I was recently somewhat forced into a new purchase. My pillow has been giving me headaches (well after some deductions I believe that to be the culprit at least) and in order to reduce the headaches I’ve been getting I decided a new pillow was a worthwhile investment.
However, shopping for a new pillow in my opinion is one of the most difficult purchasing experiences. Purely because although you can feel what they are like in the shop for a few minutes, it’s entirely different when you sleep on it for eight hours every night. A pillow is not something you can therefore, give a real test run. It’s not like testing out a new phone in a shop or trying on a new dress. Reading online reviews don’t help much either because a pillow is such a personal thing. However, in saying this, it did not stop me from doing some online research before hitting the shops. I wanted to know what’s out there and what shops to target as opposed to walking around aimlessly.
Turns out the options when it comes to pillows seem to be endless…from polyester to wool to foam to high profile, low profile, soft, hard and everything in between. The possibilities seem to go on forever which only makes the decision process even more confusing and difficult.
One thing I did know is that I wanted a low to medium profile and something of medium softness which did help me narrow down my search a little bit at least. However, one thing that really struck me is that I could have spent as little as $5 on a new pillow or well over $120! I tried doing some online research as to the benefits of a cheap vs. expensive option and to be perfectly honest the results seem to be fairly mixed.
So, having felt even more confused by this stage so I decided to head to a department store where there was 40% off all bedding and I could purchase something a bit more on the expensive side but for significantly less in the hope that I’d get something of slightly better quality that would last longer.
Now hitting the shops presented with another problem. If I was going to spend my hard earned money on a decent pillow I wanted to test it out. My boyfriend was very clever in this respect and I give him credit for his idea. Whilst the pillows were stacked on tables in the store, we took several options I thought I might like over to the bed display section and simply tested them out properly (they were in plastic of course). Being able to actually lie down on the pillow I was potentially going to spend a lot of money on definitely made the decision process a lot easier.
In the end I spent $70 (after the 40% discount) and have been sleeping great with a significant reduction in headaches and sore necks. My final choice even has a firm side and a softer side (clever design feature!) and it’s even made in Australia. I’m very happy with my purchase and the process I went through from online research to actually testing options out in store made the whole process a lot easier overall. I consider spending a bit extra on something I use everyday to be a worthwhile investment and worth a bit of extra cash to get something of higher quality.
As a final note, to ensure this was a minimalist exercise I did get rid of the old pillow. One in, one out.
What items do you consider worth the extra money?
This is Minimalism 