How to Choose the Right Mattress

Your mattress is arguably among the most important single items of furniture in your home. After all, you’re going to be sleeping on it for more than eight hours a day for its entire lifespan. That’s a third of your life. Moreover, you’re going to be living with the after-effects of your night’s sleep during your waking hours, too.

Getting your choice of mattress right, therefore, is something that should be taken very seriously indeed. Let’s look at how you might make a decision that’s right for your circumstances.

Think about your budget

This is a major purchase, and as such you should think about how much you’d like to spend ahead of time. You can find a budget mattress for a few hundred pounds, and a bespoke hand-made one for a few thousand – but most people settle somewhere in between. Bear in mind that going too cheap might make a false economy in the long-run, and that you can get a decent return with just a little extra spent.

What to look for

So, what separates the different kinds of mattress?

Composition

Mattresses are made in a range of different ways. There are open-coil mattresses, whose springs are made of a single continuous length of metal, and there are pocket-spring mattresses, where the springs are all separate. Then there’s memory foam – the squidgy stuff that conforms to your body. Many modern mattresses are made from a combination of these technologies. Bear in mind that some mattresses are given special chemical treatments, which can make them unsuitable for those with sensitive skin.

Size

Generally speaking, you want to go for as large a mattress as your room can reasonably accommodate. If you’re buying as a couple, then you might already have an idea of whether your existing bed is large enough. Most people tend to go for a larger mattress than the one they already have. Few go smaller. Bear in mind that if you’re switching sizes, you’ll need to get a bedframe to match.

Softness

Mattresses come in different levels of softness and firmness. This is highly subjective, but you might already have a fair idea of how soft you like it before you go into the shop to test the various options. If you’ve got particular needs, perhaps because of a bad back, then you might elect to go for something in particular. Couples with different tastes in mattress might decide to buy something that’s half one kind of mattress, and half the other.

Quality

Over time, an inferior mattress will sag, meaning that the level of comfort and support it offers in the first few weeks won’t be sustained after several years. For this reason, it’s worth looking for a prestigious brand with a reputation to uphold, and to look for the testimony of users who’ve had the mattress in question for several years.