This Pillow Stuffed With Buckwheat Hulls Fixed My Neck Pain
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I’ve never been a morning person, but I never connected it to bad sleep until a run of befuddling health problems led me to a hypermobility spectrum-disorder diagnosis. Neck instability is a classic symptom, and suddenly, long nights of punching, stacking, and wriggling my arm underneath my pillows to get them into a comfortable shape made sense. I scrolled through dozens of posts on online forums: Had anyone figured out a way to sleep without waking up exhausted and achy? When I found a reference to buckwheat pillows, I was intrigued and bought one on Etsy a few days later.
Buckwheat pillows originated in Japan, where the hulls have been used as cushion filling for centuries. In the States, you’ll often find buckwheat hulls in meditation cushions, but the fill is less popular for bed pillows (with the exception of anas-seen-on-TV productmarketed via infomercial in the ’90s). If the ideal pillow is soft, downy, and cloudlike, buckwheat is the opposite end of the spectrum: dense, earthy, and firm. As it turns out, those are all the things my unstable neck needs that a puffy pillow doesn’t provide.
When you lie down on a buckwheat pillow, it doesn’t squish. Instead, the pressure of your head creates a divot that holds its shape (you can also mold the pillow with your hands to get the contours just right). There isan artist in Norwaywho makes pillows out of marble, complete with realistic wrinkles, as if their owners just got out of bed. Imagine one of those marble pillows sculpted to fit your head specifically and you’d get a sense of how a buckwheat pillow feels: It doesn’t deform when you move, but it supports your neck like nothing else. If you don’t have neck pain, that may sound like hell. God bless; my genius colleagueAmelia Jerdenhas reviewedmany pillowsthat will suit your needs. But if you deal with neck pain daily, a buckwheat hull pillow is a shortcut to a good night’s sleep.
Buckwheat pillows are quirky: For one, they’re heavy, closer to a beanbag cushion than a pillow in heft. They aren’tnoisy,per se, but repositioning the pillow creates a rustling sound as the dry husks collide, like the world’s quietest leaf pile. The hulls have a faint nutty smell, which I find pleasant, but I’ve also been the member of multiple food co-ops, so take that as you will. (I use an allergy cover — I am not playing around with dust mites — which dampens both the sound and smell.) It also took me a few nights to adjust to the pillow; after the first night, I woke with my head in an awkward position, but within a few days, I was sleeping better than I had in years.
My worst night of sleep on the buckwheat pillow still beats my best night on latex or foam. I still keep a latex pillow on the bed as a backup, but when I lie on it, it now feels intolerably squishy; I notice tension building in my shoulders within seconds as my neck reaches for extra support to hold itself up. I sometimes prop the latex slab behind my back when I’m reading in bed; sometimes I place it under my knees. But if I’m sleeping, it’s on buckwheat.
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The buckwheat pillow I bought from Etsy, which came filled with more buckwheat hulls than I needed. (A warning for adjusting the fill — the hulls themselves are very lightweight, so if you’re not careful, they’ll fly everywhere.)
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The as-seen-on-TV buckwheat pillow from the ’90s is available on Amazon.
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A buckwheat pillowcase with sewn baffles for extra zoned support.
More tools for achy necks
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