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Why sleeping posture is important

Good sleep posture is absolutely critical for a healthy body, since we spend such long periods of time every day without moving.

While you sleep, your muscles and ligaments unwind and repair themselves. Stresses and tensions from the day should release with proper sleep posture, enabling you to wake up feeling rested and refreshed.

Let’s look at how you can ensure your sleeping posture is perfect to reduce your neck or back pain.

Picking the right pillow

Your pillow should be comfortable and supportive of your necks natural curvature.

A pillow that is too high might force your neck into a posture that strains the muscles in your back, neck, and shoulders.

Pick a pillow that will keep your spine straight, in line with your chest and lower back.

Alignment

Regardless of which position you choose to sleep in, make an effort to maintain your hips, shoulders, and ears in a straight line.

We recommend using an additional pillow to support your knees and maintain a neutral spine.

If you sleep on your back, place a pillow under your knees to relieve pressure on your spine and support the lower back's natural curve.

If you sleep on your side, a firm pillow between your knees will prevent your upper leg from pulling your spine out of alignment and reduce stress on your hips and lower back. Pull your knees up slightly toward your chest. This helps to align your pelvis.

We do not recommend you sleep on your front. There is significant medical research to show that this is a position likely to destabilize your spine leading to neck and back pain.

In clinic we have some adjustable orthopedically shaped memory foam pillows available for you to buy.

The Sacroiliac Joint or SIJ as it’s also known as can be a real pain in the bum, literally, and is a problem for many of us. It’s the joint where the Sacrum, an upside down triangular shaped bone at the bottom of the spine meets a section of the pelvis called the ilium, hence sacro-iliac. Activities like sitting or standing for long periods, usually aggravate it, and anyone who has SIJ issues knows that it can make getting up from sitting down, getting out the car, rolling over in bed and bending a painful issue, let alone sport and exercise. Pain can be felt in the lower back, buttocks, hip and even down the leg.

It’s a joint that was for a long time thought not to move, but it is now known that it does but only slightly and is needed for shock absorption and to take the pressure off the lumbar spine. Basically, it acts as a buffer between the hip and the lumbar spine. It has ligaments helping the structure, but also some large muscles including quadratus lumborum, hamstrings, gluteal muscles, psoas, erector spinae, piriformis, abdominal obliques.

Chiropractic adjustments along with soft tissues techniques can be used to correct hypermobility (instability) or hypomobility (stiffness) in the joints, rehab exercises can get the supporting muscles firing better and stronger. All this will take the pressure off the joint to give it a chance to heal and become less inflamed.

If you think you might have a problem with your SIJ it is important to get checked out by a professional such as a Chiropractor. At Watkins Chiropractic in Uckfield & Haywards Heath, we have helped hundreds of patients get on top of their SJI pain and work on how to reduce the risk of flare ups in the future. Just call 01825 890592 to book a consultation.

This is a question I get asked all the time, and I think we all know the difference between a good and bad pillow or mattress can mean. You only have to have slept in a few hotels or B&B’s to have experienced what difference a bad pillow can make to your sleep as well the comfort in your neck and shoulders the next day.

We have always stocked the Complete Sleeprrr Pillow, why? Because it’s the best pillow we’ve found by far. We recommend a pillow that supports your neck as well as your head, which is achieved through the therapeutically designed shape, it keeps your neck in line with the rest of your spine reducing stress on it during your sleep. The memory foam is soft and comfortable unlike many of the other contoured pillows on the market. The channels in the surface of the pillow encourage air circulation.

Finally, a feature unique to the Complete Sleeprrr, it’s adjustable depth. Because not everyone has the same size shoulders and because some are side sleepers and are back sleepers there are 2 middle sections which can be removed if you need to make the pillow thinner.

The Sleeprrr is only stocked by health professionals and isn’t available in the shops. If you would like to see how great it is, we always keep them in stock. If you would like to see how else, we can improve your neck and shoulders problems just call Watkins Chiropractic on 01825 890592.

Experiencing pain is normal. Everyone experiences pain now and then. Pain is supposed to be a protective experience to make sure you stop doing things that may be dangerous. But chronic pain, that is pain that has persisted for more than 3 months, is no longer protective, nor informative. Let’s look at what chronic pain is and what you can do about getting rid of it.

All pain is created by your brain, because your brain has decided that you are threatened or in danger and need protecting. The interesting thing here is that you don’t actually have to have any actual tissue damage to feel pain. And if your brain is not aware of tissue damage, you may not feel any pain at all, even when you’ve injured yourself. Chronic pain is the second most common reason people see a doctor and miss work. More than one third of people with chronic pain become disabled by their pain to some degree. Chronic pain can be mild or excruciating, it can be episodic or continuous, it can be merely inconvenient or totally incapacitating. The pain can be from headaches, or joint pain, neck pain, back pain, or pain from an injury. Other kinds of chronic pain include tendinitis, or sinus pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, and pain affecting specific parts of the body such as shoulders, elbows, wrists, hands, hips, knees, ankles or feet. The common thing with all these types of pain is that the actual feeling of pain is always, 100% of the time, created in your brain. This does not mean it’s not real; it’s very real. But understanding that the pain itself is created in your brain has major implications for how you can get rid of it. And because pain depends so much on what you think and feel about the pain, it’s very important you understand pain properly.

Your pain experience depends on why your brain has decided you need to be protected. Why it’s the feeling of pain for you in the first place. It can therefore be very useful for you to try to figure out why your brain may be creating pain for you. What was happening at or around the time your pain started. What makes it worse? What makes it better? Why is this so important? Because we know that the brain can be retrained, so you need to use all the tools available to you to retrain your brain out of pain. Some of the keys to retraining your brain are staying active, staying positive, eating well and sleeping well. Today let’s look at why staying active is so important. Your posture and how you move plays an important role in how you feel and how you experience pain. Even as little as a short walk every day can help. If there are movements you cannot do because of your pain you can still help yourself by imagining those movements. We know from neuroscience research that imagining a movement influences the brain in a very similar way to actually doing the movement. This can help to retrain your brain to understand that the movement is not dangerous, because imagining doing the movement will not hurt. You can basically trick your brain into giving you back pain-free movement. Play with these sorts of things. Make movement fun. Move in different emotional states, like when you’re happy or grateful. Move outside in the sun, in a park with beautiful plants and flowers. Or move in water. The movement of your spine is also very important. Yoga or simple spinal exercises can be great for this, and Chiropractic care may be really important to help you move too. The main focus of chiropractic care is to improve the movement and function of your spine. This is so important because proper movement of the spine helps the brain to know more accurately what is going on, not just in the spine, but also elsewhere in the body. And Chiropractic care is already well known in the research literature to help people who suffer with neck pain, back pain and headaches. This is most likely because Chiropractic care helps the brain to know more accurately what is going on in the spine and body and may help the brain to switch off the feelings of pain, when they are no longer needed.

So if you suffer with chronic pain, do your best to stay positive, move often, eat well, sleep well, and go see your family Chiropractor to help retrain your brain out of pain.