HAVE PILLOW, WILL TRAVEL

~ Posted by Rebecca Willis, February 22nd 2012

Your head weighs 10 pounds—give or take—so it needs the right pillow to support it at night, particularly as the years march on. But what constitutes the right pillow is a complex matter. It depends mostly on what position you sleep in: if you are a sidesleeper, you need a higher, firmer pillow than if you are a backsleeper—the objective is to keep your spine, neck, and head in alignment. For disorganised types who move around as they sleep, there are orthopaedic pillows, dented in the middle and higher at the sides. I have several, all now in a cupboard.

Steven, who works in the bed department of Selfridges, told me that choosing a mattress is easy compared with finding the right pillow. This is supported (so to speak) by the vast quantity of advice that exists on the web, not just from bed- and pillow-selling companies but from medical and health sources. There's every pillow imaginable, from the ones made of memory foam that mould to your head to the ones that are meant to stop snoring—the latter with a "cervical roll that keeps airways open".

Hotels have caught on to this. The one in Switzerland where I was staying last week had a printed menu of seven different kinds of pillow to choose from, should the two feather ones supplied not be suitable. I test-slept a few of them, though I skipped the "Hard Pillow with horse hair" (unappealing), the "small bolster" (too Continental) and the "anti-allergy pillow filled with hollow fibres" (too faddy). I decided I wasn't sweaty enough to need the "Spelt Pillow to regulate moisture". The "neck support pillow" was too high for me, while the "pillow with Merino wool" did indeed provide "comfortable temperature and cosy feeling", but not enough support. I had high hopes of the "Pine pillow, filled with 100% pine wood, soporific", but it turned out to be A4 sized, slightly scented—a mere accessory. If it had been a chunk of pine tree in a cotton cover, though, I'd certainly have given it a try.

I knew a woman once who travelled with her own pillow. Until recently, I thought she was at best eccentric or at worst affected. I'm starting to see her with new eyes.

Rebecca Willis is associate editor at Intelligent Life and a former travel editor at Vogue