Sleep on the floor. I am not saying to sleep on a very hard mattress or a thin mattress on a hard floor. I am talking about sleeping on the absolute rock hard floor, the stuff you probably have in your living room or the floor next to your usual bed. Bring a very thin pillow and a blanket.
I sleep on my belly. I've tried to change to the recommended side-sleeping position but my body just does not like it. Every time I have tried to sleep on my side or back I find myself slipping over to my belly right before I fall asleep.
I almost always wake up with some sort of lower back pain. On my best days the pain I experience is just general morning tightness that I believe most athletes have. On my worse days the mornings are terrible and and I can not rise from a chair without pain. I am never looking for sympathy but you should know I have had these problems from childhood. I still lift weights and hike regularly no matter what sort of pain I am in.
I have done all of the common things that you should do if you have lower back pain. I strength train for a strong core, I have lost almost all of my bellyfat and believe I run very low cortisol levels. While many people believe chronic pain comes from chronic stress that is not my problem. At this stage of life I am a relaxed and not very anxious person. Up until about 6 months ago I still had this terrible back.
I started thinking about how I sleep on my belly. I am confident that when I sleep like this I am putting my spine into a mild hyperextension. I have always felt since childhood that when I sleep my lower back rounds into the mattress and that causes some discomfort. I can remember being as young as 10 years old and I would lie on my belly with a closed fist under my belly button in an effort to push the spine into neutral. I did that on instinct and it actually offered some relief.
This past year I was introduced to the philosophy of Katy Bowman on the Joe Rogan Experience. She talked about how her family avoids mattresses and chairs and how they sleep on the floor. She talked about how the body can get 'casted' into certain unnatural positions if you maintain them too long. By casted she meant, frozen, as if in a cast, like you do to a broken limb. Cast a bodypart in a position too long and you may have problems and pain.
I started experimenting with sleeping on the floor. At first I would just lie next to my bed for as long as I could. The first week I did not fall asleep at all on the floor because it was too uncomfortable. I lied on the floor awake for about an hour and them moved to the bed. The 2nd week I was getting 1-2 hours sleeping on the floor and then I would wake up, find it too uncomfortable, and roll in to bed. By the end of 1 month I could sleep 4-5 hours on the hard floor until I woke up and moved to the soft bed. The shift from mattress-sleeper to floor-sleeper took about 3 months because it took a while to commit to sleeping the entire night on the floor.
6 months later I am now 3 months into sleeping 100% on the floor. My back is at 100% but there is a possibility that I am just going through another cycle where it could come back. I will know better after being pain free for a year. An unexpected side effect of sleeping on the floor is that I fall asleep much faster when I lie down. I used to spend up to an hour spinning around in bed and thinking but for whatever reason I have been falling asleep within 5-10 minutes of hitting the floor.
I have no intention of moving back to the mattress or throwing it away. I really would like to throw away this mattress as it is pretty old and takes up a ton of space. The problem with that is that only a celibate person could throw away their mattress!
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