Why You May Be Waking Up With Pains

Yes, age is partially a mindset.  For some, after the age of forty, maybe for others, after the age of fifty, a new mentality introduces itself into their psyche.  We come to terms with the fact that we are no longer twenty.  Hence, we both expect and accept certain shortcomings our bodies have.  Starting from the time we were kids, we would see some elderly people move about.  they would move slow, some with canes or walkers, and they appeared to be in varying degrees of pain.  It gets burned into our minds that the aging process is necessarily painful.  However, this is not true for all elderly.  We forgot the ones that are spry, youthful in stride, muscle tone, and spirit when we picture ourselves in old age.

After we hit middle age, getting a pain whose point of origin can't be explained, we tend to chalk it up to "getting older."  This is especially true when we wake up to pain.  We didn't fall out of bed, we didn't have any sort of blunt trauma after we laid down and went to sleep, yet we're in pain.  A normal part of the aging process?  Not so fast.  Have you checked the condition of your mattress lately?  You usually don't give this subject a lot of thought, because you don't buy one very often.  Especially if you are experiencing pain in the lower back, or shoulder, you may want to look into getting a new mattress.

A Kingsdown mattress without its bed clothes.

When is the Last Time You Bought a Mattress?

When asked, most people believe that a mattress is a once per decade purchase.  While this may be a very general rule of thumb, other factors can end up shortening the life of your mattress, especially in middle age.

1.  You've gained a significant amount of weight.  When you bought your current mattress, you consulted with your salesperson, who assisted you in picking one out.  One of the factors he based this on was your current bodysize.  Mattresses vary in firmness and strength, and what is good for a person who weighs 175 will not hold as long for someone forty or fifty pounds heavier.

2.  You have a bad boxspring.  There are brands of boxsprings that have little to no flexibility.  People assume the boxspring will extend the life of their mattress, and some may tend to slack on the maintenance of the mattress, such as either flipping it or rotating it 180 degrees every few months for the non-flip variety.  Many boxsprings are misnomers, having no springs at all.  If it has no springs, it is not a true boxspring, but merely a foundation, and will do nothing to extend the functional life of your mattress.

3.  You sleep in the same spot every night, without ever flipping or turning the mattress.  Doing this will result in premature sagging, which will wreak havoc on your lower back.  If you are a single person with a larger bed, and you don't want to take the trouble to flip or rotate it, alternate sleeping on the sides and the middle.  This will enable slower and more even wear and tear.  Improper use of the bed will result in your mattress wearing out faster.

4.  The mattress was poor quality.  The unfortunate thing is that this often not apparent right away.  Mattresses that should last ten years start sagging after three or four, despite you not gaining weight or misusing it.  It could be the brand, it could have just been a bad individual mattress where something went wrong during the process of its construction.

In Conclusion

One problem with mattresses is because they are used night after night for years, their wear is not readily apparent to the user.  Often, we don't notice the decrease in our mattress' functionality until it has almost nothing left.  However, the pain in our bodies when we wake up should not be immediately chalked up to aging, or sleeping wrong, especially if the pain is habitual.  Some mattresses do not last as long as they are advertised.  If you continually wake up in pain, especially in the lower back, and it has been longer than seven years since the purchase of your mattress, that is something you may want to consider.