Side sleeper whose arm goes numb every night — which pillow finally got the height right? Pillow

The towel result is the whole answer: you need a fixed loft you can tune, not a material. Shredded-fill pillows exist for exactly this — Coop's Original ships with an extra half-pound bag of fill so you can add or take out until it stops fighting your shoulder, and their trial runs 100 nights with free returns, with the caveat that the free return does not apply if you bought it through a marketplace listing rather than direct. Buy direct, take the fill out in small handfuls, give each height three nights.

Cheap experiment before spending anything: keep sleeping on the towel-plus-pillow stack and measure the total height when it is compressed under your head. That number is your target loft. I did this and discovered I needed about 13 cm, which immediately eliminated three quarters of the pillows I had been considering.

Broad shoulders, side sleeper, and what worked for me after years of this was a latex pillow with a stepped profile, taller edge under the neck and lower centre. It is unforgiving — no adjustment at all, you either bought the right height or you did not — but it does not compress overnight, which was my complaint with everything else. If you go this way, measure from the edge of your shoulder to the side of your neck and buy to that number.

Numb arm is not always the pillow. Mine stopped when I put a second pillow between my knees, because my top leg was rolling forward and torquing my shoulder into the mattress. Cost me nothing to test and it changed the problem completely. Worth ruling out before you spend seventy pounds.

Mattress firmness sets the pillow height, which is why every recommendation thread contradicts itself. On a soft mattress your shoulder sinks in and you need a lower pillow; on a firm one your shoulder stays proud and you need a much taller one. Post what you sleep on and the answers get twice as useful.