Sleeping on your stomach is bad for you. It can’t be put more simply. If sleeping on your stomach is your main sleeping position you need to stop.
There are a number of sleep positions that aren’t optimal but sleeping on your stomach is the worst.
Sleeping on your stomach flattens the curves of your spine which is something that we obviously don’t want. While some people feel that sleeping on your stomach reduces snoring and helps with sleep apnea, this doesn’t make much sense to me. And the negatives of sleeping this way far outweigh the positives.
In addition to flattening the curves of the spines, sleeping on your stomach means misery for your neck. Technically if you were to sleep on your stomach you should be face down into the pillow but I have yet to meet anyone who can breathe that way.
Instead you will have to turn your head to one side, and even if you alternate sides over the course of the night it will not balance out the negative effects of spending hours with your head turned in either direction.
Do it now for one minute and see how it feels. Then multiply that one minute by 360 if you sleep only 6 hours a night and you will start to understand why you might be waking up with neck pain and/or numbness in the arms and hands.
So sleeping on your stomach flattens your spine and tweaks your neck but it is sleeping you say, and how can we change something while we sleep when we are ideally dead to the world.
Here is the simplest and most effective way to stop sleeping on your stomach.
Either wear a shirt with a breast pocket and put the tennis ball into it or you can even go so far as to sew a tennis ball onto the front of your shirt in the middle of your abdomen.
If you can fall asleep that way, more power to you but I think it will be highly unlikely and you will break what is truly a bad habit.
And of course someone else has thought of selling this, so click on the image above if you want to buy a ready made t-shirt. Ignore the snore part of the pitch but other than that I love the fact that everything is available on the internet.
My mission is to help people find a way out of chronic pain and recurring injuries. While sleep positions have a profound impact on our spine so does the way we walk.
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