I just read a lot about mattresses and now I’m going to tell you about it.

I recently spent a long time learning about mattresses in order to buy myself one, and I learned a lot! If you have zero interest in this and just want to know what mattress I got, I purchased an IKEA Haugesund on sale for $250, for specific reasons that probably don’t apply to you (I may be moving in the next year or two and don’t know if I’ll be taking my mattress with me, so I really want the cheapest mattress that I think will be reasonably good without regard to durability). To prepare for my mattress-buying quest, I read every page in the John Ryan by Design Understanding Beds series. This took… a while, and I want to save both of us the trouble of doing that (or, in my case, doing it again). So this is sort of a book review, I guess.

nb: the JRBD website does have a number of helpful tables scattered around it showing, for example, what different upholstery materials can be expected to feel like, how many pocket springs you should expect at different price points, and appropriate spring gauges for different weights. None of these tables have been reproduced here, so you’ll have to look for them on the original site.

Can’t I Just Get One That Feels Good Though

No. That would be ideal, but getting mattresses purely by feel has the drawback that you’re usually buying the mattress based on how it feels to lie down on it for 2-5 minutes, but the actual quality of the mattress is how it performs over years of sleeping on it 8 hours a night. There are also multiple factors that affect the feel of the mattress, and only some of them should be chosen by feel. So you have to learn about mattresses.

What You Want a Mattress to Do

This section is more based on my understanding than anything I read, take it with a grain of salt. But I think there are a few things that a good mattress does:

Is it Worth It?

Should you even try to get a really good mattress? It seems like there would be two obvious reasons which, if they were supported by research, should be convincing: sleep quality and long-term joint health (especially back health). Unfortunately, all the studies I’ve looked at seem to be pretty low-quality and I don’t really trust them - especially because many of them start from the assumption that one level of firmness will work best for everyone, which is so obviously unsupported by even a cursory look at how people actually sleep in real life that I find it a little hard to believe it was even published.

Sleep quality seems to be intuitively supported by a good mattress, to the point that it doesn’t even really make sense to accept that some mattresses are better than others if you don’t believe they have an impact on how you sleep on them (except maybe you’d want the most durable mattress, which would mean you should sleep on the floor, since nothing lasts longer than anything).

People who already have back pain often say that finding a good mattress makes a huge difference in their ability to function day-to-day, but what if you don’t have back pain and want to avoid it? Should you spend time and money optimizing your bed? I can’t say definitively because the studies are once again all very shitty. But it again makes intuitive sense to me that at it would at least be possible to make a really bad mattress for back health. That doesn’t guarantee that it’s possible to meaningfully improve over the average (or at least, past some given point which might be well short of the most expensive options), but considering my expectations of a high-quality mattress (let’s say it costs $3k and lasts 25 years), the amortized cost seems like a pretty modest investment in your health (about 30 cents a day, making it much cheaper than most supplements and almost at parity with air filters when you consider that they need to be replaced once or twice a year).

Mattress Types

There are three main types of mattress that most people will be looking at and are any good at all: foam, traditional/pocket spring, and hybrid mattresses. Of these, I think pocket sprung mattresses are the best for most people (disclaimer: this is also what John Ryan by Design wants me to think - I’ve been thorougly convinced).

Foam mattresses are… well, made out of foam. Usually they give the sensation of sinking into them, and it’s often hard to shift positions in a foam mattress even after just a minute of laying there because you’ve created a little ditch that you naturally settle into. In mattress industry lingo, this is low responsiveness, and for me it means that I find it harder to move around at night to relieve stress on particular parts of my body. Foam mattresses are usually uncomfortable for me after a few hours. Also, foam mattresses usually retain much more heat than pocket sprung mattresses. These are rules of thumb - there are some really rigid foams, so I’d imagine that maybe some foam beds are quite supportive and maybe even responsive. But my (limited) experience is that this tends to be the exception rather than the rule, even with very high-end foam mattresses. Most of the mattresses-in-a-box are foam.

Almost all mattresses have multiple layers, and pocket sprung mattresses have a layer of steel springs which are individually wrapped in fabric, which apparently helps them compress independently of one another to conform well to your body. I don’t know why this would work well, but I can confirm that they are much more comfortable than “open cage” mattresses where the springs aren’t isolated this way. On top of the springs are several layers of upholstery filling material, also called “comfort layers.” Sometimes one or more of these comfort layers will be made of foam, but they’re more typically fibers of some kind - either synthetic (like polyester) or natural (like wool). Pocket sprung mattresses tend to be better-ventilated, more responsive, and more supportive than foam mattresses.

Hybrid mattresses are basically a foam mattress on top of some pocket springs. This is supposed to solve a lot of the issues with foam but maybe still be cheaper to manufacture or something? This would sort of make sense, in that you don’t need to deal with fibrous upholstery, which is probably harder to work with than laminated sheets of foam.

The tl;dr here is that a good mattress will probably be pocket sprung, but pocket sprung mattresses don’t have to be expensive. My $250 IKEA mattress is also pocket sprung. The rest of this post is pretty specific to pocket sprung mattresses.

You should probably be careful about buying types of mattress that aren’t one of these three.

First Steps

The first thing you need to do when you’re buying a pocket-sprung mattress is to figure out the right spring tension. This is because the spring tension should not be determined by feel! Instead, you should use your weight. If you weigh under about 100 lbs, you might want a ‘soft’ spring tension. The tension corresponds to the diameter of the spring wire, so a soft tension corresponds to a 1.2mm wire. Between 100 and 225 lbs, you want a ‘medium’ tension (1.4mm), and between 225 and 280 lbs you’re looking for ‘firm’ (1.6mm). Above 280 lbs, you can use ’extra firm’ or ‘orthopedic’ tensions (1.9mm).

nb: I think there’s also a height component that might affect unusually tall or short people. Apparently the JRBD people are willing to talk with you about it for free - probably worth it for such a big purchase

So if you shouldn’t be using feel to determine spring tension, how do you get a mattress that feels good? This should be done entirely with the upholstery! Denser upholstery with less loft will feel firmer.

Mattress Attributes

Consumer Reports

Consumer Reports is not good at reviewing mattresses. Also, Tempur-pedic is bad and overpriced. There, I said it.

Buying a Mattress

If you want a wish list for a pretty nice mattress that won’t be horrendously expensive, I’d look at the JRBD Origins Pocket 1500 as a guideline (note: JRBD doesn’t actually ship to the US, unfortunately). Starting from the top of the mattress and going down, it has:

This costs £760, or $900, for a double bed (JRBD doesn’t sell queen beds). That’s a lot of money, but really cheap for a quality mattress - and based purely on the description and reviews, this is a really good mattress.

Relatively speaking, I got a very mediocre mattress, but I got a bigger bed for $250. For what it’s worth, I do think IKEA delivers really good value for money on inexpensive mattresses, but when you get to the $600 and up level - which is really where you start to see even reasonably good mattresses - I think it’s probably better to go somewhere else.

That said, my mattress has 700 pocket springs under two layers of polyurethane foam and two layers of polyester and viscose wadding. This isn’t terrible - I lose about half of the pocket springs and a lot of the upholstery quality (I didn’t even know PU foam was a thing). Also, the mattress is one-sided and so less durable. But I save about $650, and I don’t have to feel bad about getting rid of this mattress when the time comes. Also I think I can get a mattress topper made of natural fibers that I can perhaps reuse on my next mattress for $200, which makes up for some of the gap while still saving me $450 and allowing me to remain flexible.

So do the cost/benefit analysis for yourself and find something you like! Don’t forget to actually lay on mattresses!