Is Hip Pain Disturbing Your Sleep?
The dreaded screech of your early alarm rings in your ears as you open your eyes, weary from a night of disturbed and broken sleep due to hip pain. As soon as you open your eyes, you become aware of the deep aching sensation in your hip, and before the day has even begun, you dread your first foot steps and what today has to bring. Does this sound like you? Believe it or not, you’re not alone. Disturbed sleep is one of the most common reasons people eventually seek help for hip pain.
The negative effects of sleep deprivation, take their toll quickly on those in pain. The worse of it is, the vicious cycle of pain and sleep deprivation, only makes pain sensitivity worse. Therefore, the less sleep you get due to pain, the higher your pain levels are likely to be. This makes getting a nights sleep one of our top treatment goals at our physio clinic in Stewarton.
Here are our top tips for trying to break the cycle of and sleep deprivation.
Develop a night time routine - as cliched as it is, having a wind down routine can help massively in the management of pain. Sometimes the worry and anticipation of a night disturbed by pain, can be enough to keep you awake. Taking some time to relax, take a shower/bath, perform some gentle stretching and breathing exercises can help down regulate your nervous system, putting it in a better place to initially drift off.
Sleeping Position - trialling different sleeping position can be a massive help in the management of hip pain. The goal with these is to try and eliminate as much compression at the hip as we can. You can see the images below for positions of most to least compression. You can also note that and eggshell mattress overlay can help reduce compression.
3. Timing medications - if you use pain relief, timing your last dose closer to bed time can help give you some pain relief further into the night.
4. Speak to a professional - if you are struggling to get on top of your symptoms or you have persistent night pain, it may be time to speak to a Physiotherapist. Please call our team on 01563262123 to speak to one of our team about how we can help stop hip pain disturbing your sleep.
Combine tips 1-3 for the best chance of alleviating your hip pain at night.