One of the most difficult, yet essential parts of getting a good night’s sleep is regulating your temperature. For me – a self-diagnosed hot sleeper – it can mean I often find myself kicking the comforter off my body mid-sleep or even waking up to wet, sweaty sheets. Luckily, there are a few new ways to transform your sleep without having to invest in a whole new bed.
Christopher Winter, MD at Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine and author of the book The Sleep Solution recommends a cooling mattress topper to hot sleepers—he even went so far as to say that some can even feel like sleeping on a refrigerator.
Simply consider which kind of padding you want: there’s memory foam, bamboo, gel, and more. Then, consider how much padding you want, or if you want any at all. But, you don’t have to be a hot or sweaty sleeper to benefit from a cooling mattress topper.
“Most individuals benefit from a cooler sleeping temperature, so by adding a cooling mattress topper to your bed, you create a more positive environment for sleep,” says Dr. Winter. It doesn’t just have to be about cooling or regulating your body temperature, too.
Going all in right at the top of the line, I chose to test out none other than the Chili Sleep OOLER Sleep System, valued from $1,199 (for a single bed size).
The OOLER Sleep System, aka cooling mattress topper, works by allowing you to set a sleep temperature schedule with smart settings to keep you from waking up too hot or cold in the middle of the night.
To install it, all you have to do is strap it on with the elastic straps, and put your fitted sheet and duvet on as normal (think of it as a refrigerator: if the door is left open, all the cold air will be let out; using a top layer traps the air to regulate your temperature preference). In the pack you get the pad itself, and a Bluetooth-enabled control unit.
Once on the bed, all I had to do was download the mobile app which allowed me to get the temperature from my phone, set sleep schedules for automatic and precise temperature changes throughout the night (cool, I know), and use the Warm Awake feature as an alarm clock replacement (imagine waking up by having a gently warmed bed trigger your body’s natural wake response).
But the best feature of all, is – if you order the “we” sizes – you have the ability to set up a completely different temperature to your partner. Because as lovely as the idea of having a partner to sleep next to every night can be, it often comes with the side effect of having to compromise on sleep preferences.
The first night I put it on my bed, I set the temperature to 18 degrees because of how hot I get at night. For the first time ever, I actually woke up cold! I was astonished. The second night I played around even further, setting the sleep timer so at midnight it increased to 21 degrees, and then again at 5am to 25 degrees, and I couldn’t believe how amazing my sleep was!
So is a cooling mattress topper worth the money? Well, seeing as we spend 33% of our lives asleep, I would definitely say so.
