How Should I Sleep?

📍 📍 Welcome,

Doctor Ryan Alter,

your Delray Beach Chiropractor. This comes up almost every day in my office. And the question is,

how am I supposed to sleep? Okay,

what position is okay to sleep and what’s good,

what’s bad? So I wanted to give you a quick rundown on the whole sleeping thing. The main key,

and this applies to more than just sleeping,

but the main key with sleeping is that you’re in what we call a neutral position.

And a neutral position is this. My spine is straight. My eyes

and my nose are level. I’m not tilted. I’m not rotated. I’m not kink this way. So it looks like this.  When we lie on our back,

you have a pillow underneath your neck so that everything is neutral. You see,

if I take this position,

 and I come back up.

It’s just like I’m standing now. I’m just lying down.  So again,

neutral. This is good now.  If you had no pillow,  

that’s not good. That’s extension. You can see my nose is now pointing up there. I have my neck into extension. If I had two or three pillows,

I would be into flexion. So we want the pillow underneath the neck so that we’re about neutral like we’re sitting up.

Then we go into a sideline position. This is good as well. You can kind of curl. This is all okay. The key here is the spine and the neck especially. So here we are, nice neutral neck. If I had no pillow,

not good.  See if I sat up,

that would be sleeping like this all night

and then you wonder why you don’t feel good.

 So again,

pillow,

neutral. Everything straight. What about sleeping on my stomach? Terrible. Okay,

terrible for the neck.  Again,

that’s this for seven or eight hours. So you get the idea. Neutral position,

spine straight,

nose straight out. We’re in this position for a long period of time. So it’s crucial that we’re not off even by a little bit or over that exaggerated time.

It’ll wind up making a big mess. Remember,

we’re here in Delray Beach. We want to make sure that you,

everyone you know,

are feeling your best.