Is Sleeping on my Side Causing Shoulder Pain?

Image Source: John Hopkins Medicine.

IS SLEEPING ON MY SIDE CAUSING SHOULDER PAIN?

Have you ever wondered if your sleeping habits, positions, and postures could be causing or contributing to shoulder pain, or even neck or upper back issues? Side lying sleeping is generally considered a ‘good’ sleeping posture, and it’s a common habit for many people. However, if you already have some degree of shoulder pain or discomfort or even a neck or upper back issue, various standing, sitting postures or sleep posture may also flare up or aggravate your pain.

Sleeping Posture & Pain – Cause Vs Effect

It is important to make the distinction here between what is the primary cause of pain or injuries versus other factors that may be flaring up or aggravating the problem. In the clinic we like to break down your pain and really try to understand what’s caused or resulted in the problem to begin with versus what is simply contributing to a problem that’s already flared up.

For example, let’s say that you have some pain in the shoulder. The last 3 months, you’ve increased your load in the gym. You’ve been working out your upper body 3 to 4 times a week with a high emphasis on pressing movements either overhead for the shoulder or in the horizontal plane for the chest. Perhaps you haven’t been adding in much upper back work or not allowing the shoulder to have sufficient rest between sessions. Combine this with a potential increase of stress with your sitting office job, spending longer sitting, and perhaps general poor sleep and recovery, and the balance of scales may tend towards you developing some rotator cuff related shoulder pain.

In this case it’s pretty easy to get an idea from the above story that the pain onset is likely due to  a combination of multiple factors. Such as increased load in the gym in combination with some work related stress and increased postural load.

Sleep positions often may be aggravating for these types of shoulder issues. When you’re healing from any injury or pain, it’s really important to understand and break down all the different aggravating factors as well as treating the cause of the pain. Treatment will specific treatment to work on the structures which are aggravated and sensitive, and rehab to build the strength back up, we need to address and modify these aggravating factors to improve your day to day comfort.

For this type of issue in the clinic, we would often use a combination of specific treatments such as adjustments, dry needling, active release therapy in combination with exercises to gradually reload and strengthen the sensitive injured area. However, an important part of treatment on top of this is understanding what in your day to day life is pissing off or further aggravating the problem. Often we will need to modify this in order to make sure that we’re in a healing environment and can ease in combination with the specific treatment.

Why Sleeping on Shoulder can cause Shoulder Pain

There’s no denying that if you’ve got a shoulder problem or even a neck or upper back issue, your sleeping posture can well and truly make things worse. We find in the clinic that people with these types of problems often have their sleep affected a lot. You might toss & turn and wake up due to pain, or will end up with poor sleep and not waking up rested due to the fact that you just simply can’t get comfortable at night.

The reason why sleeping can be so aggravating if you’re dealing with this type of problem is quite simple. Generally speaking, sleeping postures such as side sleeping will often result in compression or overstretching of a pain sensitive structure. Different structures involved in shoulder pain such as muscles, joints, tendons and the bursa often don’t like being compressed or overstretched. This is why sleeping positions can be such a big problem when you’re dealing with shoulder pain.

How to help relieve shoulder pain at night

Modifying an uncomfortable sleeping position and ultimately not having pain affect your sleep comes down to a combination of different factors. Firstly, we need to make sure that our main priority is that we’re looking after and treating the cause of the pain in the first place. The amount of times we see patients, for example, with lower back pain who aren’t sleeping well spend thousands of dollars on different mattresses before actually getting their back problem assessed and treated by a professional is astonishing.

So the first step to improving shoulder pain due to sleep is to get a proper diagnosis from a professional and understand what’s causing your shoulder pain. From here we can make sure that you’re doing what you need to be doing to improve the issue. This could include treatment, activity modification, rehab exercises,  in order to overall improve your pain.

Once you’ve got these factors down, then we can look at some practical suggestions to actually help improve sleep. 

If your shoulder is painful with direct pressure or compression, then you probably want to avoid laying on the involved side. Either lay with the sore shoulder up, or you could try laying on your back. 

If your shoulder hurts at night with over-stretching,then you may find that laying on the shoulder might actually be comfortable. If you’re laying with the sore shoulder upwards, then try hugging a pillow to keep your shoulder in a stable position and prevent it from getting stretched or Rolling forwards. You will likely also tolerate back sleeping fairly well in this position. It might be a good idea to cross your arms over your chest to keep everything stable and prevent stretch.

Sleeping on your side causing shoulder pain? We’re here to help!

At Fortitude Chiropractic, we tackle all shoulder pain in a process as follows:

Firstly, we assess and understand what is causing your pain as well as your expectations, specific goals or activity related things that your shoulder needs to do.

From there, we use a targeted approach to treatment, often including some chiropractic adjustment techniques, soft tissue treatment, dry needling, and various muscular release treatments. We will educate you in terms of what you need to do to help with the shoulder, and this might include some things to avoid or modify for a short period of time.

A very important part of treatment is exercise rehab when it comes to shoulder pain. Whether at home or in the gym, we’ll give you a plan of gradual progressive exercises to do to start to increase the strength, range of motion, and flexibility through your shoulder so that it can successfully adapt to tasks and behaviours that it needs to do.

Let’s get on top of your shoulder pain, book online instantly with one of our team.

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