The base offers foot-warming settings designed to draw blood flow away from the core, helping you fall asleep more quickly. The ActiveBreeze provided more evenly distributed warmth, since the fans are in the center of the bed. I didn’t mind this, especially on chilly nights. You can also use the remote to set low, medium, or high heating speeds, which the bed can achieve in just a few minutes. Based on your programmed wake-up time, you also have the option for the Tempur-ActiveBreeze to warm up 30 minutes beforehand—which was lovely, but made leaving my tangibly warm, cozy bed that much harder.
Number Cruncher
Temperature control is only one facet of this smart bed; I found the sleep tracking to be just as impactful. With smart beds, I usually wear my Apple Watch to bed, and I cross-compare data points. The Tempur-ActiveBreeze’s sleep-tracking capabilities are encyclopedic, and you can’t opt out of them—within one day of testing the bed, I started receiving email breakdowns of my sleep data, with suggested areas for improvement.
You can get a quick overview of the sleep stages you achieved with a pie chart showing changes in breathing rate, heart rate variability, wake-ups, and whether you hit your target sleep goals. And that’s just the overview. In the “Sleep” tab within the app, the data is much more extensive, detailing the overview data points in graphs, charts, and numerical metrics. A lot of this data is repeated across views, but I appreciated the variety of visuals that explained what I was doing well and what needed improvement. Over time, the app will provide daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly breakdowns of your sleep data.
My biggest concern is that despite all this data, my initial reads didn’t align with what my Apple Watch was tracking, particularly for deep sleep and REM. There could be as much as a 40-minute difference between the data from the two trackers. By day five, the Tempur-ActiveBreeze seemed to get a better hold on my sleep patterns, and tracked data that was much more aligned with what my Apple Watch was reporting. Instead of drastic ranges, it was more of a 10-minute swing at most for REM, deep sleep, and time actually asleep.
Sidekick
As with many smart beds, most features are housed in the adjustable base rather than the mattress itself. The Tempur-ActiveBreeze’s bed and base are a package deal and only work together to let sleepers experience its marquee temperature-control feature.
When it comes to the mattress itself, it’s a classic Tempur-Pedic experience. The foam is not outright pressure-relieving, as I’ve experienced with other firm-feeling hybrid mattresses such as the Wolf Memory Foam Premium Firm hybrid mattress or the DreamCloud. It takes several minutes for the Tempur-ActiveBreeze’s surface to adapt to your body’s shape, and while it provides deep contouring, it’s still not as soft around pressure points as other beds I’ve tested. To be clear, it’s not uncomfortable, nor did it cause any aches or pains. But if you are highly sensitive to pressure point relief, keep it in mind. The indentations left by the contouring didn’t stop me from moving around, but they are more noticeable as you settle into a new sleep position and feel the impression from where you just moved.
