You spend 1/3 of your life on your bed. Buy a good mattress.

Over the last several months (kind of hard to remember specifically, but within the last 6 months), I've had progressively worse night's sleep. Our mattress was old, but I didn't believe that I could sleep on it fine for all those years, and then suddenly a switch flips, and I can't sleep on it.

The weird thing was that I had no problem getting 8 hours with REM sleep, but when I woke, I was no longer tired, but I was also not rested. I was fatigued, but couldn't go back to sleep. I snore, and after seeing what sleep apnea looks like, I decided to do a sleep study.

Kaiser is actually pretty good about it, all you have to do is get an appointment (took a month, they're in high demand), pick up the equipment, get instruction on how to use it, use it while you sleep at your home in your own bed (none of that sleep-at-the-hospital nonsense), then return it the next day.

Coincidentally, the day I did the study was the last day we had the old mattress. That day was a bad day. I felt like I hadn't slept for three days, and I probably could have slept standing up, so I didn't think it was a good indication of the restfulness of my sleep with the old mattress out of the equation. The nights since then have been much better, and the only exceptions could be explained with appointments and events modifying my sleep schedule. However, I was cautiously optimistic that the old mattress was the cause of all my problems.

Now I don't have to worry. I got the call this morning that the data from my sleep study had been reviewed, and that I was not having breathing problems while I slept.

So those months of suffering were just because I didn't want to buy a new mattress, because I didn't think a mattresses could suddenly (for lack of a better word) break.

Sleep on good mattresses folks. You spend one third of your life on 'em.