Sleeping on the floor if you have back pain (Degenerative Disc Disease or herniated disc) doesn’t help: in fact, it’s a very bad idea.
Actually, lying down when you have back pain is not the best option but how are you going to sleep?
If you have back pain, there’s a good chance that something in your back (bone, muscle, nerve) is affected by inflammation and when lying down, this painful body part gets in contact with adjacent parts of the body (other bone, other muscle, other nerve), and this prevents the inflammation to self-heal. If you don’t do anything to stop that inflammation it will just stay there and your back pain will never leave you.
Sleeping on the floor will aggravate inflammation.
Sleeping on the floor is much worse than not doing anything to stop the inflammation. When you sleep on a hard surface, every parts of your body are compressed against each other. The inflamed part that causes you back pain will be even more compressed against something else and the inflammation will just keep hurting.
If you have an herniated disc, the sciatic nerve hurts because it’s compressed with the part of the disc that is herniated and that’s what causes the pain: if you sleep on the floor, you just put more pressure on the sciatic nerve: you’ll have more pain and if the sciatic nerve is too damaged, you may never recover from that.
Sleeping on the floor increases pressure everywhere.
Gravity, right?
When you sleep on the floor you increase pressure on parts of your body that are not suited to handle it. Your shoulders, your hips, your knees, your ankle: they will start hurting and you don’t want that.
And you may not be aware of it if your painkillers work. But your body will soon let you know, you can be sure about that.
Sleeping on the floor prevents movement.
If you have back pain, that last thing you want to do is keeping the same position for hours and hours: you need to move. We all move when we sleep. Several times. and it’s a good thing.
What happens if you want to move while you are sleeping on a hard surface ? You wake because that hurts. So you’re actually not going to actually sleep, you will just be spending the night lying on the floor.
Assuming you make it through the night, I garantee you’re going to regret it in the morning.
