The Magic Pillow

Egads....it’s exactly noon. I got up about half an hour ago after a nine hour, almost continuous sleep. This is also the fifth day in a row that I have been sleeping late into the morning, and the first time that I can remember that this has happened to me.

I have, up until now at least, never been what you would call much of a sleeper. I normally considered 4 to 5 hours a good night. So you can imagine just how weird it feels to me setting records like 8 or 9 almost uninterrupted hours.

I know that normal people sleep as long as I do now, and I have always kind of envied them that ability. But at the same time I have not necessarily felt shortchanged in the sleep department, as I always believed that it was some sort of metabolic thing. Some people sleep a lot. Others not so much. And that included me.

But that was before the Magic Pillow came along.

When a significant change happens in your life, and you are trying to figure out why, you invariably think through what it is you are doing differently that could have caused that change to occur.

Mine was actually a two-parter. The first part was that I recently started waking up with a very stiff neck. At first I wrote this off to the spine straightening treatments and exercises my chiropractor showed me, which would cause stress in my neck sleeping on my left side, which I generally do for about half the night.

So I made a conscious effort not to do that, and still had the stiffness every morning.

After a while it got to be a real pain in the ass and, more or less out of the blue, I decided that I should check out pillows because maybe the stiff foam tube wrapped in a beach towel, fondly known as the Star Trek pillow, had outlived its usefulness, and was now putting too much stress on my neck.

I’m not sure how I arrived at this conclusion...more a lateral thinking exercise than something obvious, but when I did, I got it in my head to start checking out other pillow configurations.

This led me, eventually, to an ad for a memory foam pillow that was highly sculptured and pretty fancy looking. But I was more interested in the science of them, and how the memory foam would contour itself to the shape of your head and neck and support both without stress, which in turn would cause the whole rest of your body to relax, especially if you had a memory foam mattress (or topper, which I did).

Armed with info and insight we headed off to JYSK.

JYSK is one of the better bed and bath stores we have down here on The Quiet Side Of The Lake. It’s over on the highway at McLeod Road in Niagara Falls, right where they a building the new Costco. So off we went.

When you live in St Catharines, going to Niagara Falls is the equivalent, time-wise, of going from the east side to the west side of Toronto, so we think nothing of it.

JYSK is a pretty decent store and when we were newbies to the area, we bought a lot of our house stuff there. So I knew they had was a very good selection of memory foam neck support pillows, and that also has several beds that you could try them out on.

The trick with memory foam is to find the pillow with the density that feels right for you. It’s all about the feel. I knew that from my research. When you lay your head down on one, you need to think, not just about how comfortable and supportive it is for your head and neck, but how it makes your whole bod feel. Because everything’s connected.

So I did all that while Heather was buying the stuff she wanted and found the pillow that fit the 3 criteria in my head. 1. Not too thick. Not too thin. 2. Not too stiff. Not too soft. 3. Body not stiff and uncomfortable. Body relaxed.

It didn’t take long and the rest, as they say is history. The one I chose was the Wellpur SOGN. Many good things have IKEAish names.

Now after 5 days, I have to admit that I was absolutely astonished at how much better I slept from the very first night. It appears there is no real ’break-in’ period required, when something fits you perfectly.

Jim Murray is an experienced op/ed, business and entertainment review blogger, copywriter and art director. He has run his own creative consulting business since 1989 after a 20 year career major Canadian & international advertising agencies in Toronto. He lives with his wife in the Niagara area of Ontario, and works with companies that are trying to make a difference in the world.

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