What sleeping position is good for lower back pain? How to sleep without lower back pain

Many people have had this experience in life: waking up from a sleep and feeling sore in the waist and back. People often wonder if their sleeping posture is incorrect. So what sleeping position is better for back pain?

The quality of sleeping posture is closely related to low back pain, and many patients with low back pain may have experienced this. If you sleep in a comfortable position all night, your lower back pain will be significantly relieved when you wake up the next morning, and you will often feel more energetic. On the other hand, if the patient has a bad sleeping position at night, or tosses and turns and has difficulty falling asleep, the low back pain will be aggravated and even induce new symptoms.

The ideal sleeping position should keep the waist in a natural physiological curvature. In addition to paying attention to the lying position, you should also use some padding to keep the lumbar spine in a physiological curvature state.

When lying on your back, you should usually place a soft pillow under your lower limbs and keep your hips and knees flexed. This position can relax muscles throughout the body, significantly reduce the pressure in the lumbar intervertebral space, alleviate the posterior disc protrusion, and reduce the tension on the iliopsoas muscle and sciatic nerve. This is the best position for patients with intervertebral disc herniation or other lower back pain accompanied by sciatic nerve symptoms.

When using the side-lying and prone positions, you can take the following approaches:

(1) When lying on your side, bend your hips and knees to eliminate lumbar extension and reduce the occurrence of low back pain.

(2) When lying in the prone position, the lumbar spine is stretched further backwards, which may cause low back pain. If you occasionally need to sleep in this position, you should place a pillow or something under your pelvis to change the excessive extension of the lumbar spine and prevent low back pain.