After days of contemplating, you finally decided to give that big, snugly, soft, and squishy pillow a go. You toss and turn, adjust your head, adjust your bed, flipped your pillow, removed your pillow, fluffed your pillow, but to no avail.
You will settle for this since you’ll perceive it as nothing but a mere nuisance. After all, you still get to sleep. But what you didn’t know is that it will lead to tensed neck muscles, neck pain, shoulder soreness, or some other form of discomfort later on.
To avoid this, you must learn how to adjust your pillow to suit your preference and satisfy your sleep comfort. In this article, we’ll share with you tips on how to adjust your pillow. We’ll also share one hack that will surely change the way you sleep!
The Role of Pillow in Our Sleep Comfort
One of the best sleep tips you will ever come across is to choose the right pillow. This is because our pillows play a significant role in how comfortable our sleep can be since it bridges the gap between our neck and the mattress and delivers support to our head.
With the right level of support, our head will be in proper alignment to the spine.
This helps you maintain the right sleeping posture and eliminates unwanted pressure in certain parts of our body like the shoulders, back, or chest, depending on your sleeping position.
The level of support a pillow can give depends on its thickness and firmness. When the pillow you’re using is thin or softer, your head won’t receive the support it needs, and there will be unwanted pressure on different parts of your body, which will lead to aches, pains, and sleep disruption.
Because of this, you should pay special attention to firmness and thickness when buying your pillows.
How to Adjust Your Pillow for More Comfortable Sleep
Unfortunately, determining the right pillow firmness and thickness is a tricky process. For one, pillow firmness is subjective. On the other hand, the thickness is objective, but you won’t be able to determine if the pillow thickness is suitable for your sleeping position unless you tried sleeping on it.
Because of this, choosing a pillow is a trial-and-error process. However, it can get quite costly. To minimize the aches and pains you may feel from using the wrong pillow, here are some tips that you should know about:
1. Insert a rolled-up beach towel inside your pillow
If you find your pillow to be too thin, and you feel as if your neck is not receiving the support it needs, you can try rolling up a beach towel and inserting the towel roll inside the pillow. When you lie down, make sure to place the curve of your neck over the rolled towel.
Keep in mind that this tip will work only for back sleepers.
2. Position your pillow the long way
If you’re a back sleeper, and you feel that your spine needs to be elevated to achieve proper alignment, you can try positioning your pillow the long way—with the other end reaching your lower back or shoulder blades.
3. Place another pillow in between your knees
When you sleep on your side, there will be a downward slant between your hips to your knees. This slant puts pressure on your hips. Placing one more pillow in between your knees is one good way to address this.
This trick is also useful for people who have had knee or hip surgery.
4. Put pillows under your knees
If you lie on your back and you often wake up with back pain, this means that there’s unnecessary pressure on your back while you sleep. Placing a pillow under your knees can help remove that pressure off your spine and help you sleep comfortably.
You can also use this trick if you’re advised to sleep on your back after surgery.
The Best Pillow Tip You Need to Know
The pillow tips we’ve provided you are effective, but only for a short period. Sooner or later, you will feel the aches again. If you truly want to eliminate the risk of sleep disruptions and body pain, the best thing you can do is invest in an adjustable pillow.
Its name says it all. An adjustable pillow is a type of pillow with adjustable thickness and firmness, so it’s the perfect pillow for comfortable sleep. Adjustable pillows come in different types, and the type determines how its thickness can be adjusted. Here are the most popular ones:
Shredded foam pillow
You just need to add or lessen the amount of shredded memory foam pieces inside the pillow for this type.
Adjustable layer Pillow
This type of adjustable pillow contains several thin pillows. To adjust the pillow’s loft and create the ideal support, all you need to do is take out one or two of the thin pillows until you achieve your desired thickness.
Because of its adjustability, an adjustable pillow has become the go-to pillow of many people, especially those who take on different sleeping positions throughout the night.
This type of pillow is also used to provide sleep support for people with sleep issues and medical conditions like snoring, sleep apnea, acid reflux, and many others because it can help elevate their head or body. If you want to get an advanced pillow for sleep apnea get a sleep apnea pillow, you may want to consider an adjustable pillow.
The Bottom Line
There’s no one-size-fits-all pillow. That is until the adjustable pillow was developed. Thanks to this new pillow type, it has become easier for us to find the pillow that will provide us with the level of support we need and keep our spine in proper alignment, regardless of your sleeping position.
With the use of this pillow, you can maintain proper sleeping posture, achieve a good night’s sleep, and finally get rid of the body soreness and stiff muscles that you’ve been dealing with for so long.
