Will a ‘shikibuton’ make you ditch your normal mattress for the floor?

While the specifics of a shikibuton set-up can vary between households, the cultural value of pragmatism and efficiency has never wavered; the storage convenience means a bedroom can be used for other purposes during the day, making it ideal for those who don’t have the luxury of sprawling living space but still need an office, living room and dining room.

Is a shikibuton better for you than Western-style mattresses?

Good news for the stressed and budget-conscious: Professor Simon Smith, who leads the University of Queensland’s Community Sleep Health group at the Child Health Research Centre, says one aspect of shikibuton could help you get a better sleep, though if that’s sleeping on the floor itself is still up for debate.

“If you’re rolling [the futon] up, if you’re sweeping the floor, if you’re making a bit of a routine or a process around sleep, that might actually be a really good thing if you’re spending a bit of time … being mindful about sleep, not just doing it or squeezing it in,” Smith says.

Smith highlights how duration is often the focus of sleep discourse, but that’s “only one part of sleep”. Creating bedtime rituals, as has been trending on social media, is another part that can be beneficial for sleep hygiene.

“We know in kids, for instance, having really good evening routines is great for them. You have a bath, have some reading time, go to bed. And that’s actually all part of the going to sleep process about unwinding, relaxing, getting ready for it,” Smith says.

“If you’re dashing about the place and then just lie down, it’s really, really hard to shift gears. So I think a little bit of focus, not too much, but on the quality of sleep and the sleep processes, it’s probably more important. Whether it’s a futon or a spring mattress or any of those sorts of things. But it’s the behavioural part of it that’s probably pretty positive.”

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A shikibuton could also help with what experts know is also good sleep practice: making a bedroom and a bed just for sleeping. But in a world where working from home is common, it can be difficult to separate daytime activities from nighttime activities. Shifting gears by way of unfurling a mattress and packing it up again, Smith says, could help indicate to your subconscious that the “space is no longer [for] awake activities and awake thoughts”.

Smith himself slept on a futon for more than 20 years, a habit that started out of student desperation. Despite his personal preference for a firm sleeping surface, the most he could say about evidence supporting the physical sleep benefits of a shikibuton is that it’s purely anecdotal. Sleep Health Foundation chief executive Dr Moira Junge agrees. She says that after 31 years of immersing herself in the field of sleep, although it’s known that bedroom environment does contribute to good sleep, just how much, exactly, remains unknown.

“I don’t have the particular numbers because the research isn’t there,” Junge says.

Sleep-deprived people will do almost anything

Sleep is a crucial pillar of health, like diet and exercise, Junge says, but “we know hardly anything” about it. Demand for information about how to sleep well is clearly propelling posts on social media, but it’s not being met by peer-reviewed studies.

For shikibuton specifically, Junge says, a study would need to monitor a group of people in controlled conditions and then compare that to how they sleep on a futon. It sounds simple, but it’s a resource-heavy exercise that Junge says “no one’s going to fund” and that makes sense considering what good sleep is competing for money against.

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“There’s a lot of research in sleep, and we have a sleep research study group, so we do it but a lot of it is firstly on sleep problems because people are first in the queue for that when it goes wrong,” Smith says.

“There are bits and pieces [on positive sleep and cultural aspects of sleep], but it’s not the same depth of research that can make an easy sort of recommendation to people. I think that’s partly because when sleep is fine, it’s unremarkable. We just do it. And when it’s not good, you often seek help.”

Junge says it’s for that reason that research into good sleep also needs to be funded, because with a reliance on subjective anecdotes comes snake oil salesmen.

“If people are desperate, you would spend as many thousands as you had spare or hundreds or whatever, you would spend it on sleep for sure,” Junge says. “People know the value of it once they don’t have it. The first time you value it the most is when you actually don’t get the sleep.”

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