![]() By contrast, people who slept in a straighter, more supported side position reported having less neck pain. ![]() This phrase might conjure up all sorts of possibilities in your mind, but what it means in this context is sleeping on your side in a twisted position, for example, with your top thigh reaching across the other thigh, twisting the spine. Researchers in Western Australia monitored volunteers' bedrooms for 12 hours a night using automatic cameras and found that those who said they regularly woke up with a stiff neck spent more time sleeping in what the researchers refer to as "provocative side sleeping positions". It depends on your ailment and the exact position you adopt during sleep. That meant they tended to sleep on their backs, so they told me it was a race to get to sleep first before the whole cabin was full of snoring men.Īnother small study looked at seafarers working on merchant container ships and found that respiratory disturbances such as snoring were more common when the seafarers were sleeping on their backs.īut this doesn't mean sleeping on your side works for everyone or is a panacea for all aches and pains. On one occasion, while touring a submarine for a radio programme I was making, the submariners showed me their sleeping quarters, where the bunks were stacked so closely on top of each other that it was hard to turn over. If you find it easy to sleep on your side, then it's probably also best for anyone else trying to get to sleep nearby. So sleeping on your side is the most common position and we could trust the wisdom of the crowd to choose the position where they sleep best, but what about the data? A very small observational study in which people could sleep however they preferred found that those who slept on their right side slept slightly better than those on their left, followed by those on their backs. This bias towards sleeping on our sides is something we develop only as we become adults, because children over the age of three spend on average an equal amount of time sleeping on their sides, back and fronts.īabies, meanwhile, sleep mainly on their backs because they're put in their cots this way for safety reasons. The older the people were, the more time they spent on their sides. They found that during their time in bed, people spent just over half their time on their sides, around 38% on their backs and 7% on their fronts. Researchers in Denmark used small motion-sensor detectors attached to volunteers' thighs, upper backs and upper arms before they went to sleep to establish their favoured sleeping position. In Hong Kong researchers are developing what they call the "Blanket Accommodative Sleep Posture Classification System", which uses infrared depth cameras that can detect a person's sleep position even through a thick blanket. To find out more, researchers have tried a variety of techniques including filming people while they sleep or getting them to use wearable technology that monitors their movements. You can ask them of course, but we only really remember the way we were lying when we were trying to fall asleep and the position we wake up in. Studies on everyone from seafarers on container ships to welders in Nigeria might be able to help us, although given how important sleep is to us it's surprising how few large-scale studies have been conducted.įirst you need a way of working out which position people are sleeping in. But what does the evidence say about which sleeping positions are actually the best? If you live anywhere affected by the recent heatwaves, you may well have spent your nights tossing and turning, trying out different sleeping positions in an attempt to get comfortable.
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