Look at me, pretending to slumber softly after a long day of work. If you can ignore the lights, it’s actually a pleasant scene… at least for me.
You see, I really like the idea of sleeping soundly. I would love to fall asleep moments after my head hits the pillow. Unfortunately for me, pretending to sleep is all too common. I toss and turn, over and over again until my mind finally stops racing. I often just can’t seem to get comfortable.
The Joy of Sleeping… or at least, trying to sleep
Over the years I’ve tried everything I could possibly think of to help myself fall asleep faster. I exercise regularly, I eat well… I even wrote an article with some tricks I use to make it happen. And while sleep onset has improved for me over the years, it hasn’t been dramatic.
So when I read about buckwheat pillows a few years ago in Tim Ferriss’ The Four Hour Body, where he describes them as being incredible for sound sleep and awesome sex, I immediately went ahead and did… nothing. I have trouble sleeping, so I should probably ignore this one tip that could dramatically improve my sleep, right?
Yeah…
The Buckwheat Advantage
A few weeks ago one of you fine readers inspired me to give buckwheat pillows a try, and I decided to start researching and order one. I ended up settling on Harvest Pillows, as they seemed like a high quality offering for a reasonable price.
From this point forward, consider this one part Harvest Pillows review, one part “here is why I love buckwheat pillows.” Spoiler: I’ve thrown out my old pillow after using this buckwheat pillow for a week, and I’m sleeping better than ever.
This is how I usually sleep, on my side. More accurately, I sleep on both sides because I’m usually flipping back and forth trying to get comfortable. The trouble is that the pillows never properly support my neck, and that’s the beauty of buckwheat pillows: they mold to your contours. I found that my neck and head were much better supported than a typical bedroom pillow.
As the Harvest Pillows advertising brochure describes, “The hulls act like sand on the beach…” It’s true too, I don’t think my head, neck, and spine have ever felt so relaxed, which is kind of funny given that I was sleeping on something that many imagine is as tough as rock.
I rarely sleep on my back, as I found it almost impossible with my old pillow, but… I’ve actually managed to pull it off with my buckwheat pillow. Trust me when I say that’s basically a miracle for me. Between the rhino-esque sleep mask and the pillow, I usually feel too warm to sleep like this (or any way, really), which is another reason I’ve come to love buckwheat pillows: they don’t heat up.
I wouldn’t say they’re cool exactly, but they don’t seem to get warm either. Our temperature naturally drops during the evenings to help us sleep, and anything that raises our temperate makes sleep more difficult.
The pillow I’ve been using is the Queen-sized version from Harvest Pillows, pictured throughout the article. See the little baggie? Let’s take a closer look.
These are the buckwheat hulls. Not what you expected, right? I too was surprised to discover that they aren’t actually spherical little rock hard objects. Part of the reason I was so reluctant to try a buckwheat pillow originally was that I thought it would be like sleeping on a piece of concrete. That couldn’t be further from the truth. In a similar vein, the pillows aren’t particularly loud either, providing you get a buckwheat pillow with high quality hulls.
How do I know this?
The Big Lie
I would like to come clean with you guys. You see, I actually did try sleeping with a buckwheat pillow (actually two) a little over three years ago. In short, the experience was horrible. The pillows were loud, uncomfortable, and I all but blocked the experience from memory. That’s how I know that it’s so important to get a high quality buckwheat pillow.
Now that I’ve found a good one, I’m hooked. Whether this is the first time you’ve seen a buckwheat pillow, or you’ve been thinking about trying one for a while now: do it. Just make sure you get a good one. They’re flat out a superior kind of pillow, and I would hate for you to write them off because you had one bad experience.
