Expert reveals why you should never sleep on your back

Getting a good night’s slumber tops most of our priority lists, so naturally, advice on how to better our sleep is snooze-ic to our ears.

Sorry, that really was awful, wasn’t it? Moving swiftly on, according to some sleep experts, there’s one position in particular you should avoid when you flop into bed at night, and it’s probably the one you sleep in the most. 

Turns out sleeping on your back isn’t all that beneficial, and if you sleep on your side your 40 winks are less likely to be interrupted. 

tommaso altamura / Alamy Stock Photo

Studies have shown that laying on your back in bed can correlate with poor sleep.

Research by psychologist Joseph De Koninck found that ‘consistently, poor sleepers spent more time on their backs with their heads straight’ when he and his team examined the sleep characteristics of eight good and eight poor sleepers in a laboratory. 

The findings were echoed by a later study led by Arie Oksenberg, who is the director of the Sleep Disorders Unit at Loewenstein Hospital.

Oksenberg and his team studied patients with severe obstructive sleep apnoea - a sleep-related breathing disorder - and concluded that apnoeic events (when breathing is paused during sleep) were more common when patients lay on their back as opposed to their side.

Sleeping on your side is also said to have some neat health benefits - like reducing pressure on the heart. 

It seems sleeping on your side really is best, as sleeping on your front can also cause problems.

A sleep expert recently shared some of the downsides of sleeping on your stomach on TikTok.

A spokesperson from Levitex, a pillow and mattress brand focusing on spine health, explained that laying on your front for long periods of time can wreak havoc on your back.

The spokesperson demonstrated sleep positions with the help of a woman wearing a suit made to look like human muscle.

He explained that the muscles at the back of our upper legs have to extend when we’re lying on our front to maintain the position, which is - quite literally - a lot of leg work.

“None of you have ever watched TV like this, so why would you spend hours upon hours twisting your neck,” the spokesperson pondered. 

He also said that lying on your front can cause back problems which will likely start 'very, very soon' if you don’t switch up your sleeping positions. 

So, if you've been having trouble sleeping lately or waking up with a bad back, maybe you could give one of these recommended sleep positions a try to see if it solves your problems.

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