How to Choose the Best Cooling Mattress?
Overheating and sweating at night are among the major causes of interrupted sleep for most people. If you often wake up drenched in sweat at night, perhaps it's time you considered one of the best cooling mattresses in 2022.
The market does not have a mattress that will make you feel like you're sleeping on the ice. However, a couple of mattress technologies and designs may help create a cooler sleeping surface.
Here's how different mattress types perform as far as heat retention is concerned:
Innerspring Mattresses
These beds make the best mattresses for hot sleepers. A bulk of the support core of innerspring mattresses consists of springs. The space between these springs promotes airflow, making them naturally cool.
Hybrid Mattresses
Hybrid mattresses have a significantly thicker comfort section made of foam (memory foam, latex, or polyfoam) and a coil-based support section. As with innerspring, the gaps between the coils allow air circulation making these mattresses fairly temperature neutral. However, these mattresses may still retain heat if the comfort section comprises a thick layer of memory foam.
All-foam Mattresses
All-foam mattresses are the most notorious for heat retention. Their poor performance is mainly attributed to the foam's general structure, which inhibits the free airflow.
Heat retention in all-foam mattresses is affected by two things: the foam's density and the firmness. Generally, a mattress with more contouring is going to retain heat the most. This explains why low, and medium-firm memory foam beds are the biggest culprits in matter heat retention.
Firm foam beds tend to hold you aloft and don't create air pockets that trap heat around you. Sleeping on the bed (as opposed to sinking in the layers) also means that there's a lot of air flowing around you, thereby dispersing body heat.
Of all-foam mattresses, latex makes a popular choice for people who sleep hot at night. Latex mattresses are naturally breathable and are comparably better at regulating heat than visco-elastic mattresses. Latex foam gets even better at air circulation when used in a hybrid setup, as it's the case with the Saatva latex hybrid mattress.
Memory Foam Mattress Cooling Features That Help You Sleep Cool
Mattress manufacturers are continually looking for ways to deal with heat retention in memory foam beds. Here are some of the features that seem to work:
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Gel - when infused in foam, gel cooling mattresses works by absorbing and dissipating body heat, leaving you to enjoy a cooler sleeping surface.
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Copper infusion- copper, is known for its excellent thermal conductivity properties. When used in mattresses, it absorbs body heat and whisks it away.
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Phase Changing Material (PCM) - phase changing materials in mattresses change from liquid to solid in response to temperature changes on the sleeping surface.
- Graphite infusion- graphite is also mixed in foam to increase its ability to conduct heat and dissipate it quickly.
