Tempur-Pedic Pro Breeze 10-Month Review: How I Learned to Love Memory Foam [CNET]

I have been testing mattresses for over six years, and have never been a fan of memory foam until I took the plunge and brought home the Tempur-Pedic Pro Breeze. Here’s my experience.

One of the perks of being a mattress tester is having the ability to readily swap out my home mattress for something new and different. We test hundreds of mattresses in our Reno office, but only one mattress for each of our experts gets to be a “home” mattress. 

For over five years my home mattress was the Purple Hybrid Premier 3, which I loved. That bed, and the new iterations of Purple Hybrids, has a very unique feel thanks to the special top layer, the GelFlex Grid, that I think is supremely comfortable. My partner, Elli, liked the Purple we slept on at home and found it comfortable, but after a while, we started running into issues — namely that they kept waking up at night due to inadequate motion isolation.

Motion isolation refers to how well a bed can deaden the impacts of one partner tossing and turning and subsequently waking up the other. The motion isolation on Purple is pretty good, but Elli is a light sleeper, so we eventually decided we needed something different to help them get uninterrupted sleep. 

Tempur-Pedic is easily one of the best brands in the motion isolation category, which is the main reason we decided to give it a try and the experience has been fantastic.

Why the Tempur-Pedic Pro Breeze?

The specific mattress we took home is the Tempur-Pedic Pro Breeze. In our office, we have most of the Tempur-Pedic lineup, including the Luxe Breeze, Adapt and ProAdapt. 

We chose the Pro Breeze because it is an all-foam model, and we have the Luxe Breeze and Adapt in the hybrid model. I prefer hybrid beds because I enjoy the support and extra bounce provided by coils, but Elli said they felt the coils too much on the Luxe Breeze. I thought if motion isolation is the main reason for finding a new mattress, we should go with the foam model that performs the best. 

Also, my partner is a big fan of a traditional memory foam feel — the mattress they had before we moved in together was the Nectar Original, which they loved but I didn’t. 

I have tested hundreds of different mattresses, and I never gravitated toward memory foam beds — I always saw the appeal, but the style of comfort just wasn’t for me because I often felt “stuck” when trying out dense memory foam mattresses. Being in a couple is about middle ground and we slept on Purple for a long time, so it was definitely my turn to compromise, but I wasn’t initially thrilled with this choice. 

One thing I was excited about was the active cooling features of the Pro Breeze. I had never taken home a bed with a cooling cover before and that was another reason we chose the Pro Breeze over the other Tempur-Pedic beds.

Initial thoughts on the Tempur-Pedic Pro Breeze

Having tested many Tempur-Pedic mattresses, I had a good idea of what to expect when we took this bed home. It is surprisingly heavy for an all-foam mattress, but it wasn’t too difficult to get it home in my small truck. If you decide to get this mattress for yourself, it comes with a complimentary in-home setup, but being a mattress expert also means moving beds around yourself is par for the course. 

I admit that I don’t really like the look of the Tempur-Pedic mattresses. For being a luxury brand, the beds don’t look all that inviting to sleep on, and the cooling cover on the Pro Breeze makes the mattress look almost “high tech,” which is not my favorite aesthetic for our cozy bedroom. 

The way a mattress looks doesn’t matter all that much since it’s covered by sheets and bedding, but I do notice the appearance. 

Tempur-Pedic Pro Breeze sleeping experience

Tempur-Pedic Pro Breeze firmness and sleeper types

In our office testing, we rated this mattress as a medium, which means it should work decently well for all sleeper types. A medium firmness is important to us because I am a primary side sleeper who prefers a plush-feeling mattress, and my partner is a combination side and stomach sleeper. 

Fortunately for us, the firmness worked really well for both of us right off the bat. I never dealt with pain issues on the old Purple which is a hair softer than the Pro Breeze, but Elli did have occasional bouts of lower back pain and the Tempur-Pedic alleviated that rather quickly and I haven’t developed any aches and pains on this mattress. 

I sleep on my side the vast majority of the time and only occasionally swap to my back and the firmness profile of the Pro Breeze works well for me and for my partner.

One quirk about this mattress is that the firmness can be slightly variable depending on the temperature of our bedroom. In the winter, we generally keep the thermostat fairly low to save on the energy bill (around 65 degrees) and when I first lay down on the mattress it feels super firm until the foam warms up underneath me, and the opposite has been happening throughout the summer. 

This actually has to do with foam chemistry, which I learned while touring the 3Z Brands mattress factory.

This only impacts the initial firmness of the mattress and normalizes quickly once I start falling asleep, but it is an interesting phenomenon. 

Tempur-Pedic Pro Breeze mattress feel

The Tempur-Pedic brand is synonymous with memory foam (sometimes called visco foam) and really pioneered using this material in beds. The foam on this mattress rebounds very slowly and has very little bounce which makes it feel really dense.

As I said earlier, before taking this mattress home I have not been a fan of beds with this type of feel but after sleeping on it for ten months, I have been completely converted to loving memory foam. 

“I find this mattress to be super comfy in any sleeping position. I tend to sleep on my side and stomach, and even my back sometimes and it is comfortable regardless. It can take a minute for the foam to adapt to my body, but once it does it’s great,” says my partner, Elli.

Once I’m fully nestled into the top layers and the foam has conformed to my shape it feels really nice — but the biggest thing I love about it is how restful my sleep is. Most nights I will fall asleep on my left shoulder and wake up in the exact same position.

My sleep-tracking data also backs this up. I have worn a Garmin Forerunner 965 watch to sleep every night since May of this year. It not only tracks my sleep, but it also gives me a nightly “sleep score” based on several factors, including your sleep stages, sleep duration, stress, total awake time and restless moments. 

Garmin almost always rates my awake time and restless moments stat (which it counts together) as “excellent” when I sleep at home. Fortunately for me, I am a very heavy sleeper and rarely wake up in the middle of the night, so I wasn’t sure if I could attribute this to the mattress until I took a weeklong trip in June. I slept on a hotel mattress, and my sleep score was worse, and my restless moments increased. The same thing happened on two short weekend trips in July. 

My old watch didn’t track sleep in as much detail, so I can’t really compare my old sleep data effectively. I always felt like I got good sleep on Purple, but I think I sleep a bit better on the Tempur Pedic.

Tempur-Pedic Pro Breeze cooling factor

My partner and I have found after 10 months of sleeping on the Tempur-Pedic Pro Breeze that the cooling factor is quite strong, so strong that it is not always welcome in the winter months. 

I am writing this in August and the cooling nature of the Pro Breeze has been a real benefit throughout the summer. It is nowhere near strong enough to keep you sleeping cool when the outside temps reach 100 degrees and you don’t have air conditioning installed yet (we do now), but I do think I would have had worse sleep quality on a different mattress before we got our AC situation solved. 

The winter was a different story. We try to keep the thermostat low to save on our heating bill, so crawling into a bed with a cooling cover wasn’t our favorite thing — but one benefit of the design on the Pro Breeze is that the cover is removable, so we just zipped it off and stored it in our linen closet until it started to heat up again. 

Having this feature on a cooling mattress is very underrated in my opinion because most of the time there’s no way to really blunt the cooling factor on something like the Brooklyn Bedding Aurora Luxe aside from putting on thicker sheets.  

The other Tempur-Pedic mattresses, like the Pro Adapt and Luxe Breeze we’ve tested, also have removable cooling covers, but the base model Adapt is not removable. 

We rate the Adapt line of mattresses to have a nice cooling factor but they are not as strong as the Breeze mattresses. 

Tempur-Pedic Pro Breeze motion isolation

The primary reason we chose a classic memory foam mattress like this was that Elli wanted the best possible performance for deadening cross-mattress motion. On the old Purple mattress, it was not an issue for me because I am a heavy sleeper, but I would occasionally wake up briefly from Elli tossing and turning, or from our fairly active cat jumping on the bed. 

On the Tempur-Pedic, it happens so infrequently that I literally cannot remember the last time I woke up from motion transfer in the middle of the night. 

“On this mattress, I feel virtually no vibration or motion transfer, so I almost never wake up from Owen tossing and turning, which really helps me get more restful sleep in comparison to our old mattress,” Elli says.

So not only does Elli not feel the motion transfer when I toss and turn, but I toss and turn less overall because of the dense memory foam. 

For any light sleepers struggling with motion isolation, a classic memory foam mattress like this could be the solution.

Tempur Pedic Pro Breeze edge support

I do find myself sleeping near the perimeter of the bed often, thanks in large part to our cat, who insists on sleeping between humans. 

I had low expectations of the edge support because it is an all-foam mattress with no construction elements designed to enhance the edge support, and memory foam layers compress with pressure. 

So far I have been pleasantly surprised and experienced few issues with edge support over the ten months of sleeping on this mattress. If I sleep on my back near the edge, I can sometimes feel a slight roll-off sensation, but on my side, it has not been a problem.

Elli says, “I think the edge support isn’t the best, but it only becomes an issue sitting on the edge of the bed or if I’m really forced as far to the edge as possible. Otherwise, it’s been totally fine.”

Overall the Tempur-Pedic Pro Breeze is a top-performing mattress for couples thanks to the solid edge support and top-tier motion isolation.

Final thoughts on the Tempur-Pedic Pro Breeze

After sleeping on this mattress for nearly a year, I can say that I love it, and I think it is fantastic. I did not expect to like this mattress as much as I do because of my historic aversion to beds with a true, dense memory foam feel. It did take some time for me to adjust to sleeping on a bed that was so drastically different from the Purple mattress I slept on for so long — but once I did, I found it to be incredibly comfortable, and I often wake up feeling legitimately rejuvenated. 

As much as I love sleeping on this bed — I will likely be switching it out for something different soon because I want to be able to test the long-term sleeping experience on different beds, and one thing I dislike about Tempur-Pedic is just how expensive its beds are. The Pro Breeze mattress is out of many people’s budget, including my own, and I want to see if more affordable beds can provide the same sleeping experience.  

There are more affordable beds from Tempur-Pedic like the Cloud, Adapt and ProAdapt mattresses, and those will provide the same type of memory foam feel I have experienced on the Pro Breeze, with the biggest difference being the Pro Breeze has a more powerful cooling factor.

I think one lesson I have taken away from spending nearly a year sleeping on this mattress is that your tastes on mattress feel can change and if you try a type of mattress that you haven’t enjoyed in the past, you might be pleasantly surprised.