Why Washing Your Mattress Is Essential, Not Optional
Getting a good night’s sleep is vital for our mental and physical well-being. If we regularly fail to obtain the recommended amount of sleep per night, we not only start each day negatively, but continued exposure can cause various debilitating health issues.
Suppose you are regularly rousing, feeling unsatisfied, or stiff. In that case, you might be overdue for a mattress upgrade, and since we spend at least twenty-six years of our lives in bed, we want to ensure that we preserve the lifespan of our new mattress so that it will be there to support us through as many nights as possible.
That means learning how to care for your mattress, maintain it, and wash it. Failure to do so can lead to further problems such as dirt, dust mites, bed bug bites, and dead skin while simultaneously decreasing the longevity of your new mattress.
Ensuring that you wash your mattress regularly is the ideal solution to preventing sleeping problems, improving the air quality inside your home, and prolonging the lifespan of your bed. Fortunately, cleaning your mattress doesn’t have to be complex, so we’ve created this article outlining why washing your mattress is essential, not optional – read on to find out more.
Minimises The Risk Of Allergies
We all recognise the importance of keeping our homes clean and its benefits, such as reducing stress levels, removing allergens or pollutants, and improving our mood overall. These same benefits can also be applied to washing our mattresses regularly. At a glance, you might think that your mattress is spotless; however, under the surface at a microscopic level, it may be covered in all sorts of dust, dirt, and grime.
Since as we snooze, we slowly shed small amounts of dead skin and sweat, which can attract bacteria, fungi, and dust mites over time. This environment creates the perfect breeding ground for irritating organisms, which can trigger allergies or reactions within humans, making getting a good night’s sleep challenging. One of the most common reactions is itching, which can be triggered by anything from pet hair to pollen.
But should your itching accelerate at night, you might find that dust mite allergens are at fault. As you sleep, your bedding will become moist and warm, which is the ideal place for dust mites to flourish – putting you at increased risk while you sleep. However, if you’re developing additional symptoms such as itchy bites or noticing blood spots on the sheets, you might have a light bed bugs infestation.
You should use internet guides to determine whether the symptoms your experiencing could be synonymous with bed bugs. Doing so will help you identify whether the raised, red bumps that have appeared are bed bug bites, inform you how/why the issue occurred, how to treat them, and provide advice about getting rid of them.
Increases The Air Quality In Your Bedroom
Keeping your sheets clean is a well-known way of keeping your bedroom looking and feeling fresh; however, unbeknownst to some, washing your mattress regularly also increases the air quality in your bedroom. One of the leading causes of sleep disturbances at night is odour since sleep has a close relationship with our sense of smell.
Although smells rarely rouse a person unless it is particularly pungent, the relationship between our senses and sleep is highly versatile. For instance, it is suggested that good smelling odours promote sleep-boosting features, make our mood more positive when rousing and even influence our dreams as we sleep.
Therefore, alternate sleep-inducing practices such as aromatherapy have become increasingly popular, as fragrances such as lavender, jasmine, rose, bergamot, sandalwood, and chamomile have been praised for facilitating better sleeping habits. On the other hand, it’s thought that foul odours can decrease our sleep levels and make for a less than pleasant sleeping environment.
Since while we sleep, we move around a lot, meaning that all the existing sweat, dead skin, oil, and dust on our mattress is spread around and can start to affect the air quality in your bedroom. Over time, if it’s left to build up, it can leave your room smelling stale and often, it can be hard to discover that the cause is your mattress.
Washing your mattress regularly prevents this by removing the biological contaminants that a dirty mattress harbours and keeping any bad smells at bay that may affect your sleep quality, improving your home’s air quality. On the other hand, if you’d like to increase the air quality in your bedroom more, you could consider making your bed as anti-allergen as possible.
One of the best ways to do this is by purchasing an anti-allergen mattress protector. It will use the natural qualities found within its material to minimise the number of microbes present in your bed. You can even find mattresses with similar anti-allergen attributes, which will help keep your bed hygienic and preserve its integrity.
Increases Your Bed’s Longevity
We all know that a mattress is a considerable investment. On average, a person can expect to spend one hundred pounds to an upwards of three thousand pounds depending on the manufacturer, size, and composition. If we’re going to be spending this amount of money on a piece of furniture, we want to ensure that this piece of furniture will last us a considerable amount of time, so we don’t end up replacing it prematurely.
Therefore, we must learn how to correctly care for, maintain and clean our new mattress so that it lasts us for many more nights to come. For optimum results, it is recommended to clean your mattress once every six months using the following steps:
- Clear the bed of all bedding, pillowcases, and protective covers, then put those in the washing machine while you tackle the mattress.
- Use your vacuum cleaner’s upholstery attachment to get every bit of dust and dirt – be sure to pay extra attention to the crevices and seams!
- Spot-clean using a stain remover until the stain lifts.
- Sprinkle baking powder over the mattress and leave it for as long as possible; you’ll get even better results if you can leave it overnight.
- Once you’ve left the baking powder on for a couple of hours, vacuum the entire mattress again and flip it over to repeat the steps once more.
The only exception to this rule is that if you spill something on it, you should clean it as soon as possible before the stain sets in.
You should wash your mattress to preserve its longevity, but you should also pay equal attention to your bedding because if ignored, it can affect the quality of your bed over time. Generally, you should aim to change and clean your bedding once per week since it collects sweat, dust, oil, grime, and dead skin, just like your mattress.
Providing that you don’t have a mattress protector or pad, the everyday grime, sweat, and oils from your bedding can transfer into the mattress, causing damage to the fibers and more severe issues such as ripping or tearing. Once a bed begins to pull, its lifespan is greatly diminished, and you’ll more than likely have to start shopping for a replacement as opposed to a professional mattress cleaner.
This is because torn casings make the pad and inner springs more susceptible to damage, creating additional wear and tear on the mattress, causing it to wear out faster. Whereas routine washing can prevent this by reducing the amount of wear and tear on the lining, preventing ripping, and protecting the cover.
