Should you sleep on your back, side or stomach?

The short answer is “on your back.”

However, here’s some food for thought. Very few people can control how they sleep. Some people can, but most can’t.

Sleeping on your back is the best for your back, but you shouldn’t become paranoid if you can’t do it. Video’s of patients during sleep studies have shown that people toss and turn multiple times per night. When the video is placed at high speed, it looks like someone is having a seizure.

When our first child was born I remember trying to “force” her to sleep on her back. All the fear with SIDS and stuff can scare a parent. So we would place her on her back. When she was old enough to roll, she would do what was instinctive to her and that was to sleep on her belly. One option would be for us to wake up every half hour and rotate her to her back, but that was not an option that could last for very long.

How you sleep is somewhat instinctive. That’s the lesson I learned from my kids.

If I give you advice, will you follow it?

I wish I could ask this question and get a straight answer, but it’s so uncomfortable that I just can’t do it.

Seriously though, if you ask for my advice, how long should the answer be? Is it worth my time to give you advice? Does it go in one ear and out the other?

You ask for my help with your spine, so I help you. Then you want to know how to keep it this way and I spend 30 minutes showing you how to exercise. The next time I see you, you have any of the following reasons why you didn’t do it:

“I forgot”
“I don’t have time”
“I dunno”
“I forgot what I was supposed to do”
“I was too busy”
“Does my insurance cover that?”

If I give you advice it’s because I’m trying to help you…so you better do it! Sometimes the most complex problems have the simplest answers. I think there are times when I might show someone one or two stretches or exercises that can make a tremendous difference, but because they seem so benign, they patient doesn’t do them. Their value or importance is not magnified enough.

Be assured that if I’m showing you something to do for yourself, I’m doing it for a reason. It’s to help you.

I had a patient that had neck pain and was raising her shoulders during every inhalation. She was over-utilizing her neck muscles and developing pain and cramping in her neck. I spent about 10-15 minutes teaching her how to perform diaphragmatic breathing. It’s like yoga-breathing. The purpose was to teach her to relax the muscles of her neck so that she wouldn’t hurt. She was to perform this ONCE per day for a total of 10 breaths.

On the next treatment I asked her if she did them and what the results were. “I didn’t have time” she said. She didn’t have time to take 10 breaths once per day! Imagine that!

Help me help you. Follow advice.