PillowFacts / Problems / My shoulders and my pillow disagree
My shoulders and my pillow disagree
Pure geometry. Nothing in this cluster is about health.
I have broad shoulders and every pillow is too flat
The gap your pillow has to fill is set by your shoulder. A broader shoulder means a bigger gap, and the retail market …Every pillow props my head up too high
The mirror of the broad-shoulder case. A narrower shoulder, or a soft mattress that lets the shoulder drop a long way,…I changed mattress and my pillow stopped working
Required loft is your neck-to-shoulder distance minus how far the mattress lets your shoulder sink — so it is a proper…
What a pillow can be asked to do here
| loft in measured range | Pillow loft within the range your own measurement implies. This is first for every constraint in this cluster, because no surface is soft enough to rescue a pillow your head has already flattened. |
|---|---|
| position tolerant support | Support that does not depend on hitting one exact spot, so rolling over does not mean re-finding a position in the dark. |
| high loft required | A loft above what most retail pillows offer. Broad shoulders on a firm mattress can need more than the 5–6 inch band the market clusters at, which is why the shelf feels wrong rather than you being wrong. |
| low loft required | A loft below the common band. Narrow shoulders, or a soft mattress that swallows the shoulder, can leave very little for the pillow to fill. |
| remeasure after change | The measurement is a property of body AND mattress. Change the mattress and the answer changes, even though the pillow did not. |