Loving My New Mattress

Last week I purchased a new mattress.  The last mattress my lovely bride and I purchased was a memory foam bed and box spring, which we bought with part of our tax refund roughly fifteen years ago.  The bed was expensive at the time, somewhere between $1500 and $2000, but it absolutely served us well.  My biggest complaint with that mattress was that it was hot.  I had to start wearing wicking pajamas in order to not wake up drenched in sweat every night, and even that didn't fully eliminate the problem.  It was a trade-off though, because that mattress was crazy comfortable.  Until it wasn't.

Over the last few weeks, I started noticing back pain, and it was getting progressively worse.  It was in the very lower back, just above the hip, on the left side.  It took me a while to figure out it was likely the mattress.  I wasn't 100% sure it was the mattress, because I wasn't smart enough to try sleeping somewhere else to see if that fixed things, but regardless wifey was good with my suggestion to buy a new one.

As I started research, my online shopping initially took me to mattress stores, where I quickly, but unsurprisingly discovered that I could expect to fork over well above $2000 for a good quality bed.  Then I remember my friend James telling me that he purchased a mattress in a box for a very reasonable price, and he loved it.  Once I did my independent sleuthing, I discovered that I could get a high quality kind sized mattress for less than $700.  Done!  I bought another memory foam mattress.

The first thing I noticed with the new mattress is that I was no longer sweating at night.  That cooling technology really works!  My back pain was reduced the next day as well, and I was quite hopeful.  A day or two later though, my hopes were put into question, because I woke up with a sore lower back and thought the love affair with the new sleeping hardware might be short-lived.  However, the morning after that, my pain was again reduced and I remembered that I'd been doing a bunch of manual labor around the homestead that was likely the root of the discomfort in my back.

Saturday, I took a road trip to see a friend of mine, and all said and done, I spent about five hours in my car.  It had been a long time since I'd done that, and when I got home, my lower back, neck, and shoulders were all quite stiff.  I fully expected I'd be very uncomfortable the next morning.  That, however, was not the case at all!  I awakened feeling quite refreshed, with only the slightest stiffness in the very lower portion of my spine.  Within an hour, my back was completely pain free.

After about an hour of moving about, all of the pain in my lower back was gone, and THAT was when I realized this was the first time my back hasn't at least been stiff for several months.  The pain and stiffness had been slowly creeping up on me, and I just thought it was a sign of aging.  It's crazy how much difference it made.  I feel more energetic, more mentally alert, and years younger.  I'm loving this new mattress!