What is Your Sleeping Posture?

Sleep is one of the few natural phenomena that is hardwired into everyone. We are instinctively able to sleep, regardless of age. Everyone is born with an ability to sleep. This ability is demonstrated by the ability of babies to sleep. As far as everyone is concerned, it a natural process.

However natural sleeping is, it can end up being a not so easy endeavor. Various factors come into paly, each determining the extent of benefits derived from sleeping. Too much sleep is associated with some conditions detrimental to health such as obesity and cardiovascular diseases. On the other hand, too little of it is known to cause some negative side effects as well including dementia and diabetes.

At the pinnacle of factors affecting the amount od sleep one has is sleeping posture. Sleeping position has a hand in causing wrinkles, heartburn, and snoring.

Read the full story to find out how your sleeping position is affecting you.

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Stomach Sleeping

The Benefits: There is very little to gain by sleeping on your stomach. This sleeping position is the most disadvantageous sleeping position. Nevertheless, you stand to reduce susceptibility to apnea and snoring.

The demerits: Sleeping on your stomach distorts the natural alignment of the spine, leading to lower back aches. The resulting posture of the head, which is placed looking at one side only also affects the neck. If you are an advent stomach sleeper, you can reduce the impact on your back by placing a pillow just under your abdomen to raise your lower back.

• How to sleep away from neck pain

Side Sleeping

The Benefits: This is the most popular sleeping posture. More often than not, you will find yourself in a fetal pose while sleeping. Other times, you will be stretched out straight. Whichever of the two you opt for, you stand to ease the extent and the occurrence of any heartburn. Additionally, if you are pregnant, it is advised fro you to sleep on your left side, which improves circulation to the heart. Back sleeping during pregnancy places undue pressure on the back, which can cause fainting episodes.

The Demerits: Sleeping on one side the whole night can cause organ strain, with the lung and stomach being the most susceptible. Organ strain can be prevented by altering between the side as you sleep (which is rather difficult once you completely doze off). One side sleeping can also cause pressure-induced numbness on the arms. Supporting your body weight with one arm only, places a lot of pressure on the given armís muscles and nerves as well as restricting blood flow. As a consequence, you may end up experiencing painful needle sharp pains in your arm or an episode of ìrubber armî.

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Back Sleeping

The Benefits: Ask any physician which is the best sleeping posture and they will intuitively tell you that it is the savasana pose posture. The benefits that emanate from sleeping in this position are enormous. For starters, the whole of the back section, including the spine is relaxed and well supported. The mattress, in this case, can perform its work comprehensively by providing support to the spine. What this means is that the back muscles and the spine are relaxed and get a good night rest.

Additionally, the neck is placed in a neutral posture, thus reducing the occurrence of any unnecessary pressure.

Since your face is kept free of any compression against the pillow and mattress, it leaves you free from any sleep induced wrinkles. This is a huge plus for all those who aim to maintain a wrinkle-free face.

The Cons: as you would imagine, there are some definite cons is being back sleeper. One of them is the increased susceptibility to snoring and sleep apnea. Sleeping on your back causes the lower end of your tongue to collapse while you sleep, causing obstruction of the windpipe. Consequently, you end up snoring. There exist a high correlation between this sleeping position and snoring or apnea that one of their treatment is sleeping on your side!

Additionally, research into good night sleep has shown that people who snooze with this position tend to suffer from a poor night rest. Information stemming from the research that people who have a restless night, spend a good amount of time on their backs than in any other position.

Sleeping is a matter of comfortability, and a great deal should be done to ensure you are comfortable. Play around with the various sleeping posture until you find the perfect match for you.

How to optimize my sleeping position

In case you can not change your sleeping position, you can check out this video of  St. John to modify and optimizing your sleeping position then you can have a good sleep as well as good health.

Stomach sleep position

Stomach sleeping is bad idea for every body. Here's why. Most people sleep on their stomach with a pillow sometimes flat on the bed. But that's even not that much better.

So what were are doing is we are putting the spine into a little bit of an extension and tightening down all of these muscles that are comming down the back.

Along with that we can see that if we are going to sleep on our stomach we have to turn our head to the side that puts our cervical spine into a rotation or twist and then we stay there for hours and hours when we are sleeping.

The other thing that we end up seeing with stomach sleepers to again depending on the mattress and the state of the mattressis that the low back tends to curve too much here to kind of sinks into the bed and we end up getting some low back issues.

There are variations of what happened down here. People with their feet sometimes straight out, sometimes kicked to the side here. We are putting the hip into a shortened kind of position and very asymmetrical

The worst part of this sleeping position is what happens in the cervical spine and that rotation. In the clinic, doctors treat atlas access distortions mal positionings of those structures by releasing muscles around them and you are in this twist and most people tend to turn their head to the same side every time they sleep on their stomach.

It is not like they switch back and forth which would make it better but it is still not great.

Side sleep position

Here we have a side sleep position with one pillow. Side sleeping is really an okay position to sleep in although many people find it tobe uncomfortable.

If you have a shoulder injury or shoulder pain, that could be problematic. Here to again we run into folks with certain neck issues and certain low back issues. And I want to show you how to make this side sleeping position better, more comfortable and something that you can do to help alleviate any of those discomforts that you have.

First of all, we are going to start down at the bottom here. There is a couple of things missing. What we want to do is support the knees and the low back here a little bit beeter. And in doing that I'm going to grab a pillow from knees and we are going to use this one right between the knees. Many people like to be stacked up as we call it the hips one on top of the other, the knees one on top of the other right here. And this is a great position.

We don't want the knees to be too bent like up in that crunched up, kind of fetal position because that again will tighten things across the hips here overnight. But a stack knee position with a pillow that go from the knee all the way down to the ankle.

There are some products out there that kind of only supports the knee but what happens here is then the foot falls down towards the bed put some torque on the knee and possibly soem rotation in the hip.

So if you can manage a pillow between the knees that covers the whole lower leg supports the thigh. Basically what we are going for is to have this upper leg parallel to the bed.

Some people like to sleep with a knee thrown out in front of the other, so in that position go ahead and straighten out your back leg. This position actually becomes pretty problematic for side sleeper.

Here we put a huge rotation into the low back and often. That ends up being uncomfortable after a little while and we get some low back problems. Here we need maybe something more substantial a larger pillow or I've seen different yoga bolsters and things like that that work well here. We put this thicker pillow out in front again. Here the hips stay a little stacked up. Again the thigh is parallel to the table and we've got a good untwisted supported position here for the lower half of the body.

For Female, they usually have wider shoulders, narrow waist and hider hips. So what happens in the side lying position is their lumbar spine is kind of want to fall down towards the bed/the mattress. This is where we get into a little discussion of mattresses depending on how good the support is in your mattress. This may be taken care of in a good mattress, their hips will sink a little bit farther and  the shoulders sink a little bit farther and the mattress kind of arise to support this. But in this case, you can use a pillow to support you waist and that can ensure your backbone, spine in a nice straight position.

In order to optimize your side lying position, you should need a partner to look at you from the back while you are lying down in bed, then he/she can justify your position & pillow support to create an ideal side lying position.

Back sleeping position

Now let consider back sleeping position. This is position that most people get into, completely flat on the bed and a nice big fluffy pillow underneath the head. But what we can see there is big problem with this position is that this nice big fluffy pillow has pushed you into a major head forward position. This problem is happened with most people when they use big down pillows and these pillows are not appropriate for your body size or not appropriate for the position that your head needs to be in.

In the approach with the straight of your spine, let remove the pillow, we can see that the middle of the shoulder joint should line up with the middle of the ear. This is good alignment form front to back. When we get too far out in front of our shoulder, the head becomes in the head forward. We tighten up all these muscles along the front side of the neck and that can even start to involve muscles down to the chest and we can get this rounded forward head. Neck pain shoulder playing kind of situation.

However, you can see that there is nothing support the back of your neck. What ends up happening over time is the head will start to go into an extent flat position and the next starts to press down towards the bed and then we get a straight and vertical spine.

So what we want to do is find something like a roll – neck roll. Some people use a towel rolled up and you can find a towel to create a pillow with 3.5 inches. You should try to create a rolled pillow that suitable for your neck to ensure that your head actually rest on the mattress, your neck is supported and the ear is in line with the shoulders which is what we want it for this kind of coronal plane alignment.

An extra things we need to consider is if there is patent with a low back problem especially if the low back tends to curve too much, we might want to support underneath the knees. This is probably the orthopedically musculoskeletal of most neutral position to sleep in and the one we recommend to most of you.

We do not recommend back sleeping position if you suffer from sleep apnea or have significant snoring problems.