Prolonged sitting for meetings or work related travels or driving for long hours and managing home, kids and work can lead to joint and nerve pains for working mums, as these physically stressful situations can lead to irritation of the nerves. Physical stresses can also be in the form of poor sleeping postures, as we spend quite a few hours in one position when we are sleeping. When it comes to relieving nerve pain, it's important to avoid sleeping positions that may exacerbate discomfort. In this blog, lets discuss which sleeping position is bad for nerve pain. We will also address how to adopt good sleeping postures to manage or avoid nerve pains.
When we sleep all our joints and muscles should be in a neutral position to prevent any stresses from building up on them during the night so we can wake up refreshed and pain free. One position that can potentially strain the neck and back and the whole spine is sleeping on your stomach. When you sleep on your stomach the curve in your lower back or your lumbar lordosis is exaggerated to its maximum capacity. So the curve sits at a maximum angle and there are additional stress on the nerves, muscles, ligaments and joints in the lumbar spine. This can aggravate your existing nerve pain originating in the back or could be the cause of your first episode of nerve pain. Also, when you sleep on your stomach you need to turn your neck to one side or the other. This causes a lot of tension on one side of the neck while creating compression on the other side of the neck. This can lead to nerve pain in the arms and hands, originating in the neck.
A simple solution to avoid or alleviate nerve pain is to sleep on your back or side, while maintaining a good sleeping posture. When you sleep on your back, keep your knees bent by placing some pillows or a bolster under your knees. This enables the lumbar spine to be flat on the bed and the muscles of the lumbar spine are well supported. If the knees are not bent, the lumbar spine does not touch the bed and are the muscles are left unsupported, leading to stress on the spine, nerves and muscles, that can then lead to nerve pain.
If you sleep on your side with the top leg crossing over the rest of the body, then use a pillow between the bed and the top leg. If you keep your knees stacked on top of each other then keep a pillow between the thighs. To measure the height of the pillow lie on your back so that your knees are facing the roof and put a pillow between your legs such that the thigh bones are parallel to each other. Using a pillow between your legs when side sleeping puts your pelvis in a neutral position, thus keeping your lower back muscles relaxed, thus avoiding Sciatic pain or any other nerve pain in the bottom and legs.
Here is a video that gives more details about "How Should You Sleep with a Pinched Nerve in Your Back?"
HERE is a free guide on "How can you manage your nerve pain?" where you can get more information about what are nerve pains, how do you know if you are suffering from nerve pains, simple solutions to manage your nerve pain and much more.
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