Study Uncovers the Truth About Sleeping Positions
2/19/2020 | Casper Editorial Team
There are almost countless sleeping positions — stomach, back, log, starfish, free fall and more.
But the truth is, no one really has one. We might like to think of ourselves as side sleepers or back sleepers, but a more accurate descriptor, for all of us, is all-over-the-place sleepers.
We found this out after doing a camera study on sleeping positions during development for the original Casper pillow. The positions most people fall asleep in are different than the ones they end up in, and the positions they do end up in are the goofy types that they never recall.
Most People Don’t Know Their Actual Sleeping Position
Having “a sleeping position” mostly refers to how we prefer to fall asleep. When we asked participants during the study about how they slept, they usually identified a clear type, like side or stomach.
But we saw that didn’t hold up. People would fall asleep on their stomach and then roll over onto their side, grab a pillow and put it between their knees.
For example, 70% of participants slept on their side at some point during the night, no matter what position or positions they had identified.
The reality is that sleeping is more activity than rest.
Pillows and Sleeping Positions
The way you sleep has everything to do with what pillow you feel most comfortable using. The catch is that we typically sleep in many positions each night. This means the “best” pillow on the market should work well for all sleeping positions.
Finding the Perfect Pillow
To find the perfect pillow for all positions, we dove into the material sciences. We visited a fiber guru (yes, there is such a thing), and went to almost a dozen other experts around the U.S.
We started looking for a fiber with the softness of down and rebound of foam. We used a leaf blower to fill trial pillows with different fibers and handed the prototypes out for testing.
Through all of that, there was one pillow we made — out of one unique microfiber — that people universally loved. This became the original Casper pillow — perfectly squeezable and adaptable for every sleep position imaginable.