We Interviewed 3,000 Necks

The Neck Census began with a question we thought would take a month to answer. It took fourteen. By the end, we had spoken with 3,000 sleepers, measured 3,000 necks, and collected more than 41,000 pages of notes. This is a summary of what we learned.

A note on method first. The Census was a listening exercise, not a clinical trial. It began in 2020, before STRATA existed. Its participants are separate from the 1,604 sleepers in our three published studies. We did not ask anyone to sleep on anything. We asked them to talk.

What we asked

Each participant answered 46 questions about how they slept, how they woke, and what they had tried. We then measured the distance from the side of the head to the outer edge of the shoulder, which we call the cervical gap, and took a pressure map of the participant lying on their usual pillow.

The last question was always the same: “If you could change one thing about your pillow, what would it be?”

What they told us

Almost nobody liked their pillow. Only 11% described their current pillow as “right”. A further 23% said it was “fine”. The rest used words we have chosen not to print in the Journal.

Most people owned several. The median participant owned four pillows. One owned nineteen. She had brought a list.

Most people had tried stacking. 72% had, at some point, slept on two or more pillows at once to reach the right height. Almost all of them described this as “a temporary arrangement”. The median temporary arrangement had lasted six years.

The cervical gap varied enormously. It ranged from 38 to 171 millimetres. No single pillow, and no three-size range, could serve that spread.

Nobody knew their number. When we asked how tall their ideal pillow would be, the most common answer was “I don’t know”. The second most common was “taller”. The third was “shorter”. Several people said both.

The answer to the last question

The answers to the final question fell into five groups.

1. “Make it the right height.” 38%
2. “Make it stay the right height.” 21%
3. “Make it cooler.” 17%
4. “Make it stop moving.” 13%
5. Other. 11%. This included “make it quieter”, “make it smell of my childhood”, and, from one participant, “make it understand me”.

We took all five seriously. The first two led to the layered stack and the Protocol. The third led to the Thermal Stratum. The fourth led to buckwheat. The fifth, in its own way, led to the Strata Number™, which is as close as a pillow has come to understanding anyone.

What surprised us

We expected necks to be different. We did not expect people to be so certain about their pillows and so uncertain about their necks. Participants could describe a pillow they had owned twenty years ago in fine detail. Very few could say how their neck felt on a typical morning. Most had simply stopped noticing.

That finding is why the Sleep Journal exists. The Protocol does not only find your Number. It teaches you to notice your neck again, every morning, within five minutes of waking.

A thank you

Three thousand people gave us an hour of their time and a measurement of their shoulders. Every one of them was offered a STRATA when it launched. 2,214 accepted. Their median Number is 52, which is the same as everyone else’s. We find that reassuring. We hope they do too.