Sleeping on my arm alot

**JadeGreen** · 07-18-2017 11:17 PM

A problem that has become worse; almost chronic in the past few months is waking up in the night or morning to find that I am asleep on my side and one arm is completely numb and limp due to me cutting off the circulation. It's gotten to the point that it's happening almost nightly, and its started to infringe on my sleeping pattern and dream recall. I generally fall asleep on my back, and have become more aware of what position I fall asleep in the past week or so, but still find that I wake up in this position, with my arm numb.

Anyone know how to stop this from happening?

**cooleymd** · 07-19-2017 04:07 AM

Well I sleep on my side and use body pillows, I have some under my head and usually one lenthwise along each side, but also I wrap my arm around one or the other (changing sides as I try to fall asleep). So I usually wake on my side but my pillow is between myself and my arm, tho in the past I have had cut off circulation sometimes. Try lots of pillows or large pillows like mine

Maybe you could use sleep disruption to cause yourself to wake after every dream, if you trained yourself to wake every 90 min or so it might not be as bad when it did happen. Of course if you have trouble falling back asleep could cause insomnia

**Charles3** · 02-17-2018 07:01 AM

I can't sleep on my back so I sleep on my side but I use a big couch cushion under my whole body except my arm. What this does is it puts all the weight on my side of my abdomen, rib cage up to underneath my arm, and my neck and head, but less of the weight is distrubuted on my shoulders. Therefore I can stay on my side for long periods of time without any problem any more.

It got really bad for me. I had a pinched nerve in my right shoulder that lasted all day the next day once. It took some experimentating to find the right pillows from around the house but now it works. My only problem is falling asleep itself which even in a pain free position I sometimes cannot fall asleep!