Ensure yourself better sleep while you’re travelling.
It is a well-known fact that people spend about a third of their lives sleeping, and it is important for this sleep to be as quality as possible so that every new day can be as good as possible right from its very start. It’s no fun at all to wake up even more tired than you had been when you fell asleep, with pains in your neck and shoulders – especially when you’re travelling and it’s of prime importance to have a lot of energy for sightseeing many exciting locations. When you’re on a long, uncomfortable and exhausting journey, good sleep is very often hard to come by, but an ally that can greatly help you to snooze is – a travel pillow.
Long gone are the days when, even if you wanted to take a pillow on your trip with you, you did not have much of a choice as the only one that you could take was the one in your bedroom – which is, naturally, too cumbersome and impractical for travel. Luckily, today there are countless models of compact travel pillows that fit easily in any bag, and their smaller dimensions do not mean that they are less efficient. Thus one of the most famous variants of the travel pillow, a soft ˝horseshoe˝ that is placed around the neck, is great at fulfilling its main task – holding your neck in an upright position so that your head does not fall to the side during sleep and cause you painful neck problems after waking. The support that a travel pillow gives your neck and head also allows your spine to remain straight during sleep, helping you to feel more fresh and energetic in the morning despite the often uncomfortable travelling conditions in a bus, train, plane etc.
Due to the valuable role they play in improving the quality of sleep, travel pillows can be recommended to most anyone, but in particular to people prone to neck and shoulder pains after sleeping. A travel pillow can also be of great assistance to such people at home, keeping your head and neck in the correct position while you’re, for example, reading or watching TV. In addition, travel pillows are not useful for adults alone – they can also be good for children, who are often lively and find it difficult to bear long and monotonous journeys, and a travel pillow can come in handy to get them to fall asleep sooner and wake in a good mood to a new day filled with excitement. Travel pillows for children come in a variety of colourful and cheerful shapes, often in the form of animals or stuffed toys and are sure to become a dear ˝travelling companion˝ to your children very soon.
Buying a travel pillow is a good decision even if you do not travel very often, as for a reasonable price you get a product that you can also use in various everyday situations, while it can also make a good gift.
As travel pillows today are present on the market in countless forms and variants, perhaps the greatest dilemma of them all is – which one of them to buy? Apart from existing in a multitude of different patterns, they can also be filled with various materials – from cotton, feathers and polyester blends to seeds and hulls. One of the newer innovations that many swear by is memory foam – while it can be an even more comfortable solution as it adapts to the body of the user, you should also bear in mind that such pillows lose their firmness and shape sooner. Inflatable pillows can be very practical due do their exceptionally compact dimensions, and even self-inflatable models exist.
Here are also somewhat more ˝advanced˝ travel pillows that, apart from fulfilling their main purpose, also offer other features – thus the multipractical Evolution Pillow also has a built-in music player pocket and comes together with memory foam ear plugs. On the other hand, the Travel Halo distinguishes itself with its somewhat more unusual shape – instead of around the neck, it is placed around the forehead like a sweatband – and it also boasts an attached eye mask. In any case, there is no dearth of choice, and it is up to you to choose that travel pillow which suits your needs and preferences the best.
Silvia Vidović
