Sleep Position

[Slinky]

I recently read about this doctor, Steven Y Parks, an ENT and also much "into" sleep remedies, at apneasupport. He's written a book: Sleep, Interrupted and has an interesting website. This is a blog from his website:

About once per week, I see mostly female patients who come in for recurrent sinus or throat problems who also have severe and chronic fatigue. When asked if they sleep on their backs, they’ll say yes. But when I question them further, they’ll tell me that when they were younger, they always slept on their stomachs, with their face on one side of the other. Then I asked about when they began to sleep on their backs, and not too surprisingly, it’s about the same time that they began to feel more tired and started to have various illness such as sinus infections, throat pain, etc.

These people MUST sleep on their stomachs so they can breathe well when sleeping at night. The reason for this is that many people (to various degrees) have a tendency for their tongues to fall back slightly when lying on their backs due to gravity. When you add deep sleep, all the muscles begin to relax, and the tongue may collapse completely, which causes a temporary obstruction and arousal. This prevents people from getting deep sleep. This is what I talk about in my book, Sleep, Interrupted.

If you have this condition, you probably realized this subconsciously when much younger and slept on your side or stomach to compensate pretty well. But when you start to sleep on your back, then you can’t compensate very well anymore and you will have multiple micro-obstructions and arousals, preventing you from achieving restorative, deep sleep. So in a sense, this will age you more in the following manner: inefficient sleep causes a low grade stress response, constricting blood vessels to nonessential organs such as your gastrointestinal or reproductive organs, skin and hands or feet. If you don’t get enough blood flow. your skin cannot heal and repair itself properly, this "aging" faster. Plus you also feel tired and lousy.

This situation can also apply to people who are admitted to the hospital after operations or after an accident, but in these situations, the consequences can be much more severe. Others have to sleep on their backs due to an shoulder injury or neck pain, which prevents stomach sided sleeping. Some people ABSOLUTELY cannot sleep on their backs. Something to think about.

I found this particularly interesting because my sleep problems BEGAN after a whiplash. All my life I had been a "tummy" sleeper. I had to change that after the whiplash.

[DreamStalker]

Sounds logical to me ... that those female patients were probably sleeping on their stomach early in their lives because their bodies were responding to early onset OSA.

I injured 3 vertebra when I was 18 and have suffered chronic back pain ever since. In order to relieve the pain, I conditioned myself to sleep on my back. By the time I was diagnosed with severe OSA I had already been waking up on my stomach for well over five years. Even though I would go to sleep on my back, I would end up on my stomach sometime during the night.

So yes, the body does adapt in order to stay alive as long as possible. In my case, breathing won out over my back pain in the end … lucky me.

Since starting my treatment for my OSA, I have learned and adapted to sleeping on my side. I still have chronic back pain but I now deal with it through chiropractic adjustments and massage and acupuncture therapy … life is great!

[jnk]

Fascinating! Thanks, Slinky.

[Slinky]

I did too, jnk. And, it was about the same time I started w/sinus problems that eventually led to a 2 1/2 year battle w/sinus infections, steroid injections into the nasal passages, several antibiotic treatments, etc. It took a 30 day regimen of an antibiotic to clear up what the 10 day regimens hadn't been able to stop more than just temporarily. And I still have some 'drip' on occasion. (Nice, healthy, cold nose??? )

I also have a slightly deviated septum. Of course, THAT could maybe have been caused by the RV awning support bar that knocked me almost unconscious (like at the whiplash, blacked out, saw some stars, couldn't move, but could hear) and gave me a set of raccoon eyes that lasted a goodly amount of time.

[san_fran_gal]

That is very interesting! It's exactly my situation, too! I always slept on my stomach. When I was pregnant it was hard, because I could no longer do that. But after baby, I went back to tummy sleeping. A few years later my neck started hurting (apparently stomach sleeping is not good for the neck) and could no longer sleep on my stomach. Shortly after that -- and I didn't correlate it at the time, although I did later -- I started waking up several times a night with a parched mouth. That was what sent me to the sleep doc. Thanks for posting this!