This video is going to be about How Not To Sleep. I’m going to show you a few of the common things that most people do that creates pain particularly in their neck, but that can also create problems like numbness and tingling down the hands.
So let’s demonstrate. One of the worst things that people do when they sleep is that they sleep with too many pillows. In the video you can see she has two pillows and while that might look comfortable, her neck is actually going forward. Some people sleep with three pillows, and so they sleep propped up. Now, you may be very tired at the end of the day and you might be able to sleep like this, but you will end up with neck pain. It might not happen immediately, but this adds up. Maybe six months down the line, a year down the line, you’ll start getting neck pain from sleeping in this position.
Now another wrong way of sleeping is face down. People tell me “Oh, I sleep face down, Doc. Is that good for me?” Absolutely not. The reason why this is not good for you is that when you’re sleeping face down you are kinking the neck, so it’s like you’re wringing a towel but with the neck and spine. You don’t want to sleep face down, because you will wake up with pain. It doesn’t matter whether your head is facing to the left or right side, you will end up with pain because of kinking of the nerves and the muscles.
Some people sleep face down with their hand under their head. Some people have gotten used to this from a very early age. And doing this puts a lot of pressure on the neck and on the shoulder. I treat a young lady who got hurt from doing this for many, many years. She ended up with frozen shoulder because of this sleeping position.
And the last position is sleeping with the wrists curled in. Now when you sleep like this you are kinking your neck and the wrist. This can cause you to develop carpal tunnel syndrome.
So these are the top three ways that people get hurt when they’re sleeping. And this is something that you can easily avoid. How? You have to you lay on your back. Like any other habit, you've got to practice a good habit, practice sleeping on your back with one pillow. This is the proper way of sleeping. You can overcome many habits in a period of 5-7 weeks. I hope you got value out of this segment. Thank you for watching.
