How to Sleep With a Body Pillow: The Side Sleeper Setup

Looking for an adjustable body pillow for side sleeping? The MAREA 20 × 54 inch kapok body pillow has a zippered cotton shell so you can change the amount of fill. Its matching 20 × 54 inch outer cover is sold separately.

A body pillow should touch you in three places: under your chin or against your chest, along your front where your top arm rests, and between your knees. Get those three and the rest of the night sorts itself out. Here's how to position it, what to do with your head pillow, and how to adjust the loft so it fits you instead of the other way round.

Step one: keep your head pillow

The most common mistake is trying to put your head on the body pillow. Don't. A 20 by 54 inch pillow isn't shaped for that, and once your head is on it your shoulder is off it, which defeats the purpose. Use your normal head pillow for your head. The body pillow starts at your collarbone. If you want the two to feel like one piece, use the same fill for both, which is why we make the head pillow and the body pillow from the same wild harvested kapok.

Step two: lie on your side and pull it in

Lie on the side you usually sleep on. Bring the body pillow in so the top end sits just under your chin or against your chest, whichever feels natural. Rest your top arm over it. The pillow should be close enough that your arm lies on it without reaching, and your chest isn't rolling forward to find it. If you have to hunt for it, move the pillow, not your body.

Step three: the knee

Bend your top knee and let it rest on the pillow. The lower end should sit between your knees and, if it's long enough, between your shins. This is the part most people notice first. The top leg stops sliding forward across the bottom one, which is what often tips a side sleeper onto their stomach by 3 am. With something between the knees you tend to stay where you started.

Step four: check the loft

A body pillow's loft matters as much as a head pillow's. Too full and it pushes your arm up and your knee out. Too flat and you're hugging a towel. Ours ships fuller than most people want, on purpose, because you can take fill out and can't add what isn't there. Unzip the end, pull out a handful of kapok, zip it up, lie down again. Repeat until your arm rests level and your knee sits on it without being lifted. Keep the fill you remove in a bag, because you'll want some of it back in a year when the pillow settles. If you overshoot, a refill bag puts it back. It's the same process as the head pillow, which I walked through in the loft guide. Still choosing one? Here are the kapok body pillows compared.

Which side of the bed

Put it on the side you face, not the side you turn away from. If you switch sides in the night, you have two choices: drag it over with you, which becomes automatic within a week, or use two. Most side sleepers settle into one side once the pillow is there, because turning over now means leaving something comfortable.

Back sleepers and combination sleepers

A body pillow isn't only for side sleeping. On your back, run it under your knees to take the flatness out of the position, or lay it along one side so your arm has somewhere to go. Combination sleepers who move all night often use it as a guard rail: it's there when they roll onto their side and out of the way when they don't. If you mostly sleep on your stomach, a body pillow is less useful, and a very low head pillow will do more for you.

Pregnancy

Long pillows have been used by pregnant sleepers for as long as they've existed, and a straight body pillow does the same job as the curved ones with the advantage that it doesn't dictate a shape. Positioning during pregnancy is a question for your doctor or midwife, not a pillow company, so ask them. The pillow works the same way whoever is holding it.

The cover

A body pillow gets held, sweated on and slept against more than any other piece of bedding, so put a zippered cover on it. Ours is the same organic cotton sateen as the pillow shell, cut to the body size, and it's the layer that goes in the wash so the kapok never has to.

Give it a week

The first night with a body pillow feels like there's someone else in the bed. By the third it feels like there always was. By the second week you'll reach for it before you're fully lying down. If it isn't working after one hundred days, the sleep trial covers it. And if you're curious where the whole idea came from, I traced it back seven hundred years in A Short History of the Body Pillow.

Anthony
Founder, MAREA Sleep

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