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The Gold Standard for Mattresses
The gold standard for comfort in mattresses is the memory foam mattress. Memory foam is the heat activated material originally developed for NASA to protect astronauts from damage as they were crushed under the high gravitational forces of a rocket launch. It provides both firm support and a soft cushion and makes a nearly perfect sleeping surface.
When you lie down on a memory foam mattress, the special foam material begins to react to your body heat. The portion of the foam in contact with your body begins to soften and allows the body to literally sink into it like a cloud. The heated portion of the memory foam molds itself around the contours of the body, cradling you in comfort. This cradling action eliminates pressure points that can cause discomfort that often leads to a fitful night of tossing and turning. Pressure points can also aggravate chronic joint pain from old injuries or arthritis. With memory foam, you won’t wake up feeling more sore than you did when you went to bed the previous evening.
Beneath the conforming layer of memory foam, the portion that is removed from your body heat remains firm. This firm underlayment provides solid support as you sleep and helps maintain proper spinal alignment. Proper alignment while you sleep is so important for preventing back pain, as any doctor will tell you.
Memory foam, then, combines all the benefits of the softest, most comfortable mattress with the benefits of a firm supportive mattress. It’s like having two mattresses in one without any of the drawbacks of conventional mattresses. You’re probably thinking that if it’s as good as two mattresses it probably costs as much as two mattresses. Once, that was true, but not anymore. Modern manufacturing methods and higher production capacities have dramatically lowered the price of memory foam mattresses. They can now be purchased for about the same price as an ordinary spring mattress. Some online memory foam mattress retailers even offer completely free shipping to any destination within the 48 states. For something as large and bulky as a king-size mattress, that’s quite an offer!
Memory foam is made with an open cell foam that allows the foam to breathe and helps it conduct your body heat to soften the surface layer. You may have seen name brand memory foam mattresses demonstrate this action on television by showing a hand print left in the foam for a few moments after the hand is drawn away. As the foam coals again and air is drawn back into the open foam cells, it slowly bounces back to its original shape. At first it remembers the shape of the hand that was pressed into it, and then it remembers its original form. That’s where the name memory foam came from.