The Supreme Cube pillow is designed in a way to align your head, neck, and spine so that when lying on your side, your neck doesn’t bend at such an awkward, uncomfortable angle.
“If you imagine yourself lying down on your back on a mattress, you really don’t need that much support,” says Rebecca Robbins, PhD, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and a scientist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. But if you’re a side sleeper, “imagine yourself on a mattress and think about the space between your shoulder and your head. That is several inches for anyone,” she says. “If you don’t have enough support, it’s going to jeopardize your shoulder and potentially create a risk for shoulder injuries."
For this reason, steadfast side sleepers, depending on their height, the width of their shoulders, and the softness of their mattress, may benefit from a taller, loftier pillow that prevents their neck from bending at odd angles in the night (yikes). “Side sleepers are going to want thicker pillows in general because they want to fill in that gap between the mattress and their head,” says Rafael Pelayo, MD, a clinical professor in the Sleep Medicine Division at Stanford University in California and the author of “How to Sleep: The New Science-Based Solutions for Sleeping Through the Night.” Cuboid-shaped pillows “fill in that space. That’s the idea behind that."
Most side sleepers don’t stay completely still throughout the night, but rather move a bit, from side to side or even (as in my case) into completely different positions. If you didn’t move at least some, you’d get bed sores, Pelayo says. Robbins says that patients are convinced they keep still through the night, but “when we pull them into the laboratory and show them how many times they move, their jaws drop to the ground, like, ‘I had no idea. This is crazy!’” This doesn’t necessarily mean that they shift positions entirely—though they might—but rather that side sleepers may flip from left to right, or a back sleeper may throw their arms above their heads, bend a leg, and so on. I tend to fall asleep on my side or in a weird, stomach-side hybrid position, with my stomach facing the mattress but my shoulders and head facing to the side. I move from side to side throughout the night and wake up on my side or back, making me a real “omni-sleeper,” according to Robbins.
As reported 0/21/22 by Consumer Reports