The Best Sleeping Positions

Why does your lower back or neck only hurt first thing in the morning? You aren't necessarily waking up sore because your mattress is bad—in reality, a lack of overnight support is simply exposing an underlying mechanical weakness already trapped inside your spine.

In this episode of Ask the Chiropractor, Dr. Brant Hulsebus explores the structural biomechanics of sleep and outlines the best sleeping positions for back pain. As a Palmer College of Chiropractic graduate and the team chiropractor for the Rockford IceHogs, Dr. Hulsebus breaks down how to maintain a perfectly neutral spine while resting. Learn why stomach sleeping places dangerous rotation on the upper neck, how to properly size a pillow between your knees to protect your hips, and why structural chiropractic adjustments must always precede a trip to the mattress store.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• The true anatomy of a resting spine and how to match your body's natural standing posture in bed.
• Why stomach sleeping causes twisted neck joints, hand numbness, and severe tension headaches.
• The side-sleeper blueprint: Sizing a knee pillow to prevent spinal rotation and hip strain.
• Pillow diagnostics: Why firm, shape-retaining pillows outperform soft feather or down options.
• The science of morning stiffness: Why inflammation pools when you stop moving for eight hours.
• Hybrid mattress mechanics: Finding the ideal balance between memory foam comfort and structural coil support.

Have a question about sleep posture, pillows, or morning back pain? Leave a comment or message on our platforms, and you might be featured as our next question of the week!

👉 New Patients: Save time at the clinic by submitting your intake paperwork online here: https://hulsebuschiropractic.com/patient-intake-form/

📍 Visit Hulsebus Rockford Chiropractic:

• Address: 1877 Daimler Road, Rockford, IL 61112
• Phone: 815-398-3434
• Website: rockforddc.com

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

0:00

Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here, and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford IceHogs. Let's dive into it. Well, hi there. Last week we talked a little bit about text neck. People spend too much time in front of a screen, a phone, a computer, a television, a steering wheel, whatever it might be. And that all contributed to peoples having poor neck health, which also leads to headaches, which was the week before. This week we want to talk a little bit about the best sleeping positions, because a lot of the times people wake up and they tell me they have a stiff neck or stiff problems. So we want to address some of the situations you have when you sleep. You know, we've been here in Rockford, Illinois, for a long time, and people wake up with back pain a long time in Rockford with… and come to my dad and my grandpa before me, talking about, "Hey, what's the best way to sleep? What should I be, how should I be sleeping?" And, you know, it is frustrating because you go to bed, you wake up, you know, you can feel pretty good when you go to bed, but you might wake up and feeling stiff and feeling irritated, like, "What did I do during the night to make my back so bad?" A lot of times I used to tease people, if you watch an action movie before bed, maybe you had dreams where you were running in place and you injured yourself. But we know a lot of times what a, what a spine should look like in good posture versus when it's not. So let's talk about a posture of a good-looking spine. So if you were standing up straight and we were looking at you from the side, we notice your spine's got several curves. The spine would bow forwards in the neck, and the thoracic spine where your ribs are would bow backwards, and the lumbar spine would match the upper neck in bowing forwards. Now, the thoracic curve is the one that we're born with. It's called the fetal curve. We're born off a kind of a she- she- C shape before we're born, and then as we start to nurse and look around the world, we develop a neck curve. Then as we crawl and scoot around, our lower back kind of forms that lower back curve, and that's how we get our curves in our spine. And that's what a neutral-looking spine looks like. And when you're sleeping, you want to have that spine in that same position. A lot of times people maybe have their shoulders going one way, their upper back going another way. We really want to see the spine nice and neutral and nice and straight from the front to back view. Uh, if you got too much stuff going on, too many different situations in your mattress and your pillows, and your spine's twisted all over the place, well, that's gonna put a lot of stress on certain joints and not on others, and tire them out and start having problems. I'll give you an example. If I sleep on my stomach, I got my head twisted and turned in order to breathe, and that's gonna put a lot of stress on one side of my neck, and I'm gonna keep waking up with bad neck issues. But typically, when my neck goes up like that, my other hip wants to move too, and it's not surprising to have lower back issues with that. If I'm sleeping at my side and I, and I, and I have my one knee over the other knee and my hip's twisted in and my hip's rolling forward or backwards, that starts creating a curve and a twist in my spine. And usually, my upper back goes the other direction, and that's gonna be a lot of stress on my spine. So we really like to talk a lot about different positions when you sleep. Now, ideally, a good way to sleep is flat on your back, and somebody can look at you to make sure you're not-- have those curves look the way they're supposed to. Now, if I'm on my side, that's okay, but we want to address the hip issue. We want to make sure that we don't have that one knee drawn over the other one. So a lot of times we can correct that by simply by putting a pillow between our knees, and that pillow should be big enough that when your pillow's between your knees, your legs are nice and straight, right exactly at your hips. Not too big where you're spread open or too narrow where you're pulling down and still twisting that hip. You want to keep it nice and neutral. And again, stomach sleeping is awfully challenging because you have your head all the way twisted in one direction in order to breathe, and a lot of times we don't want to go the other way, so we start to see weird twist and turns in the base of your neck, causing your hands to go numb, and lastly, can also get some severe headaches. So stomach sleepers aren't always the best, not always the thing we're looking for. We wanna see them sleeping on their side and their back and stuff like that. So the role of the pillow is to, is to fill in the difference between the shoulder and the head. So if I am a side sleeper, my pillow should go right next to my head and onto my mattress. You see, every head, shoulder, and mattress are unique, so when people say,"Well, what's the best pillow to get?" I don't know how to answer that because your head, shoulder, and mattress are unique. I often tell people, go get a whole bunch of pillows and try them out. Have somebody look at you and see if you're making a straight line or not. If you're not making a straight line, then the pillow could be the issue. So go buy a whole bunch of pillows. Don't open them. Lay on your bed, try them out, and see how they do. I'm not a big fan of pillows that lose their shape. A typical pillow that loses its shape is one that's full of feathers or down. I like a nice firm pillow so that way it doesn't lose its shape through the night. Now, if you're sleeping on your back, the same rule applies. Have somebody look at you. Make sure you don't have your chin all the way tucked in or you're looking all the way back. You should have the same posture as when you're standing. So its job is to keep you nice and straight, and if you sleep on your stomach, the pillow doesn't really matter because you're causing so many other things going on, it doesn't really matter The other thing too is make sure that the mattress isn't too saggy. Make sure that you're, this is not an old mattress where your hips are going down low because they have more weight than your upper back, and you're not laying level. Somebody needs to look at you again. Make sure that you're making a nice, straight, horizontal line. All this twisting and turning can cause problems. And I want you to understand something too, because we've had patients go through this whole spiel where they come and see me, they're having hot lower back issues, and they start buying new mattresses thinking that was the end-all be-all. If you have a subluxation in your spine where one or two bones are misaligned creating pressure on a nerve, which sometimes can cause back pain, and you're coming to see us because you have a subluxation, the mattress doesn't really make a difference until the back has been adjusted. Your chiropractor has to do their job first. It's very-- the, the reason why your back hurts when you're sleeping on a bad mattress isn't because the mattress is bad, it's because it's usually exposing something in your back that's misaligned, and with the lack of support, it's more than the body can handle, and it starts talking to you. So if you wake up with a bad back, or every time you sleep on a certain mattress you have a bad back, yes, the mattress could be bad. But in reality, the mattress is actually exposing a weakness you have. Otherwise, everyone who's slept on that mattress would have the exact same problem because the mattress is the issue. The mattress is exposing the issue within your spine. So before you go out and start buying new mattresses and new pillows thinking that's gonna solve all the problem, because mattresses are not cheap, you should go to the chiropractor first, start having your spine evaluated, start getting under corrective chiropractic care, and then go look at mattresses. Because you don't want to go out and make the change while you're still trying to heal. So you want to hurry up and get adjusted. You have to imagine this. The bones are misaligned, there's stress. That's called the subluxation. The muscles around there tighten up to protect you, is to make sure they don't get hurt more. During the day when you're sitting, walking, standing, moving around, there's still some motion in those joints. But when you're just laying still for eight hours when you're sleeping, that stuff really locks up and really gets tight. A lot of times people will tell me,"You know, once I get up and moving around, I feel a little bit better." Well, you're breaking some of that tissue loose, that scar tissue, helping those muscles relax, and starting to open up those joints. That's really what you're doing when you're walking and moving around. So it's very, very important you get these corrected and then start looking at the mattresses. Because people will say all the time, "Well, what's the best mattress for me to get? What's the best mattress?" And here at Rockford, it's kind of funny, because I've actually sat down with mattress salesmen, because I don't really want to spend a lot of time talking about mattresses with each individual patient. So I go and I meet different salesmen in Rockford, and I tell them what I like and don't like. And for whatever reason, that, that person never keeps their job. We've had companies close. We've had people switch careers. We've had people move, other things come up. So here's the deal When I look at a mattress, I like something that's f- that gives me the support I need, but not sleeping on a rock. So you want something medium to firm, because you want the support. Now, in the old days, we had water beds. They were comfortable. Everybody liked them. They were soft, but they gave you no support, and it made your spines worse. Sometimes a mattress like, let's say it's just full of memory foam, can be a little too soft. They might be comfortable at first, but it's a little too soft. You're not getting the support you need. Sometimes a bed mattress with just coils is too much. It's pushing all the time. You need to have a little bit of comfort. So I sleep on a hybrid. It's got the memory foam with the coils. It's both of them put together. So I like something with good support. So again, getting a good quality hybrid mattress is probably a good way to go. But again, if your spine's misaligned, it doesn't matter. And again, why does my lower back hurt only in the morning when I wake up? Because your mattress is exposing the problem in your spine. It not necessarily cause it. Because if it caused it, that means somebody with a healthy back could sleep in your bed and get up and have a worse back the next day. So usually what it does, it exposes the weakness, the misalignment, and getting that chiropractic adjustment is going to help move it and help it get aligned. Because remember, when you don't move, that's when you get inflamed. If you watch a basketball game, they twist their ankle, they finish the basketball game, but the next day they're limping around because the inflammation won't come in until you stop moving. And at night you're not moving, and it gives the inflammation a great chance to build up and pool in there. Then you get up in the morning, you move around, you kind of break up some of the inflammation, some of that tissue, and usually after a couple of hours, now you notice you're starting to feel some relief. Unfortunately, the underlying cause is still there. So before you spend a lot of money on mattresses, I would go to a chiropractor and get a chiropractic evaluation of my spine. Now, only a chiropractor knows how to evaluate for these things. Medical doctors and orthopedic doctors do not. It's not part of their education. So I would definitely check with a chiropractor for this chiropractic issue. And remember, if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, the only person qualified to answer that's a chiropractor. If you have a question for me, go ahead and leave a comment wherever you're watching or listening to this, and maybe next week you'll be the question of the week. L- let's come back next week and talk a little bit about lifting, bending, and twisting. Maybe that's part of the issue, right? Let's talk about how people lift, bend, and twist. We'll come back next week and talk more about that. Thanks for tuning in.