Andrew Huberman and Dr. Peter Martone discuss why humans sleep best on their backs and why firmness matters. Huberman's sleep scores improved on hard surfaces like buckwheat beds after an adjustment period. They recommend a solid base with cushioning on top to distribute weight evenly without sagging into poor spinal alignment.
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When you get the position correct, the surface is less important, and I'll tell you why. So when, when, when, when we look at how our body was designed, right? We were designed to sleep in a position that distributes our weight over the greatest surface area. That is why some of these studies that do these animal studies and they try to extrapolate them to humans. It doesn't make sense. Your dog is designed to sleep on their side because they distribute their surface area over their weight over the greatest surface area. And then we are designed to sleep on our back to distribute our weight over the greatest surface area. And when you're doing that and your body gets used to that, that's that what you're sleeping on really doesn't make as much of a difference. And if you're wearing an OURA ring, you would want to. So you want to look at your restlessness, right? How restless are you sleeping? That tells you, you know that that'll give you a good amount of data on if you're sleeping in the right position and if the surface is right for you. What I recommend is a nice firm support underneath with a big thick mattress topper to distribute your surface area, your weight over even a greater surface area, like a down or something like that, if you're not allergic.
So you like it kind of mushy?
I do.
Got it. So I tested the mushy stuff and being that I'm pretty much just a wall of living muscle. Okay, not really a machine.
There you go.
No, but I probably weigh more than the average person. Just, I'm six four and I have relatively dense structures in here, at least that's what the data says. So I'm going to go with that. I found generally more pain and more restlessness on mattresses. So I looked at a few PubMed studies about ancestral sleeping surfaces and there's pretty clear evidence you want to raise the head of the bed. And I've written about that in my anti aging books and that has to do with some circulatory stuff. But I tested everything from, you know, super soft, it moves with you all the way up to basically sleeping on a board. And for me, the highest end would be like a Japanese buckwheat whole bed, which is very, very firm or closed cell hard neoprene. So I literally sleep on the like 1 inch of the hardest foam you could get. And people like, that's not even a bed. Like, I didn't want to sit on that thing. I'm like yeah, but my sleep score is always higher when I'm on that. And I'm never in pain, but it took six weeks of suffering after I started doing that before my body adjusted. And the thought there is that when you breathe, if your body moves up and down, you're pumping your lymph. But if you're on a fluffy mattress, when you breathe, it kind of absorbs some of the movement that's doing something in the cells. I don't know if that's real or not, but for me, at least put me on a rock versus a sponge and I'll be happier. And I don't know if. Do you have any data on how typical that is, or am I just a weird guy?
No, both. I'm not going to lie to you. That's fantastic. But you never want to be normal. Look at what normal is.
Well, fair point.
Yeah. So there, there is. I mean, when you're looking at. All you need to do, like I said, is nice, firm support, which is firm. And I like to give myself some cushion to distribute my. My surface, my weight. But really, when it comes down to it, this, the, the. The best foot for your actual curves would be a hard surface.
Okay, so people, as a chiropractor, you'd support a hard surface. Okay.
Yeah. And it's very difficult for people to do that because beds are becoming more and more comfortable for bad positions. So, you know, you'll hear them. Oh, your shoulder will fall into the bed and you're contorted. And to get a contorted spine aligned at night, like you said, it's miserable, it's hard.
Okay, got it. So firm is probably better, unless you can't sleep on firm. But I would just say even if you say you can't sleep on firm, do it for a few weeks and maybe you'll find magic happens.
