Read the transcript for this video:

Good morning and welcome to your Weekly Cup of Joe. My name is Joe King and I'm the owner of Physical Therapy Advantage in North Aurora. Today we are doing a two-part series on sleeping and sleeping posture a little bit. So we're going to talk about head positioning and using your pillow correctly. So in general, when we're looking at our posture, we want to be up and down, right? So typically normal American postures, everything is hunched forward, so we're all hunched forward. And then when we sleep, we don't want to be in that position either. We want to be able to be open up, we want to keep things lined up. So when you think about posture wise is you want to think about the center of your ear holes, the center of your shoulders, middle of your shoulders, mid of your trunk to your hips. And as if I turn the side here, you see that same thing is Ear holes, Shoulders, Trunk. You can't really see my hips too well, but they're in good alignment as I'm sitting here. So when you're sitting, standing, or even lying down in bed, we want to try to keep that good posture as best we possibly can. It's not really easy to do when you're sleeping, because we don't know what we do when we sleep. So we want to try to do that as best as we possibly can. So I'm going to show you that a little bit, because most people use too many pillows, and some people do use not enough pillows to keep that good head alignment.

So makeshift bed here-- it's my couch. But if we're laying on our side, some people will have multiple pillows and they'll crack their head up and they'll be sleeping like this, or some people won't have any pillows and like, oh it's better, and now my head is tilted down. You want to try to find that happy medium where now I can keep my head in good alignment here. You still want to try to keep your head in good alignment, ears to shoulders, and we also want to make sure that we're not cocked too far up, but too many pillows or cocked too far down with not enough pillows, but the same goes, if you're lying on your back. So if you're sleeping and laying on your back, you want to make sure you don't have too many pillows as if this is folded up and you have two pillows and I'm sleeping like this. Maybe you have been reading all night. I'm reading until I fall asleep and I'm sleeping like this, or if I don't have enough pillows, my head is cocked backwards, and I'm more looking up back above the bed, towards the wall, the ceiling like that. So you want to find a pillow that supports you, gets into your neck and now you can keep that good alignment and support.

As I said, we don't know what we do when we sleep. So sometimes that doesn't manifest all night long and you have to reposition the pillows and everything else and reposition yourself. But as long as you start in a good position and you be cognizant of it, it will definitely help you throughout the time that you sleep. If you have any other questions regarding posture, sleeping positions, neck aches, back aches because of sleeping or whatever, please don't hesitate to give the clinic a call at (630) 892-8003. And we look forward to seeing you next week for your Weekly Cup of Joe. Bye.