When being hot in bed is a bad thing

When Cliff bought our new mattress a few years ago I loved the comfort of it, but a full night’s sleep became a thing of the past.  Every night I would wake many times, so hot that it felt like my skin against the mattress was burning.  I would wake and move off the hot patch many times during the night.  Cliff did not have the same experience and took my complaints with a pinch of salt.  The timing coincided with menopause.  I didn’t really have hot flushes, I was permanently warm, my thermostat was on a higher setting.  I couldn’t sleep with a stitch of clothing and often pushed the duvet off and lay under a sheet, even in winter.  Then I blamed the mattress, maybe it was too dense, maybe it traps heat?  It has 2 different sides, one memory foam and the other something else.

With the new mattress Cliff bought a mattress protector (a good mattress costs a small fortune and you want to protect it from stains.  In the end I discovered that the mattress protector was the problem.  I took the protector off the bed and instead put 2 other sheets under the fitted sheet on top.  After years of broken sleep at long last I get a full night’s sleep.  If it’s a toss up between a slightly discoloured mattress and sleep, the answer is a no brainer.

Over the same period I can see that I have aged a lot and developed bags under my eyes.  I don’t know if the bags will ever diminish but I really wish that it didn’t take so long to solve the problem.  Few things are as important as getting a good night’s sleep, and there should be no compromise in achieving proper rest.