Why You Should Sleep on a Waterbed – 8 Benefits
What is a Waterbed
As the name suggests, a waterbed is a mattress or bed filled with water. Waterbeds come in two types, the soft-sided waterbed mattress, and hard-sided waterbed mattress. If you are looking for a comparatively durable mattress that offers excellent value, the hard-sided waterbed is a good option. The soft-sided waterbed, on the other hand, resembles innerspring or foam mattresses, and is the right choice for those who want to use their existing bedroom furniture to support it.
How do Waterbeds Work
Usually made from soft PVC (polyvinyl chloride) or similar material, modern waterbeds have a mixture of water and air chambers, which are interconnected. You need to heat these water mattresses using electric waterbed heaters. Then control the temperature with a thermostat that can be set to your personal preference (average skin temperature being 30-33 °C).
Contents
Benefits of Waterbeds
1. Extended Periods of Restful Deep Sleep
Among the many benefits, the mattresses allow you to regulate the bed’s temperature and adjust the fill-pressure of the water, thereby controlling the hardness or softness of the waterbed. It provides a relaxing surface, offering complete tranquility, and producing more restful sleep with fewer reawakenings and less movement. Therefore, it helps people with sleeping disorders to fall asleep more easily.
2. Support for the Total Body
While conventional mattresses produce pressure points on your shoulders, knees, hips, and buttocks, waterbeds take the exact shape of your body and absorb its weight, thereby providing even support. It keeps your spine in its natural position, improves blood circulation, and prevents pain in your joints, neck, and lower back.
3. Soothing and Therapeutic Effect
A heated waterbed mattress helps you in maintaining your body’s average temperature, alongside soothing sore muscles, relieving tension, and speeding up relaxation. Because of its therapeutic effect, the mattress provides relief to those suffering from back pain, arthritis, or any other conditions associated with bones and joints.
4. Sore Relief
Since these mattresses have pressure-minimizing and weight-distributing properties, patients who have been in a state of coma or paralyzed use waterbeds to prevent the occurrence of bedsores.
5. Good for Allergy Sufferers
People suffering from hay fever, eczema, asthma, or allergy can benefit from waterbeds because it is easy to clean the dust off the surface of these mattresses. Moreover, the dust mites, which trigger eczema, asthma, and allergies, cannot penetrate and live inside the vinyl waterbed surface.
6. Motion Isolation
Most waterbed mattresses are designed with baffles for providing maximum support to your body but with minimum bed movement. Unlike innerspring or foam mattresses, the baffled construction helps avoid the transfer of motion so that the movement of one person does not disturb the sleep of the other. It is also possible to buy personalized baffled mattresses for separate halves of the bed.
7. Good for Pregnant Women
Sleeping on waterbeds helps reduce stress and anxiety in women who are expecting, while allowing them to sleep comfortably, even on the stomachs. It is perhaps one of the cleanest and most hygienic surfaces they can sleep on.
8. Easy to Clean
These mattresses, being designed with an impervious surface, can be cleaned with any solution. Cleaning involves wiping the surface using a damp cloth dipped in an antiseptic solution or bleach. The vinyl surface can be cleaned entirely of mites, dust, dead skin particles, molds, mildew, and even bacteria.
As mentioned above, waterbed mattresses have a wealth of health benefits and are currently being used in hospitals and medical facilities throughout Europe, Australia, Asia, and the United States. However, waterbed cot mattresses, especially the old-style hard-sided ones, are not recommended for babies and young children because they can get trapped between the frame and mattress.
