How To Sleep With Neck Pain AND Headache. (Including 5 Pillow Hacks)

The secret of how to sleep to avoid neck pain & headaches lies in keeping the neck in a certain position. Three factors can affect this: whether you have a good pillow for your neck, a mattress that isn’t too soft or hard, and a good sleeping position for neck pain. It can be hard to maintain these optimal sleeping positions for your neck all night, but there’s a few tricks you can do with your pillow to help. 0:00 Intro 0:12 The Key 0:33 Lying Face Up 1:49 Side Lying 3:40 Face Down RELATED VIDEOS Neck Pain? Stiff Neck? Do These 2 Minute Neck Exercises Daily.    • Neck Pain? Stiff Neck? Do These 2 Min...   THE BEST WAY TO SLEEP FOR NECK PAIN AND HEADACHES: LYING FACE UP Lying face up is probably the easiest way to keep your neck in a neutral position. If you can sleep all night like that, just a thin pillow is good. But if you lie on your side sometimes too, make sure the pillow is the size the correct size to keep your neck straight when you’re on your side. The biggest issue when sleeping face up is rolling the head to one side. A folded towel on each side of your pillow will cause a slight depression in the middle, and this can help to keep your neck straight. If your pillow is really thin on the sides, you can roll a soft towel to give your neck more support … IF that feels good. SIDE LYING Pillow height is crucial when side lying because you really want to have your neck straight with your spine. A slightly firm pillow that’s about 10-11cm high is a good size for most people. Just keep in mind that the softer the bed, the more you sink into the mattress, and the higher the relative height of your pillow. A gently contoured pillow can help if you head is wider than your neck, but many contour pillows are too sharply contoured so be sure to avoid those. The height of the pillow is more important. Prolonged rotation is very bad for the neck, so try not to roll forward when lying on your side. Bending your top knee more than the other will make you roll forward, so aim to bend your knees equally. Putting a pillow between your knees can help with this. Another option is hugging a pillow, to stop you rolling forward. If the pillow sits under your chin, this has the added bonus of helping to keep your neck straight instead of bent forward. If your pillow is too small, you can put a folded towel under the pillow … in the pillowslip to keep it from moving. If you go to a hotel and the pillows are too big, either ask for another, or at a pinch you could put a thin pillow under your rib cage to lift your torso up a bit. If you have a tendency to sleep at the end of the pillow where it drops off, this can cause rotation too, so a towel at the end of the pillow can help support you better, if you have this habit. And try to avoid sleeping with your arm up under your pillow, as this can distort the neck too. LYING FACE DOWN It’s not possible to sleep face down without twisting your head to one side to breath. If you need to lie that way for medical reasons, try putting a couple of pillows under your torso.   ---------------------------------------- Say ‘Hi!’ on social media: Facebook:   / bodyfixexercises   Twitter:   / bodyfixexercise   Instagram:   / bodyfixexercises   Linked In:   / 49086519   #bodyfixexercises #neckpain #headaches