Morning Back Pain – How I Fixed it With Some Easy Solutions

Morning Back Pain – How I Fixed it With Some Easy Solutions

After turning 40, I started to have struggles with back pain in the morning and other general aches when waking. However, through fortune more than anything else, I was able to cure my morning back pain. Perhaps my own experiences can help you with your morning aches?

Without going into too much personal detail, I recently returned to the UK after a decade living in North America. I invested in a quality bed over there. It was a queen size (equivalent to a UK king size mattress), medium-firm Sealy posturepedic mattress with a foam top. It was heaven and I slept well on it for several years.

Morning Back Pain Begins

However, as I started to approach middle age, I noticed morning aches and pains began to creep into my daily routine. It began with lower back pain when I woke up. The pain would stay with me most of the day and only certain positions could help.

I assumed that this was life as a 40-year-old. Other people my age and older had told me about their aches and pains, particularly lower back pain, so I figured it was a natural progression. Changes in my life soon showed me that was not the case.

Last summer, I moved back to the UK with my family. It’s a big move and, when we arrived in the UK, most of our belongings were still stuck in a shipping container on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, waiting for a boat to bring them to us. We arrived with just a few suitcases and stayed with family for a few weeks while we got ourselves sorted. This is where things started to change for us.

Someone kindly offered their room to me and my wife and the experience changed my life. We slept on an extra-firm, super-king (equivalent to a North American king size) foam mattress and the change was incredible for both of us. The first morning, I woke with hardly a twinge in my back. Was it really that simple to cure morning back pain?

The next few weeks were amazing. For me, the morning aches and pains almost completely disappeared. My wife found different benefits. As a light sleeper, she is often woken by my nighttime movements, but that problem was also fixed by the larger and firmer bed.

Buying a Bed

We were convinced. When we moved into our own place, we were sure what we needed: a super king, super firm mattress, ideally foam. We headed out to some mattress stores and, in one, were introduced to a machine that analyses your sleeping position, weight spread, and other factors to determine the correct mattress type for you. It recommended a mattress with medium firmness. Not a chance! We knew what our perfect mattress</a > was.

Having looked around various shops, we were a little shocked by the potential cost facing us. Although we were happy to invest in a good bed, the kind of mattress we hoped for was beyond our budget.

So, we tried others out to see what would work. Coils instead of foam appeared to be an acceptable trade off to reduce the cost. Pillow top wasn’t going to work for my back pain. The firmer the better it seemed. Armed with the knowledge and ideas from testing beds in shops, we looked online for a good deal and found one: a Silentnight Eco Comfort Mattress.

When the new mattress arrived, we were excited to see if it offered the same benefits. It almost did, but something wasn’t quite right. My morning back pain and aches seemed to return, although not as bad as before. it was a disappointment, but the solution turned out to be incredibly simple.

With our belongings still waiting to make their way over the ocean, we were short on pillows. I had one, but it didn’t offer the support I needed. I have never liked having my head too high when I sleep, but this one soft pillow was not enough. I needed something to fill a small gap.

The Solution to My Morning Back Pain

Looking around for something I could use as a pillow one evening, I grabbed the closest thing I could find to a pillow: a memory foam neck pillow we had used on the flight over. The neck pillow has the shape of a horseshoe; when using it on a plane, most people place it around the back of the neck with the two ends pointing down towards the shoulders.

I placed the neck pillow on top of my regular pillow with the ends pointing towards the head of the bed. I then laid down with my head in the hole in the middle of the neck pillow, with the back supporting my neck. Essentially, the only support it gave me was under my neck, while the sides nestled against my ears.

The first evening was incredible. I enjoyed a wonderful night’s sleep and woke up without any back pain at all in the morning – not even a twinge. I continued with the combination of a firm mattress and a travel neck pillow and was completely convinced. Such a simple solution but truly remarkable results that completely eliminated my morning back pain.

Certain that I had found the cure for my morning back pain, I moved onto a more permanent solution. I bought a memory foam pillow with neck support and arrange it every night to recreate the support of the travel pillow. It worked just as well and I have now gone a full year without back pain in the morning. My life has truly changed.

Now it must be said, these changes worked for me, but that does not guarantee they’ll work for others. I am a large male and I sleep on my back. If you are a different size and shape, or if you sleep in a different position, this may not be the solution for your back pain. However, if you sleep like me, or if you want to try a low-cost solution, it might well be worth a go. Let me know if it works for you!

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