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Find out how to stop those bedtime backaches

It's dawn on Monday and you're doing the usual early morning crawl out of bed. Your neck hurts and your lower back feels like a mule kicked it.

To be blunt, the most dangerous place in your bedroom is the bed. What do you actually do in your bed besides sleeping, if you're like most you read, watch television, study, work and eat. And most of these activities do more harm than good to your back.

Your spine is made up of three curves. You can feel them as a hollow area at the back of your neck, lower back, and a slight roundness of the upper back. Maintaining these three natural curves while working and resting would save many people a lot of pain, lost productivity and health-care costs.

When you use your bed for reading, watching television, etc., you probably get comfortable by propping yourself up with pillows. This often violates the rule of maintaining a neutral spinal alignment. The hollow in your lower back is now reversed into rounding, the roundness of your upper back is more accentuated, your shoulders are hunched forward and your head is significantly in front of the shoulders (probably pushed forward by the pillows).

Why should you care about this positioning? Once again very basically and bluntly, if bad positioning is maintained over an extended period of time, it puts strain on your muscles, ligaments and joints. Strain can develop into inflammation, pain and permanent changes (and they're not pretty). Subsequently, the a.m. blues set in, and pretty quickly.

So how should you use your bed for watching television? However, if you can't break the habit, then moderate the damage by getting up every 30 minutes and frequently rearranging your pillows. Finally, improve the ergonomics of your set-up:

Your back should be on a gradual incline. Your lower back hollow should be maintained with a lumbar pillow.
Put a pillow under your knees to keep them bent.
Your head should rest back on a pillow so it can fall back past your shoulders and allow the neck to maintain its natural hollows.

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