Best ways to sleep when you have back pain

Everybody experience back pain at some point in their lives. It becomes more prevalent with increasing age. Understanding the mechanism of back pain will help you to understand the postures that minimize the pain. Some of the causes of back pain  are spondylosis, quada equine syndrome, spinal disc degeneration and radiculopathy. These are diseases of the vertebral column. Degenerative changes of the inter-vertebral discs  are responsible for most of the back pains. The discs are composed of two components. They are the nucleus pulposes and the annulus fibrosus which surrounds the nucleus pulposus. With aging, the discs get dehydrated. As a result, they get compressed. This reduces the disc space and the annulus fibrosus bulges out. These changed initially causes ischemia to the spinal cord creating ischemic pain. The bulged disk can compress the nerve roots. As a result, the nerves get irritated and pain arises. These changes mainly occur in the lower back because it holds most of the body weight.

As described above, the causes for the back pain accelerate when more weight is put on to them. Therefore, you should sleep in a way that minimizes the weight on the vertebral column. Sleeping on your side is one of the ways to minimize strain on your back. Turn to our back with hips and knees slightly flexed. You should not let your upper leg fall off because, it can twist your vertebral column and causes more pain. You can prevent it from falling off by keeping a pillow between the knees and thighs. There are specially designed pillow that you can buy to fulfill this purpose. Sometimes, people who are used to sleep in their back tend to change their posture back in to the supine position when in sleep. You can place another pillow behind your back to prevent this from happening. If you want to sleep on your back , you should make sure that you maintain the normal curves of the back. To achieve this, you can place a pillow under your knees. In addition, you can also place a small rolled towel under your lower back. Always place a pillow under your neck.

The worst position  for back pain is sleeping on your stomach. It puts a lot of strain on your back and thereby aggravates the back pain. Therefore, you should take all the precautions to not to sleep on your stomach. There are commercially available mattresses and pillows  that are designed to make you sleep comfortably.