You can't sleep because you have neck pain and or
a pinched nerve. What do you do? In this video, I'm going to show you the best ways to sleep
comfortably, whether you have neck pain, a pinched nerve, or both. Stay tuned.
My name's Dr. Jon Saunders. I've been in clinical practice for 21 years treating patients
with spinal related conditions. In this video I'm going to discuss how you can sleep comfortably.
If you have a pinched nerve in your neck that just won't let you fall asleep at night, I know
it can be frustrating and prevent you from getting a good night's sleep. There are ways that allow
you to get comfortable so you can get the sleep necessary to allow your body to heal. If you're
suffering from a pinched nerve in your neck, you know it can be downright frustrating.
Further, it can prevent you from falling asleep and getting a comfortable night's sleep, which
is imperative to your body's ability to heal. One important thing you need to consider when trying
to sleep with a pinched nerve or neck pain is you need to consider what normal alignment is.
When we look at the spine from the front, we expect and hope to see that is nice
and straight. So, we need to consider that when choosing a pillow or the position we
sleep in. Most important for a pinched nerve, often caused by a disc bulge or herniation, a bone
spur or tight muscles, we really want to make sure we're trying to support that natural curve or arc
in our neck. This position is the best position to keep the tissues in a relaxed state, meaning when
your spine is in the right alignment, it's in its most stable position, which allows pressure to be
evenly distributed normally through disc tissue, nerve tissue, ligaments, and muscles. So,
we really want to make sure we're trying to maintain proper alignment and posture in
the positions we sleep. Let's get right to, I'm going to show you the two best positions
you can sleep if you're suffering from neck pain or pinched nerve to help you get
the best sleep you've had in weeks. So, let's start on our back. We want to get in
a position that's going to support the natural curve in our neck. So, a few pillows might do
a better job of this. First and foremost, we've all seen these curve pillows. One has a thin and
one has a thicker side. When you're on your back, typically want to use the thin or the smaller side
to help support that natural curve where the head sits in this little cutout. One of the biggest
things to understand is your pillows are for your neck, not your head. So, when you have a pillow
that supports your neck in a proper alignment, it's going to take pressure off the disc and nerve
something that's going to give you some relief at night. Another pillow you could use would be
a roll pillow. They're quite popular as well. The same thing, you're going to put the pillow in
the middle of the neck to help support that curve. Now because the spine is attached from top to
bottom, we want to consider what's happening in the lower back as well. So, what I'm going
to do is demonstrate a very simple way to get in position where we're using the best pillow to
help support the curve in your neck. You should always start with a pillow underneath your knees
to help support your pelvis posture as well as your lower back because your lower back's attached
to your mid back, which is attached to your neck, it's really important to look at the whole spine
and your posture should be considered when, even though this is video, is for relieving pressure
in your neck for a pinched nerve. We want to keep everything else in alignment as well. So, you can
see that we're really focusing on supporting the natural curve. If the pillow is on your head, you
can see that that would have the opposite effect, something that would make the problem worse.
So, you really want to make sure your neck is supported in the right position. And again, you
can use a curve pillow, you can use a roll pillow, you can even use a normal pillow, which let me
show you here, let's just change these around. I think the biggest thing when you use a regular
pillow like this is that the edge of the pillow needs to be between your shoulder blades. So,
you, let me show you what you shouldn't do. You wouldn't want to have a pillow and focus on
the head because what it's doing is taking that curve and straightening it or worse, putting it
in the opposite direction, which can really stress the cervical nerves. What you want to do is you
want to bring the pill a little bit further down and the most important thing here is making
sure your head is in line with your shoulder, which is in line with your thoracic spine, keeping
it nice and straight so that you're supporting a good posture to help alleviate any tension that's
going through the spinal nerves that's causing that shearing pain from the neck down the arm.
Now if you're like most people, you're probably not going to stay in the same position and that's
okay. The next position we're going to demonstrate is the side position. I'm going to show you a
couple important things that you need to avoid in order to help take tension off the spinal nerve
that's causing that radiating pain or the neck pain that's causing the radiation between your
shoulder blades. So, let's get to that. So, let's get the side sleeping. When you're side sleeping,
we want to make sure the affected side is, so if the neck pain is on the right, for example, and
the pain's going down your right arm or in between your right shoulder blade, what you want to do is
to have that side up. So, we want the unaffected side down. Now for this pillow, this is where
we want to change the pillow around to have the thicker side to support the distance between
the tip of our shoulder and our ear to make sure that when we're lying down that our head is
neutral or perpendicular, sorry to our shoulders. And so that simply looks like this. We're
going to slide the pillow in to support the neck and come down the unaffected arm. This is
where it gets tricky for some people. The arm up will take tension out of the nerve and that
will be the position you wanted in for others, you might find it needs to be on your side or
you'd put a pillow in this small part here, uh, in front of your stomach to help support
the arm too. And so there's a variety of ways that you need to experiment with the arm, but the
biggest thing is making sure your head is in line with your shoulders and your thoracic cage and
that you have some support for your arm in the right position to keep tension out of those spinal
nerves. You can see if the pillow was too thin, your head would be in a position that would
be creating more tension in those nerves. And if it's too fat, the same thing, you're
going to compress the nerves on the affected right side. So, you want something, and again,
this can be a cervical pillow like this, it can be a regular pillow, it can be a rolled
pillow between our legs and you're going to just want to support that. One thing you don't want to
do is to make sure your head is not slipping down into the fetal position. Again, that's going
to take the natural curve out of our neck, something we're trying to preserve while we sleep.
And then you're going to again, manipulate the arm with a pillow here or here that's going to get
you the best relief based on how much tension you can reduce in those nerve roots. Now that
I've shown you the two best ways to sleep with a pinched nerve in your neck, I want to switch
gears briefly just to give you two excellent stretches or traction stretches you can try either
before you go to bed or when you first wake up. Now, one or two of these may be irritating to
the condition, so you really want to test this out. The first one, simple. You know, lie on the
edge of your bed, arms to your side and just let your head slowly hang. You're going to relax
into this stretch up to 30 to 60 seconds. Just visualize your head, tractioning off your upper
back to get the full effect. You can do that one or two times either right before you go to bed
or when you first wake up. Now for some of you, that's going to irritate it, so you want to try
the opposite traction. And so, this, we're going to flip over, lie on our back, come to the edge
of your bed and again, slowly let your head hang and then just relax into it. You can hold this
one for 30 to 60 seconds again and really feel that your head is being pulled the top of your
upper back to get the full effect of the traction. And remember if you want more specific and
efficient help with your problem. It's always best to seek out local professional help. Try
those sleep positions tonight and let me know how it goes as well. Which of those tractions
did you find more helpful? Put in the comments below and let me know which one you like
the best. If you like videos like this, maybe you'll show some support by giving me
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subscribe button below and the notification bell so you can be informed when I upload a new
video. If you're suffering with neck pain or pinched nerve, I get it. I understand it is
frustrating. Stick around and check out some of my videos. I'm sure you're going to find
one that's helpful for you to give you quick relief so you can get back to living your
life without any limitations. I appreciate you tuning in. I can't wait to see you
in my next video. Until then, stay well.
