The Hot Flash Night That Made Me Try the Supa Modern Cooling Pillow

I woke up at 1:40 in the morning in the middle of May with my cheek stuck to the pillowcase. Not damp exactly. Stuck. I flipped the pillow over to the other side, put my head down, and counted to about forty before that side went warm too. Then I flipped it back, which is a thing you do at 1:40 in the morning even though you already know the other side has not cooled down.

So I did what I do in the middle of the night, which is shop on my phone in the dark with the brightness turned all the way down. By 2 a.m. I had ordered a set of two SUPA MODERN cooling pillows. It was not a researched decision. It was a tired woman on her side of a queen bed, in a west-facing Tucson bedroom that holds the afternoon heat, trying to buy five more hours of sleep.

Here is what I am not going to tell you: that this pillow stopped my night sweats. It did not, because a pillow cannot do that. I am 51, I work the front office at an elementary school, and I have been waking up hot since I was 49. My doctor knows all about it and we have talked it through, and I would tell any woman reading this to have that same conversation before she buys anything at all for her bedroom.

What I had before was an old solid memory foam pillow, the kind that holds the shape of your head and also, apparently, the heat of it. It never had a cool side. It had the side I had just been lying on and the side I was about to lie on, and by the time I got to it they were the same temperature. That was the real problem. Not that the pillow was hot, but that it never offered me anything cooler to turn to.

The SUPA MODERN box came about a week later and it was heavier than I expected for a pillow box. Two queen pillows, 20 inches by 30 inches each, one for me and one for Ray. They are shredded memory foam with microfiber, and the fill is not sewn shut. There is a zipper. That zipper mattered more than I thought it would when I ordered at 2 a.m.

I am a side sleeper, and the first night the pillow sat too tall for me, so I unzipped it and took out a handful of the shredded foam and zipped it back up. I did that two more times over the next week, a little at a time, until my ear was where it needed to be. Ray never touched his. He sleeps cold, he keeps his heavy fleece blanket on his side of the bed, and he uses the soft side of his pillow and is perfectly content.

The covers are two-sided. One side is the cooling side, one is the soft one, and I sleep with the cooling side up. The cover zips off and goes in the wash with the sheets on Saturday, which is the only day I do sheets in this house, and then it goes straight back on. The fill does not go in the machine, so that is a hand wash situation I have not needed yet.

The first night I flipped it once. Before, I was flipping six or seven times and then giving up and lying on my back with my head on the flat sheet.

What changed, honestly, is the flipping. The pillow starts cooler and it takes longer to warm up, so by the time it does I am usually back asleep. It does not stay cold all night. Nothing on my bed stays cold all night.

I still wake up hot some nights. Sometimes twice. That has not gone away and I never expected it to. What went away is the part where I lie there awake, flipping a pillow and getting angrier by the minute. Now if I wake up, I turn the pillow over, there is a genuinely cooler surface there, and I go back to sleep. That is the whole benefit, and it is a smaller claim than the packaging makes.

The one thing I would change is the price of a second set for the guest room, because I have already caught myself carrying mine down the hall. The small fan on my nightstand and the lighter bedding I switched to over the summer do their part too, but the SUPA MODERN pillow is the piece I noticed first.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you are a hot sleeper who flips her pillow four or five times a night, I would buy this one. Not because it is magic, but because it gives you somewhere cooler to go, and because you can take fill out until it fits your neck, which is the thing I could never get from a pillow that came sealed shut. SUPA MODERN got that part right and I will give them the credit.

If you are buying it hoping it will stop a hot flash, I would put the phone down, call your doctor, and then buy it afterward for comfort while the two of you sort out the rest. Those are separate jobs and only one of them is a pillow's job. And if you sleep cold, like Ray, get the set anyway. There are two in the box, the soft side is right there, and you will stop stealing each other's pillows at three in the morning.

One more practical thing, and then I will leave you alone. Take the fill out in small amounts and sleep a night before you take out more. I got greedy the second time, had to put foam back in, and there I was at ten o'clock on a Tuesday stuffing a pillow like a Thanksgiving bird. Go slow. Six weeks in, mine is right where I want it.