personal experiences like mine? And does the method of creating the incline make a difference?
I also started messaging Incline Sleep with questions. At that point I was still approaching all of this as a customer who had experienced a positive result and wanted to understand more about it.
One thing I’m learning as I dig deeper is that there is an important difference between something I personally experienced, something a company explains or believes about its product, and something that has actually been demonstrated through independent research.
I’m trying to become much more conscious of those distinctions.
For example, I can confidently say that I began waking less frequently, felt more rested in the morning, and stopped waking with the same hip and shoulder aching after I began sleeping on my inclined mattress. Those are things I experienced.
What I can’t automatically conclude from my experience is exactly why those changes occurred or that another person will experience the same results.
That’s part of what makes this subject so interesting to me now. Instead of simply saying, “This worked for me,” I want to understand what we actually know about inclined sleeping, what we don’t know yet, and where some of the claims surrounding it originated.
The more questions I asked, the more interested I became—and my conversations with the people at Incline Sleep and Mattress Foundations began to grow from there.
I’m still very much learning, so I think my next few journal entries will explore some of these questions one at a time rather than trying to tackle everything at once.
One subject I’m particularly interested in is the difference between full-body incline and upper-body elevation, because I didn’t understand that distinction at all when I first started looking into this.
That’s probably where I’ll go next.