How to choose an outdoor camping sleeping mat (moisture-proof mat)?

For outdoor camping, sleeping mats are the most important partner to isolate the cold earth. Choosing a sleeping mat suitable for your activities is as important as choosing a tent or sleeping bag.

When you first enter the outdoors and purchase equipment, you always attach great importance to tents and sleeping bags, but often overlook sleeping mats. It’s no wonder:

There are four ways to lose heat from the human body: evaporation, convection, conduction, and radiation. Among them, conduction and convection dissipate the most heat, while lying down while sleeping, the heat loss from conduction accounts for the bulk.

If you sleep directly on the ground outdoors, the result is that no matter how thick a sleeping bag is wrapped, you will feel cold, because the ground is constantly sucking your heat away. There is a large loss of heat, ranging from weak action on the second day, to direct loss of temperature at night.
Sleeping mats (commonly known as "moisture-proof mats" by domestic mountain friends) have become indispensable equipment for outdoor activities in the sense of isolating the cold earth. Compared with the beds at home, they are lighter in weight and easy to pack, making them suitable for outdoor people.
There is no doubt about the necessity of sleeping pads. As outdoor players, what we want to know is that there are so many sleeping mats on the market, how can we evaluate and choose the best?

Why is down material so warm? Because there are countless small air sacs formed between the velvet flowers. The design idea of ​​sleeping pads is also the same: lock the air. Based on this, there are three types of sleeping pads on the market:

Foam cushion-keep warm through countless small airbags inside the dense closed-cell foam material.

Inflatable cushion-artificially construct an air bag and fill it with air to keep warm. Some models will fill the airbag with other insulation materials to further enhance the thermal performance.

Self-inflating cushion-a combination of foam cushion and inflatable cushion, using the expansion of open-cell foam to achieve self-inflating effect.