The key to happiness is a good mattress

A doctor labelled it muscular, suggested Paracetamol, and told me it was unlikely to be anything serious. But, boy, did it hurt, and it was always ten times worse in bed.

What the doctor should have prescribed wasn’t pills, but a new bed, or at least a new mattress.

I hadn’t considered that it might be our bed but when I mentioned my discomfort to my husband - who rarely complains about anything - he launched into a tirade against the mattress. His heavy frame had, after more than a decade, not only caused the mattress to sag, but had damaged the bed frame too. He was sleeping in a valley.

Many of us sleep on lumpy, bumpy, worn out beds. A Sleep Council survey showed that 26 percent of Brits sleep in an uncomfortable bed and that 27 percent have a mattress that is more than seven years old. Mattresses can deteriorate by as much as 70 percent within ten years of use.

We had been sleeping on ours for 12 years. I bought it in the street, dirt cheap, from a man selling from the back of a lorry. He knocked on the door and led me to a van packed with them. We’d had the previous mattress for 22 years, it was like sleeping on a bag of spanners. He ended up selling two to me and several to my neighbours as well. Cash only, no questions asked.

A good mattress can help you sleep better. Picture: Pixabay

In bed shops you’re confronted with a huge range of mattresses filled with everything from faux fur to rubber, wool and gel. A body contour machine helps match your shape and weight to the right one. Needless to say, my husband’s generated quite different results to mine.

Though well out of our price range, I couldn’t resist testing a sumptuous, multi-layered affair, like something from The Princess and the Pea. It was like sinking into a marshmallow. Costing several thousand - yes, really - and with no back-of-lorry deal in sight, it was out of the question.

It’s not easy testing beds. “You need to thrash about like you normally do,” I told my husband as he self-consciously lay as still as a rock.

The Sleep Council says we spend less than two minutes trying out a new mattress, even though we spend around 3,000 hours lying on one every year.

Although buying a new bed can be costly, a study by the University of Warwick found a good night’s sleep gives us the same mood boost as winning £120,000 on the lottery. Put like that, we figured, getting a decent one is probably worth splashing out. So, our Christmas present to one another is our new bed - a mattress and base.

And has it helped? Yes and no. Yes, I don’t wake up feeling as though I’ve been shot in the side with an arrow, and no, without the dip where my husband previously resided, his every movement encroaches on my slumber. He can now easily access my side of the bed and that’s my exclusively my territory. I might have to order some razor wire.

Of course, for most couples, the key to a good night’s sleep is to do what Charles and Camilla do and sleep apart. So-called ‘sleep divorce is on the rise, according to the National Bed Federation,with 15 per cent of couples sleeping separately, many in separate rooms.

In our home, it might well come to that. But I know one thing - we will both fight tooth and claw for custody of the new mattress.