Is Your Sciatica Pain a Nightmare? Discover How to Get a Good Night's Rest

Sometimes sciatica and back pain can not only ruin your day, but it can even keep you up at night too. Sometimes the pain can be so bad that you just stay up all night completely unable to sleep at all. But if you combine these following three components, you’ll find that you can finally put an end to the back pain and find a relaxing and peaceful night’s sleep. First you need to use ice. By applying ice to your lower back right before heading to bed for about 15 - 30 minutes, you can help to reduce the inflammation around your sciatic nerve, which is one of the primary causes of sciatica. If you’re a busy person and don’t have time to rest on your laurels with an ice pack, that’s okay too. You can get an ice compress back brace fairly inexpensively that will hod the ice pack in place for you if you need to run around the house doing chores. Remember to avoid using heat on your lower back. Although it might feel good in the moment, it will actually aggravate your inflammation, which definitely isn’t good in the long run. Secondly, you need to exercise. You want to do simple stretching exercises that help target the muscles around the lower back and hips. These areas are the most common location where muscle imbalances happen that eventually lead to sciatica. Stretching exercises will help to loosen up tense muscles that might be clamping down on your sciatic nerve. When you combine muscle stretching with ice compresses, you will probably be surprised at how fast your pain will go away. Often times within just a few hours. Thirdly, you need to sleep in the proper position. The best position to give your relief from sciatica pain through the night is on your side. What you want to do is lie on your side and place a pillow between your knees. This pillow will help keep your legs parallel and ease the pressure on the hips. Then place at least two pillows underneath your head. You want to make sure that your neck is in a perfect straight line with your back, so adjust the pillows as needed to achieve this. Finally, place a pillow in front of your stomach to help keep you from rolling over in the night onto your belly. A lot of people toss and turn in their sleep and this is the best way to help you keep this position throughout the night. If you do roll forward a bit, that is okay. In fact that will probably help you take a little more pressure off your hips anyway. So, if you’re having trouble sleeping through the night because of chronic back pain or sciatica, go a head and try out these three tips out. Ice your back shortly before bed to decrease inflammation, then do some stretching exercises to loosen up the muscles, and finally try out the sleeping position I described above. Sweet dreams.