Hi everybody. Dr. Kinney here, your chiropractor for low back pain in Belmar, NJ.
Today I want to do a quick video on how to sleep when you have lower back pain.
So people ask me all the time, what’s a great mattress to use and what brand is bad. And honestly, it doesn’t really matter so much about that when you are a blur.
I mean it does. That’s a video for another day. Honestly, when you’re uncomfortable with lower back pain, you have to make yourself comfortable in the moment.
Sleep Strategies for Low Back Pain | Chiropractic Belmar, NJ
Honestly, the best thing to use is really just a pillow. So you can use a pillow, or throw a pillow off your couch or off your bed, or even just a regular pillow that you use for your head. One of the best ways to do this is just to use it at night, sleeping honestly, on your side is the best.
So I often think if you have lower back pain more on one side than another, you want to put the bad side up. And you want to sleep with a pillow between your knees.
Now, when you don’t have a pillow between your knees, your knees come together and they’re a little bit thinner than your hips are, your hips are wider.
So this tends to put a little bit more stress on your lower back. When you put the pillow between your knees. What that does, essentially is it makes your legs more parallel, taking some of the stress off the lower back.
If you can do this in conjunction with ice on the bad side of the lower back. That’s honestly the best 20 minutes on, take it off for 10 or 15 minutes. Put it back on for 20 as many rounds of 20 as you can do, laying on your side with that pillow between your knees.
That should help you sleep at night. If you’re a back sleeper, you could use the pillow underneath your knees almost like a bolster.
So what this does is pushes your lower back down to the bed or the table and kind of softens up the muscles when you sleep without a pillow. You get a little bit of an arch and that lower back kind of can hurt put more stress on the lower back.
So putting a pillow underneath your knees. When you sleep at night it is also going to if you sleep on your back, it’s going to help take some of the stress off the lower back.
You should never ever sleep on your belly. Sorry, belly sleepers, not a good thing when you have lower back pain.
So always try to either sleep on your side or on your back or the pillow that should help alleviate some of the stress.
All right, thank you!
