A nightmare on your street – Millbrook Contract Beds talks about nightmares

Dreams are complex little mysteries. They have the power to surprise us, make us happy and fulfil our fantasies. But where there are dreams, there are often nightmares lurking around the corner. Nightmares are terrifying dreams that cause our hearts to race; even after you wake up and realise that it was all a dream, your heart continues to pound and the fear stays with you in the darkness of the bedroom. Millbrook Contract Beds is fascinated with every aspect of dreaming, especially nightmares. They’re fascinating things. Continue reading »

Making your guests comfortable this summer…

If you’re a hotel owner you’re no doubt bracing yourself for the summer months.  Aside from being a busy time of year you will see an influx of people staying at your establishment and hopefully putting their heads down for a night or two in your contract beds!

However, with the glorious summer comes a bit of an issue for a lot of hoteliers and that’s the lighter evenings.  While we all remember the misery of dark evenings and cold mornings in the winter time, when summer finally comes, the sun doesn’t go down until past 9pm and it rises much earlier in the morning.

This can be a real issue for light sleepers – and all the best contract beds in the world won’t help someone with sensitivity to light!

Continue reading »

Extra Support – The Benefits of Adjustable Beds

In any guise, a bed should be considered a place of rest, recovery and recuperation, where the troubles and stresses of the day before fade away into the blissful state of sleep.  However, a bed doesn’t have to be a simple gateway to the Land of Nod, but can actively help your body.

Anyone who has ever tried to sleep whilst experiencing back pain knows how much of an irritation it can be.  Instead of having to painfully shape your body to a flat mattress, try using a handy remote control function to make your bed change shape around you!

Not only do these adjustable beds provide a massive helping of luxury and comfort but they have many therapeutic uses, helping sleepers cope with conditions from arthritis to asthma, which is particularly useful in where contract beds for the healthcare industry is concerned.

Whilst lying flat on a regular bed, most of your weight is focused on several ‘pressure points’ – such as your shoulders and hips – which have most contact with the mattress.  As a demonstration of this, it is possible to pass your hand quite easily under the arch of your back, feeling very little resistance.  With an adjustable bed, you can raise and lower different parts of it to provide support where it is most needed, relieving pressure on the parts of your body most prone to aches and pains.

Trouble getting in and out of bed can come from any combination of problems, making the ability to raise yourself to a sitting position a practical and priceless one.  Raising your back and head just a little can relieve symptoms of acid reflux and help open the airways of those suffering from asthma and other breathing difficulties, aiding in a more sound sleep.  A lift such as this can also help reduce occurrences of snoring.

Long haul flights and long periods of standing can lead to leg cramps and fluid retention, to which some individuals are more predisposed than others.  A slight raise in the legs while sleeping can work wonders to reduce these symptoms by releasing pressure and improving blood flow through the whole body.  This can help individuals with arthritis or heart problems too!

Adjustable beds feature heavily in Millbrook’s Healthcare Collection, such as the Therapy Deluxe -which is an adjustable pocket spring bed is made with heat sensitive visco memory foam and has a five way adjustable position, operated by handset control. I even includes a massage option! Massage beds have also been shown to improve circulation, keeping you warmer and more effectively oxygenating your brain.

Take a look at our beds and enjoy the benefit of adjustable beds for great sleep with Millbrook!

When your good mood gets left behind in slumber

It might sound made-up, but there was a revelation recently that will blow your mind if you’re part of a couple. We’ve all had moments in relationships where we’ve warred and rowed; one of the most common causes of arguments in the bedroom is the question of who gets to sleep where in the bed. Choosing your side is the first big drama thrown up by a burgeoning relationship because each person has to feel comfortable in their new domestic situation. As if that wasn’t enough, it now turns out that sleeping on a certain side can heavily influence your state of mind in the day. Continue reading »

Top Tips for hoteliers to reduce allergens in hotel rooms & attract more guests.

Well we’re at that time of year again where allergies can become a bit of a problem for your hotel guests. Whether it’s a pollen allergy or dust, keeping people happy when they are at your hotel and sleeping is an important thing to sort and certainly should form part of your service level plans.  So in today’s blog, Millbrook Contract Beds has some good advice for hoteliers everywhere!

Guests who are prone to issues with allergies are actually more common that you may imagine. It has been suggested that there are actually a staggering three hundred million people worldwide who suffer from some kind of allergy, with some experts suggesting this will increase over time. With this in mind it is difficult to understand why hotels and guest houses are not actually addressing this problem fully.

Continue reading »

20 Sleep Facts you didn’t know! Some serious sleep stats from Millbrook Contract Beds

Millbrook Contract Beds spends a lot of its time on Twitter and Facebook sharing our love of sleep with our followers. We regularly tweet and update about sleep facts and sleep related stories. So we thought, why not take all we have learned and collected over the past year of Tweeting and compile it into a comprehensive fact list? Bear in mind these are just a handful of the facts we have researched (in total there is probably more like 300 odd facts we have learnt about sleep, beds, dreams and sleep disorders).

#1 – People can sleep with their eyes open and not even be aware that they are doing it.

#2 – The average adult needs to sleep a total of 7 to 9 hours per day.

#3 – 50% of people over the age of 60 suffer with some type of sleep disorder.

#4 – The world record for the longest period without sleep stands at 18 days, 21 hours and 40 minutes. Although it is not recommended that people try to break it because…

#5 – A person needs sleep to function. To go without sleep for an elongated period without close medical supervision can be fatal.

#6 – If it takes a person more than 5-15 minutes to fall asleep every night it could mean that they are sleep deprived.

#7 –  REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep causes the sleeper a paralysis that they are unaware of.

#8 –REM sleep kicks in after 90 minutes after we fall asleep and lasts for approximately 2 hours.

#9 –  If you ever dream that you yourself are taking a nap during your dream it could be a sign that you need to relax and take it easy more. Sleeping in your own dreams can also symbolise that you are at peace.

#10 – New born babies typically result in 400-750 hours of lost sleep for new parents in the first year.

#11 – REM dreams are often characterized by bizarre plots, but non-REM dreams are repetitive and thought-like, with little imagery.

#12 – It is theorised by some sleep scientists that we dream to fix our experiences in our long-term memory – we dream about things that are worth remembering.

#14 – A scientific mystery remains so as scientists have still not been able to explain how shining a bright light on the back of human knees resets the brains sleep-wake clock.

#15 – Exposure to noise during the night can suppress immune function even if the sleeper doesn’t wake. Unfamiliar noise, and noise during the first and last two hours of sleep, has the greatest disruptive effect on the sleep cycle.

# 16 – “Natural alarm clock” (allowing people to wake up more or less when they want to) is caused by a burst of stress hormones. This is caused due to an unconscious anticipation of waking up.

#17 – It is unknown if any other species dreams as we do…

#18 – This should come as no surprise to parents but teenagers tend to sleep on an average of 10 hours per night.

#19 – The position that you sleep in reflects your personality.

#20 – Brains are far more active while they are sleeping than they are watching TV.

And there’s your lot… for now!

For more on sleep facts please follow Millbrook Contract Beds on Twitter and Facebook.

Millbrook Contract Beds’ tips to keep you comfortable

Insomnia and sleep interruptions can be down to a lot of different factors, but the sleeping environment can be a huge factor in whether or not you get a comfortable and restful night’s sleep. In fact, dodgy beds can be the root cause of back pain, sleep disorders and sleep interruptions. Millbrook Contract Beds specialises in beds that provide the ultimate comfort and we’ve got some handy tips to make sure that you are comfortable in bed this winter. Continue reading »

Don’t let your bedroom become a domain of distractions

Millbrook Contract Beds has experience in quality beds and mattresses and we know our stuff when it comes to getting a restful and peaceful night’s sleep. One of the biggest causes of insomnia is the blurring of the line between bedroom and living room. Since televisions, smartphones and laptops became a driving force in our lives, we are no longer limited to specific locations when we want to watch a show, listen to music or check our Facebook pages. The line between living room and bedroom is almost invisible now and bringing these distractions into our bedroom suddenly stops the bedroom from being a quiet and restful place. It suddenly becomes a domain of distractions.

Continue reading »

What your sleeping position says about you

Our blog today is a little bit more light-hearted. We’ve been asking everyone in both the Millbrook Beds and Millbrook Contract Beds teams a simple question this week: what’s your favourite position?

Understandably, people were shocked at first, but we are talking about the positions you sleep in every night. According to some great research and infographics, the position you sleep in tells you a lot about your personality. So when you go to sleep tonight in your contract bed or Millbrook Bed at home, keep it in mind and keep a record when you wake up. You’ll be very surprised at the revelations.

Continue reading »

Sleep advice for busy hoteliers…

Easter as we know is not far away and with any luck, all our hoteliers will hopefully find their rooms packed full to the brim with happy guests, contributing to keeping the business going! However, during this busy time more and more hoteliers find that their sleeping patterns are usually disrupted and also lack of sleep can be a real issue, often leaving them feeling tired.

There’s other way of putting it, but lack of sleep and feeling tired do affect your ability to work properly, which could be a real issue in an industry where service levels are so important.

Therefore, in today’s blog Millbrook Contract Beds thought it would go through some of the best ways to avoid sleep problems in the form of a good bed ritual and enough sleep to cope with life’s (and guest) demands!

We can probably all agree that being woken up from a slumber to the sound of an alarm can be horrible in the morning. The worst scenario (and this happens a lot) is that if you’ve had lack of sleep you may be tempted to put the snooze on just a little too often, which can then result in you being very late for the important jobs of the day.

If you get a good night’s sleep then in reality you can actually get up a lot more easily in the morning and hopefully feel more able to deal with the day.

However, the service industry more than any other commercial practice is notorious for long days and less hours for sleeping at night, so what can you do to help with that one?

If you have staff then make sure you use them to take up the slack and if you are able, see if you can get cover for a nap in the afternoon. This may sound like a luxury but even one hour of a staff member covering the phone will help you recharge your batteries.

Now while you cannot do anything about a five hour night of sleep what you can do is get into a good routine before bed. That way, even five hours will be a good way to recharge.  The best things can be to get organised and allow your mind to relax.  Instead of putting things off for the morning, why not get things done and then once you are in bed you won’t have to worry about anything – giving you a much better chance of relaxing while you’re there.

This month is National Bed Month and the Sleep Council has some great tips on getting good sleep so if you are having problems at the moment, why not drop over to their website and take a look around? You never know what you might find out!