Pillow Talk: Does Your Bed Really Support You?
Support is hard to find—parents, relationships, and even mattresses let us down. While we can’t help emotionally, we’ve got the best bed recommendations from NYC’s top sleepers.
He’s always hard, too small, and he never makes me feel good when I'm inside of him. To anyone reading this, do NOT purchase the BeautyRest Silver Extra Firm Mattress from Mattress Firm.
Okay, okay, it’s time to get serious. During our two-week hiatus, it dawned on me that I can’t form a healthy, long-term relationship with sleep if I have an unpleasant foundation. It is time to address the elephant in the room: my mattress. Now, as far as relationships go, this is actually the most secure I have felt in, well, quite a while.
We all had the classic college dorm room twin XL (or so they advertised) that felt like someone filled a zippable blue tarp with tiny pebbles boasting just enough crevasses and deviations to be marketed as a “memory foam Tempur-Pedic massage that will make your child feel like they are back in their hometown bedroom” (great for some, shockingly worse for others).
Then, there was a brief stint with no mattress at all. I took a trip with my now-close friend Rachel to Barcelona last year, and I should use this next sentence as a PSA: Always ask about someone’s sleeping habits before agreeing to stay in what appears to be a very nice, all-female hostel close to city nightlife.
Unbeknownst to me, Rachel had (and still has) quite possibly the most obstructive sleep apnea I have EVER heard in my life (mind you, I once voluntarily sandwiched myself between a toilet and a shower with headphones blasting white noise and a pillow over my face in a Holiday Inn hotel room in Ocala, Florida, while my father peacefully rested, dreaming about what I can only assume were five piercing train horns passing by our window).
Back to Barcelona. We didn’t actually get to sleeping until after our first rendezvous with the Barcelona club scene (as some of you may know, this was around 7:00 a.m.). As a religious 2:00 a.m. snoozer, you could say I was quite exhausted—but not as exhausted as Rachel, who hit the hay almost immediately. This is when I derived my own conclusions as to why Rachel had never in her life had a significant other (sorry, girl, love you). I truly cannot describe to you all how painful the sound of this woman’s heavy breathing was to the naked ear, so instead, I will attempt to do so via jpeg image (pictured below).
Now, if you are a visual learner and skipped to this part of the article, you may be wondering why a 22-year-old woman is squinting at you, clutching a pillow in a dimly lit hallway. Well, after some tossing and turning (and tossing and turning, and tossing and turning), I decided I was a capable young woman and would take matters into my own hands. The obvious solution here would be to grab the blankets, pillow, and maybe even mattress from the hostel bed and find a chair, bench, or couch to catch some ZZZs on for the remaining few hours I had until our breakfast reservation.
Let it be known that I tried to do that. In fact, I was willing to wake everyone else up from the beams of my iPhone flashlight in order to figure out how to remove the blanket from my bed—which, I would come to realize, was fastened to the mattress with what I could only assume was super glue. My father raised me to be a problem solver, so I grabbed the only removable item from the bed—the pillow—threw on my leather jacket (which earned the role of blanket for the evening), and curled up in a quaint corner of the hostel hallway.
Over the course of the night, three separate very concerned hostel workers routinely performed wellness checks on me (I assume it would be bad for business to have a dead person in the hallway.) I assured them I was as well as I could be and dozed on and off until the morning (afternoon). While a rational person might have told Rachel about the snoring issue and switched rooms for the remainder of the trip, the northeast corner of the third floor of Yeah! Hostel Barcelona became my temporary residence for the subsequent three nights. That was my last overnight trip with Rachel.
Most recently, I found myself rudely awakened by the thud of my own head hitting the floor where I had fallen between my queen bed (two twin beds that I didn’t know had been pushed together to mimic a queen bed) in my study abroad apartment in Milan (anything to get the Airbnb booking these days, am I right?). There didn’t seem like a good solution to this problem at the time, so I resorted to thinning out my bloodstream with liquid gel Advil capsules and minor bruising on my sacrum and occiput.
Given my rocky history with sleep and my present-day mattress woes, it was time to do what we do best around here—hit the streets of NYC in search of first-hand advice on how to put an end to Mattressgate 2025. Although NYC may not sleep long, they may at least be sleeping well…right?
The first person who took pity on me was Abby, 25, who just moved to Bushwick from the Lower East Side (tragic, I know). When asked about the quality of her mattress, Abby informed me that she “think[s] it’s pretty good” but also admitted she “[doesn't] really know.”
Now, you, as I was, may be wondering…why is that?
While Abby does own a mattress, not only has she been sleeping with it on the floor (I’ll let this slide—sourcing, let alone moving, a bed frame in this city elicits the same emotions as repenting for your sins), but the mattress is still in the plastic wrap.
Plastic wrap. On the floor. If that didn’t resonate the first time, let that sink in.
When I asked why she wouldn’t just, you know, take off the plastic wrap (crazy idea), she shrugged and mumbled what I wrote down as:
“emfhh🤷🏻♀️ (stick figure included in my notes)”
and said it felt like more effort than just having a few plastic-y crinkles here and there throughout the night. However, she did let me know that the last mattress she purchased from this company made her break out in hives, so maybe the plastic wrap is actually saving her from an unfortunate EpiPen stab and a trip to the ER.
As a woman of the people, I had to ask this Type C individual (think adding an extra drop of nonchalance to your already nonchalant Type B friend) what she deemed to be one of her more abnormal sleep-related habits. I derived my own conclusion that she was made for the short-on-time NYC lifestyle as she informed me that for two years in high school, she put her school clothes on the night before, so she could save herself the extra 5 (if I'm being generous) minutes of getting ready in the morning. Screw the articles, it’s time for a sitcom.
Next, I sourced in-house and spoke to my friend Aidan, 23, about his experience sleeping on my couch for a week (a WEEK) because nothing sounds as good as free. While he claimed his deep snoring and mild narcoleptic tendencies were caused by the softness of my couch, I call BS (a WEEK).
I only know this because I once spent an entire summer sharing this one-bedroom apartment with my twin brother, where we took turns sleeping on the couch and the bed every other week. Shockingly, I slept better on the couch than I did in the bed. And I believe Aidan did too—because every time he asked me a question while lying on the couch, he fell asleep before I could finish my answer (maybe he should get that checked). If anyone would like to reserve my couch for a New York visit, please consider a long weekend (or even a weekend, for that matter).
Finally, I spoke to Georgette, 22, who—at first glance—appears to only shop at Free People and may or may not hold an executive position in the Tri Delt sorority at Colgate University (gleaned from her tote bag, phone case, and PopSocket—are those still a thing?).
If you are going to look the part, you might as well act the part—and act she does. When asked about her sleeping habits, she informed me that she sleeps with five pillows in a king-size bed with her miniature Goldendoodle, Bentley (so Eloise at the Plaza). The pillows, she insists, are for a back injury. The injury? Horseback riding. With every fiber of my being, I stifled a diaphragm laugh, chose peace, and expressed my condolences.
When asked if she had ever had an interesting hostel experience (or even stayed in a hostel for that matter) she replied that her father deems them unsafe and she is only allowed to stay in Marriott or Marriott-adjacent hotels. Don’t worry, though—she redeems the stays with points! The lesson here? Always judge a book by its cover.
The conclusion to this article could go one of two ways. Think of this as a choose-your-own-adventure:
Option A: The cold, hard truth—every problem can be solved with just a few (thousands) more dollars. Buy that hotel, buy that new mattress, and rent that bigger apartment. But you don’t need me to tell you that (in fact, I probably shouldn't tell you that because it will send both you and me into an unnecessary deep existential crisis, of which we have too many to begin with).
Option B: When life gives you lemons, sometimes you just have lemons. But at least you will also have a great story for your column in your company’s weekly Substack article with 16 subscribers.