Improve Your Sleep Posture

Lifehacker – Improve Your Sleep Posture

Neat article from Lifehacker, which actually references several other relevant articles; but I always find reading LH’s posts useful, especially since their commenters are pretty top-notch.  (Am I one of them, you ask?  Certainly!  But you know my thing with names…  ;)

Sleep posture is important, though I’ve found that polyphasic sleeping makes it less important to sleep right every time – since you’re not doing it for eight hours straight, you’ll suffer less from bad posture.  Chiropractic problems due to tossing around in my sleep and ending up in odd positions used to be a huge problem for me, before I tried polyphasic sleep.  Another benefit of the naps, though, is that I’m also a less “mobile” sleeper now, in the sense that I don’t toss and turn.  In fact, it’s pretty much a given that I’ll wake up in exactly the position I fell asleep…unless I fell asleep reading in bed before my core-nap.  If that happens I won’t wake up with a book on my face, because my dearest will remove it for me (and usually my glasses too)!

I used to suffer horrible neck and shoulder pain from bad sleep posture, and if I were still sleeping 8 hours in a chunk, I probably still would.  Thanks to my schedule, though, I can take a single nap on my face, in a car, up against a tree, or whatever, and maybe end up a little stiff, but fine.  Twenty minutes in a funny posture isn’t really anything, and even my core is more forgiving than a monophasic chunk.

But it should be noted that, even though I don’t suffer if I sleep weird, my body definitely prefers to lie flat, with something roll-shaped under my neck and occasionally my knees too.  So it’s worth reading up on sleep posture, and making sure yours is good for you as often as possible.

When learning to nap, or when troubleshooting bad sleep habits, it can also be helpful to try and use the same posture every time. Body position can become a “trigger” that reminds your brain that it’s time to sleep, so I do tend to recommend that people adapting to polyphasic schedules try to sleep in the same position, if not for every nap, then for every “same nap” (i.e. if you take your 3pm nap in a car, try to always take it in a car).

Nap on,

PD