

(Read our full guide to back-sleeping.) 3. People with a torn rotator cuff often wake up in the middle of the night when side-sleeping, since your body weight concentrates on a single pressure point, causing pain. Assuming you have a supportive mattress, back-sleeping can promote better spinal alignment-helpful for folks with disc or vertebrae issues-and reduce pressure on injured limbs. If you’ve got muscular or skeletal discomfort but don’t have breathing issues, back-sleeping may be your best option. Consider back-sleeping if you have shoulder or back pain (Approximately 38,000 people in the US die annually from heart disease with sleep apnea as a complicating factor, reports the American Sleep Apnea Association.) 2. According to a 2014 paper Oksenberg co-wrote for the Journal of Sleep Research, patients who slept on their sides reduced or even eliminated the number of times their breathing was compromised during sleep. That’s why Oksenberg strongly recommends that people with breathing problems, like sleep apnea, learn to sleep on their sides. Astronauts consistently report decreases in both respiratory interruptions and snoring during compression-free, weightless slumber. This is one reason why the best way to sleep is floating in midair. This is one of the prime causes of snoring, but it also leads to all sorts of other sleep issues.

When you sleep on your stomach or back, gravity works against you by compressing your airways. Side-sleeping can actually save your life if you’ve got severe sleep apnea, said Arie Oksenberg, PhD, director of the Sleep Disorders Unit at Loewenstein Hospital in Raanana, Israel. Here are five good reasons to change your sleep position-and three ways you can do it. If you can do it, though, it may well lead to dramatic improvements in not only sleep quality but also your overall health. But we are, above all, creatures of habit, and changing the bedtime posture you’ve held for much of your life isn’t easy. Getting your body into the proper sleep position is one of the best things you can do for your health.
