The Top 10 Reasons to Sleep in a Hammock

Mrs. True just mentioned in a post about the fact that we sleep in a hammock. I came up with the Top 10 reasons why you should have a hammock instead of a bed awhile ago. I thought it would be good to revisit the idea here.

As a bit of a back story, we started sleeping in a hammock a little over a year ago when Mrs. True was researching the out-gassing of mattresses (in conjunction with having baby mattresses and being told to let them out-gas for a while so that the baby doesn't breathe toxic fume). Hammocks were only tangentially mentioned - they are, oddly enough, not much blogged about - but the few resources she could find always mentioned that they were excellent for your back.

Since I have had recurring neck pain for years (after I got in a bike accident), this interested her. It was also significantly cheaper (by at least an order of magnitude) and/or easier than non-outgassing mattress options, so we decided to try it out. We ordered a family-sized Brazilian cotton hammock and built a hammock stand out of 1" galvanized steel pipe from Home Depot, for a grand total of about $200. 

It took us less than a week to get used to sleeping in it, and we have never looked back. In fact, when we spend the night in a bed (on vacation or such), we are sore and unhappy. We have since bought smaller hammocks for each of the Truelets, freeing up tons of space in their shared bedroom/playroom (three kids' beds, even bunk beds, would make the room claustrophobic; three hammocks barely register), so everyone in our house sleeps in a hammock.

So, without further ado, here are the top ten reasons to choose a hammock instead of a bed:

1. When was the last time that you laundered your bed? That's gross! I heard from a reliable source (a stand up comedian) that there a 10 million dust mites in the average bed. Your bed might be super-average. The Truelets would invariably (when they were sick) come over to my bed and throw up on it. How do you clean that off? With a hammock you just put it in the washing machine.
2. Your back will thank you. I once got attacked by a car while biking to work. My neck was never the same since then... until we got a hammock. I now only have neck problems when I want them (which is to say when I sleep in a bed.)
3. You love your spouse and want to cuddle with them. A hammock enables (and even enforces) that cuddling. If you don't love your spouse (or cuddling (like that is even possible)) you can get two hammocks - one for yourself and one for your spouse. Just make sure that one of them is big enough so that if you want to cuddle sometimes then you can still cuddle.
4. Your bed is trying to kill you. What I mean to say is that hammocks do not have to be fire retardant like the government has mandated that all bed mattresses are. The out-gassing of fire retardant materials into your room from a mattress is guaranteed to kill you (unless something else does it first). Every person who has ever slept on a bed is either dead right now or is in the process of dying.
5. You can take your hammock and you can hang it up against one wall and reclaim your entire room whenever you are not sleeping in it. This allows you to have a smaller bedroom and still get a larger amount of use out of it than a normal size bedroom. Japanese people have been doing this for years by sleeping on small mats and putting them away during the day. The only problem with the Japanese method is that it is impossible that those little mats are comfortable (Unless you are Japanese, I guess). I played a game once called Sushi Go! which almost makes me Japanese but not quite Japanese enough to enjoy sleeping on a mat on the ground.
6. Hammocks allow you to sleep in a much cooler condition in the summer. They allow heat to radiate in all of the directions instead of just up so you can get cool from the bottom as well as from the top. This allows you to save money on cooling bills.
7. You can have multiple hammocks in trendy colors so that you can show off your fashion sense and style (the extra hammocks will easily fit in a closet or something. They don't take up that much room)
8. Hammocks are portable, so if you want to take your hammock with you to sleep on the road or something like that (not literally on the road, that's dangerous. Sleep in the gutter.) you can totally carry your hammock around with you. If you want to carry around your mattress you probably have to have a really big truck. Good luck with using a mattress on a camp out (or in the gutter for that matter). We have actually taken our hammock on camping trips. It is great. My sister's tent blew over and our hammock was wonderful.
9. Hammocks are far less expensive than mattresses and they're more comfortable anyway. You could buy 4 or 5 hammocks for the price of one bed and then you can change out your hammocks every season or however often you want to.
10. Unless you like sweeping out the underside of your bed regularly, underneath your bed is a really gross place (a breeding ground of filth to quote Mrs. True). Every so often if you move your bed you'll find that there is a desiccated apple core, or a dried up piece of pizza. You will never find such nonsense underneath your hammock because you move your hammock every single day when you get out of it.
11. If your kids decide to climb in your bed and have a cracker party it is difficult to clean it out. With a hammock, you just dump it over and all the crumbs are ready to be swept/vacuumed off of the floor.

There are a couple of downsides to a hammock, though these are easily outweighed by all the advantages. One is that it is very difficult to get out of a shared hammock without disturbing the other sleeper(s). If you cuddle kids down for a nap in your hammock and then want to get up, it takes a lot of skill and a dollop of luck to get away without them crying. And if you're not used to sleeping cuddled up to your spouse, do get two hammocks.

Finally, in the winter you will need to attach an underquilt to your hammock or else you will get an amazing amount of cooling (at a time when it is not desired). You could buy an underquilt like this (make sure to get the right size), but we just tied blankets to the bottom of our hammock, and it works great.