Creature Comforts That Lull You to Sleep

IF a fairy tale princess were to lie down on a stack of $5,000 pillowtop mattresses, would she still feel the pea? Maybe not. But were she a modern princess, she would certainly know if the sheets had only a 200 thread count, the duvet wasn’t baffle stitched or the pillow was wrong for her particular sleep style.

Matt Collins

In the Region

Thanks to plenty of admonitions from health gurus, it’s no news to anyone that we live in a sleep-deprived culture. Anxious and overscheduled, we crave the solace of temporary oblivion that is the promise of sleep. But is the current cult of the bedroom excessive? Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, was content with a simple cave. There he drowsed on an ebony bed, apparently without the advantage of ionizing purifiers to keep the air from becoming stagnant.

We have air purifiers aplenty, as well as humidifiers and aromatherapy diffusers to fill our rooms with the calming scents of balsam and lavender and verbena. We have, it seems, internalized Hypnos, making sleep a kind of self-worship, and the bedroom, where we propitiate ourselves and our senses, its temple.

Which makes the bed an altar of sorts. The Greeks spared no expense creating those for their gods, so are you going to settle for a regular old mattress with 900 or so springs, or insist on a Dux bed, which has up to 3,700? Or maybe you should consider a Tempur-Pedic mattress, said to conform to your weight and body temperature

THE FACTS

An old wives’ tale has it that a little kick to the palate before bed can lead to fitful sleep, if not nightmares.

It’s the sort of wisdom that often turns out to be based on no evidence at all — or, worse, flat wrong. But in this case, it’s good advice.

Research has shown over the years that a spicy meal at night can indeed lead to poor sleep. The most direct study to show this was published in The International Journal of Psychophysiology by a team of Australian researchers. The scientists recruited a group of young, healthy men and had them consume meals that contained Tabasco sauce and mustard shortly before they turned in on some evenings and nonspiced control meals on other evenings.

On the nights that included spicy meals, there were marked changes in the subjects’ sleep patterns. They spent less time in both the light phase of sleep known as Stage 2 and the deep, slow-wave Stages 3 and 4. All of which meant that they experienced less sleep over all and took longer to drift off.

Several things may account for the effect. An obvious possibility is indigestion. But the scientists also noted that after eating the spicy meals the subjects had elevated body temperatures during their first sleep cycles, which has been linked in other studies to poorer sleep quality

Rafael Fuchs for The New York Times

For years, doctors have been discouraged by Americans’ disregard for and mismanagement of their sleep. But bragging about how little you sleep, a hallmark of the ’80s power broker, is starting in certain circles to come off as masochistic buffoonery. The sleep doctors we once ignored appear on morning shows to offer tips. Health professionals and marketers are hopeful that a new seriousness about sleep will continue moving out of a luxury-minded vanguard and into the mainstream. Sleep may finally be claiming its place beside diet and exercise as both a critical health issue and a niche for profitable consumer products. -- From "The Sleep-Industrial Complex," by Jon Mooallem, Nov. 18, 2007

Rafael Fuchs for The New York Times

For years, doctors have been discouraged by Americans’ disregard for and mismanagement of their sleep. But bragging about how little you sleep, a hallmark of the ’80s power broker, is starting in certain circles to come off as masochistic buffoonery. The sleep doctors we once ignored appear on morning shows to offer tips. Health professionals and marketers are hopeful that a new seriousness about sleep will continue moving out of a luxury-minded vanguard and into the mainstream. Sleep may finally be claiming its place beside diet and exercise as both a critical health issue and a niche for profitable consumer products. -- From "The Sleep-Industrial Complex," by Jon Mooallem, Nov. 18, 2007