"I am one of those people," says Dr Chris McCarthy. "I do take my pillow with me."
You may have seen those people at the airport, a pillow stuffed under one arm as they drag a suitcase to check-in. Or you may be one — attached to a pillow soft enough to settle into but robust enough that it is not bunched into a ball by morning.
McCarthy insists he is not being fussy. He is a physiotherapist, an associate professor at the Manchester School of Physiotherapy, and he knows the wrong pillow can be a pain in the neck. He does not take his abroad, but as soon as he reaches a hotel he starts "faffing about" with the pillows — and he has a tested trick for making even a poor one fit to sleep on.
It depends on your sleeping position
The right pillow, he told the BBC's Sliced Bread podcast, depends on the position you sleep in. Most people fall into one of three categories: side, back or front.
He discourages front sleeping, because your neck is turned one way for a long period of time.
The principle behind all of it is simple enough to apply without buying anything: the pillow's job is to keep your neck in line with your spine, so the muscles are not held stretched for hours. A side sleeper has the widest gap to fill between shoulder and head, and needs the most loft. A back sleeper needs much less, and a pillow that is too thick pushes the chin towards the chest. A front sleeper has no good option, which is why he advises against the position rather than the pillow.
What it means in Bangladesh
Neck and shoulder pain is extremely common here and almost always attributed to the wrong thing. The usual explanations offered are cold air, a draught, or "gas" — while the actual causes are mechanical and mostly happen during the day.
The dominant one is the phone. Hours spent looking down at a screen holds the neck flexed under the load of the head, and it is now the most common posture in the country. Add commuting slumped in a bus seat, working at a desk with a laptop screen far below eye level, and — a specifically Bangladeshi factor — carrying weight on the head or shoulder.
Against that background the pillow is worth getting right precisely because it is the cheapest of the variables. Three points cover it. Match the height to your sleeping position: high and firm for side sleeping, low and soft for back. Replace a pillow that has gone flat, because a compressed pillow provides no support at all and most households here keep them for years past that point. And avoid sleeping on your front, which is the single change most likely to help a long-standing stiff neck.
The improvised version of McCarthy's hotel trick works at home too. A folded towel or a thin cushion placed under the edge of a too-flat pillow adds loft where the neck needs it; a too-thick pillow can be made usable by lying closer to its edge. Neither costs anything.
One caution. Neck pain that travels down the arm, or comes with numbness, pins and needles, or weakness in the hand, is not a pillow problem — that suggests a nerve is involved and it is a reason to see a doctor rather than to buy bedding. If your partner's snoring is what wakes you rather than your neck, that is a different problem and we set it out in what snoring does to the person beside you.
