In this ‘Common Causes of Pain’ video I talk about ways you can help yourself avoid getting neck and low back pain from sleeping or laying on your front, as this is a common problem I’ve seen in my practice over the years.
If, by some chance you find yourself with acute neck or low back pain and happen to live near an Osteopath (or me if you’re in Kent, U.K.) then do come and see us as we can do an awful lot to help these sorts of problems.
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Hello welcome to P ostos so today I wanted to talk about another avoidable cause of pain and that would be the pain you get from laying on your front and sleeping on your front so you can get pain from sleeping by laying on your front either with your
Hands here a pillow here sometimes without even a pillow there it just depends on the shape of your spine um in relation to how it is being held and the adjustment that it has had to keep it moving or not as the case may be
So when you you all on your front you tilt your head you have to not just rotate but you have to tilt and slightly extend normally to tilt upwards um the neck in order to be comfortable laying on your front initially when you do that it actually brings together the The
Joint surfaces of the neck and that can lead to inflammation so causing you pain and that pain signal then will relate to the spinal cord and then cause a contraction signal back to your muscles so you end up with not just pain and inflammation from the original compression that you’ve given
Yourself but you end up with muscle contraction so spasms and that can lead to more pain and inflammation and more muscle contraction and so the cycle continues until you break it and you break it normally by waking up moving around sometimes you’ll put a heat pack there maybe have a
Shower might use an ice pack sometimes that can help release things and sometimes you’ll go and you’ll see your local osteopath and if you’re in midstone in Kent come and see me and then we’ll help you to feel better but how can you stop that because I mean
It’s not just next that it affects it can affect your low back as well it’s not very nice is it to be interrupted by pain when you wake up so when you sleep you think well what can I do to modify how I sleep sometimes sleeping on
Your front with your head turned it’s just not the best idea for you you know everyone has their own shape of their body and everyone different and not just that but the surface they sleep on the quality of the bed will be different so there are a lot of variables and
There isn’t one hard and fast for all but one thing I can say is that sleeping on your front is not generally good best thing to do is to sleep on your side so if you sleep on your side you don’t have the same issues with over
Arching your neck or over rotating your neck or over tilting your neck unless you don’t use enough pillows so ideally you would sleep on your side you got enough pillows to keep your neck centered in midline and not tilting one way or the other if you can do that you
Shouldn’t have any issues generally speaking people can sleep on either one side or the other if you have trouble with that one thing you can do is you get a pillow and you put it between your knees with the pillow between your knees it then makes it less
Likely for you to roll over onto your front because there’s a pillow in the way so it’s just a less likely to do it it doesn’t necessarily stop you sometimes in your sleep you’ll move it out the way and you’ll go back to laying on your front but it can it can
Help if you just can’t do that or if that just doesn’t work for you the other thing you might want to try is to use a pillow again this time you put it here and that way you’ve got that extra space which when you compress the laying
On the pillow is just enough to take the pressure away from the joints and make it less likely less likely not impossible that they’ll cause you pain if that fails it may well be something to do with the bed the quality of the bed as I mentioned sometimes they’ll
Dip and sometimes it’s you and your head position if it’s held far too far forwards from perhaps you know working a lot on a computer or maybe you’re doing a lot of driving then you’re going to need to perhaps look at that and see what you can do about it if there’s
Anything you can adjust in your work ergonomics the driving position in in the car or the how you’ve got your laptop or computer workstation set up then you need to look at that so you’re not having to be in this position at the time and that can help alleviate it
Quite often if that doesn’t work work it may be something that you need help with so by help I mean from a therapist like the self like I mentioned if that’s the case then what we would do is we would look at you see where any restrictions
Are in your body we would start to work gently through the restrictions trying to give you advice as we went as to how you can help yourself cuz ultimately when you go to see somebody you don’t just go to see them and expect them to do everything for you if you do then
You’re fooling yourself we don’t do that what we do is we advise we help we adjust what we can what we see at the time and the advice we give you then take home and you do yourself so together with what we do and what we
Advise you to do equals what you end up doing at home you end up with a result don’t forget you know if you don’t change anything thing that you do you’re going to be in the same position as you were cuz everything you’ve done up till now has brought you to where you
Are that’s all I really wanted to say today so step on your side it’s a lot [Applause] Easier