From ergonomic memory foam to luxury goose down, Australia’s options for where to lay your head are enough to make it spin. So how do you choose the perfect pillow?
The room inside Hästens’s “sleep spa” is calming. Lights dimmed low, soft piano music and a subtle lavender scent linger in the air as I sink into the Swedish bedmaker’s signature blue-and-white checked mattress.
It feels less like shopping and more like checking into a boutique hotel. The luxury brand, which has showrooms in Sydney and Melbourne, has celebrity fans, too. Emily Blunt loves her Hästens pillow so much she gave one to Oppenheimer co-star Cillian Murphy.
But what, exactly, makes a pillow worthy of such devotion? After years hunched over a laptop, plus occasional insomnia and many pillows of my own, I’m hoping to find out.
Emilia Axelsson, a sleep specialist, watches as I roll on to my side before sliding one pillow from beneath my head and replacing it with another. “This one’s too high,” she says, noticing my chin tip towards my chest. “When a pillow is the wrong height, your muscles work all night to hold your neck in position. The right pillow lets them switch off.”
Based on my fitting, Axelsson recommends two options: the Beddoc Therapeutic Pillow ($1,035), which combines down and feathers with an ergonomic core, and the Hästens High Firm Pillow ($725), a lofty down pillow for side sleepers who need more height.
The Beddoc gently cradles my neck while remaining surprisingly soft. The High Firm is light, airy and moulds around my head without feeling heavy. But the price tags are neither soft nor airy.
Australians are spending more on sleep than ever before, but millions across the country are still waking up exhausted. More than half of adults regularly experience at least one sleep symptom while Choice found in 2023 that 62% of survey respondents bought a product they hoped would improve their sleep. But do we really need to?
Dr David Cunnington, a sleep physician, argues sleep is far more complicated than the products promising to fix it suggest. “A pillow can improve comfort, but it can’t solve a sleep problem,” he says. “Sleep is influenced by so many factors that no single product can be a silver bullet.”
Cunnington believes part of the appeal of sleep products is that they give us something tangible to fix: “When the causes of poor sleep are complicated or difficult to change, buying a new pillow can feel like taking back control.”
The pursuit of perfect sleep can even be counterproductive. “The harder we chase it, the more elusive it becomes,” Cunnington says. “Sleep is a mirror of our daily lifestyle. If we’re running on nervous energy throughout the day, that is likely to keep us awake at night too.”
Samuel Paterson has accumulated so many pillows that his cupboard has become a graveyard for them. “I’ve lost count of how much I’ve spent on pillows,” the mining engineer says. “Every time my neck flares up, I convince myself the next one will finally fix it.
“My wife keeps asking when I’m going to stop buying them.”
After long shifts underground and hours crouching in confined spaces, Paterson often returns home with a stiff, aching neck. One pillow that has helped is Dunlopillo’s Luxurious Latex Contour Pillow ($189.99) – the only pillow range endorsed by the Australian Physiotherapy Association. It felt unfamiliar at first, Paterson says, but after several nights he found himself waking with less morning stiffness.
Neck pain is one of the most common musculoskeletal conditions after back pain, and Trudy Rebbeck, a physiotherapist ,says modern lifestyles are partly to blame.
