[0:00] Question of the day: How do you avoid a mattress that’s too hot?

[0:06] Cooling Gel Marketing vs. The Real Deal: A lot of marketing focuses on cooling gels, but these don’t truly solve the heat problem. It’s just marketing.

[0:31] More Foam Equals More Heat: To simplify it as much as possible, the more foam you have in a mattress, the hotter it’s going to be. If there’s 5 centimetres of foam, it’s going to absorb a certain amount of heat. If it’s 10 cm thick of foam on top of the springs, it’s going to be twice as hot.

[0:49] Laws of Thermodynamics Explained: When you heat something up, it has to dissipate that heat on the other side. If it’s thicker, it has less chance to dissipate the heat. So, I’ve found that using **5 cm of foam** in the top of the mattress is the best balance between comfort and heat regulation.

[1:08] The Frying Pan Analogy: Imagine a thin Teflon frying pan. It doesn’t take long to heat up, and when you take it off the heat, it doesn’t take long to cool down. Now, if you use a cast iron frying pan that’s like 8 mil thick, it takes a long time to heat up and it takes ages to cool down because it’s so thick that it can’t release the heat. That’s exactly what thick foam does on a mattress.

What Hot Sleepers Should Look For:

• [1:33] Minimise Foam: About 20% of people just sleep hot. If you’re one of those people, you need to really focus on not getting too much foam on top of your mattress.
• Maximum Foam Thickness: Make sure **5 cm is your maximum** amount of foam.
• Avoid Pillow Tops: If you see a big pillow top, that’s going to make you really hot.
• Avoid All-Foam Mattresses: If you see something like a Tempur, which is all foam, that’s going to make you really hot.
• Skip Cooling Gels: Stay away from the cooling gels; they don’t work. It’s just marketing.

The rule is simple: **5 cm is cooler than 10 cm, and 10 cm is cooler than 25 cm. More foam, more heat. Less foam, less heat.**