Sleeping on the Floor
I thought I’d weigh in on the conversation happening online about sleeping on the floor, or more generally sleeping on a firm surface. To cut right to the chase; I think it’s probably good for most people, most of the time. How’s that for a strong non-comital answer…
Think of it this way, if you put a spoonful of peanut butter on the counter, it will slowly spread out. Gravity pushes it down, the counter won’t yield so the only place it has to go is outward. Now imagine a spoonful of peanut butter plopped onto a bowl of yogurt. The yogurt will give way, forming itself around the peanut butter. The peanut butter holds it’s shape. In this analogy you are the peanut butter and the surface it’s on is your bed. Now think of this in real life, when you lie on a hard(er) surface to sleep, gravity will press on you, but if you can’t melt into your soft bed, your body has no option but to spread just a little. That creates a stretching and pulling along your spinal discs and other joints as well. That slight stretch is generally good for all the sinew and gristle holding you together, and specifically the stretch lowers the fluid pressure in your discs and your discs can re-absorb more water. Helping them rehydrating and restore. Think of your spinal discs like tough, fibery bags of water. Rehydrating them is very good.
When we go through our day slouching at our computer, leaning when we drive, crooked when we stand and lounging when we sit, there’s no wonder we have chronically bad posture. Then our wonderful soft bed maintains all those lousy postures for us all night. We accumulate the bad posture when we should be resetting ourselves when we sleep.
But to be fair, let’s talk about the other end of this conversation. If your back is already in great shape, sleep however you want. If your back is already in bad shape and sleeping on a firm(er) surface is utterly intolerable, sleep on the surface you need in order to sleep. And if you’re back is in any shape in between, but sleeping on floor is also just impossibly uncomfortable, slowly work up to it. Be creative and find *very gradually* ways to firm the surface you sleep on. Also if you are exclusively a side sleeper, and or you’re a woman with curves, the firm surface might be to uncomfortable. One important rule of thumb is getting sleep is much more important than how you sleep. Lack of sleep will kill you much quicker than sleeping in terrible ways. So if you want to try it, just keep the length and depth of your sleep as the long term objective.
Good luck if you want to give this a try. For me personally, when my own back doesn’t feel good – I injured a spinal disc some years ago – I get great relief from sleeping on the floor. I’m not a glutton for punishment so make it softer and warmer, but the floor none the less. I made a video on this topic, see it here:
And another video that gives guidance on how to interpret your body signals to know if you’re getting better or not. How you’ll ultimately know if this helps you will be revealed most clearly first thing in the morning. If you typically wake in the morning with sharp familiar pains in the expected places, notice if those specific sharp pains are less. You will likely be more sore in different ways at first, so take stock of the change in your typical morning pains.
