Side-Sleeping and the Pregnant Woman: What You Need to Know

How important can your sleep position be if you are pregnant? In some cases, it can literally be a matter of life and death.

I know. That seems like one of those grand click-bait proclamations designed just to get your attention. It's not. Here's why.

In 2014, several groups who work to reduce the number of infant deaths in the UK and New Zealand got very concerned about some still birth studies done a few years earlier. There were three such studies, all of which pointed to a direct connection between the likelihood of stillbirth and a mother's sleeping position, especially late in her pregnancy. None of those studies were conclusive, so in 2014 the groups sponsored a study called the Midlands and North of England Stillbirth Study (MiNESS). The study took three years to complete, surveyed over a thousand women, and compared those who had experienced a stillbirth with those who had a live birth. Here is what it found:

Mothers who went to sleep on their back had at least twice the risk of stillbirth compared with mothers who went to sleep on their left‐hand side. This study suggests that 3.7% of stillbirths after 28 weeks of pregnancy were linked with going to sleep lying on the back. This study also shows that the link between going‐to‐sleep position and late stillbirth was not affected by the duration of pregnancy after 28 weeks, the size of the baby, or the mother's weight...

This is the largest of four similar studies that have all shown the same link between the position in which a mother goes to sleep and stillbirth after 28 weeks of pregnancy.

The reason for that involves one of the major veins in your body called the inferior vena cava (IVC). The IVC begins just above your waist and runs along your spinal column to your heart. Its job is to bring blood in need of oxygen to your heart, where it can fill up and head back out through the aorta. it's called "inferior" because it services the lower half of your body, just as its partner the superior vena cava handles your upper half.

Good so far? Okay. Here's where it gets tricky.

When a woman later in her pregnancy sleeps on her back, the weight of the baby in her uterus presses down on the IVC and restricts the flow of blood. Less blood going to the heart means less blood coming from the heart. Not only can that be fatal to the baby but it can also harm the mother due to low blood pressure (a condition with the sufficiently dreadful name of aortocaval compression syndrome). It's important to note here that not every woman experiences this condition and you should always -- ALWAYS -- talk to your doctor if you have even the slightest medical concern. With that in mind, if you're pregnant (especially if you already have sleep-related conditions like sleep apnea), we'd like you to talk to your doctor about side-sleeping. More information from a qualified medial professional is always a good thing to have!

The important takeaway here is that, for women in the third trimester of their pregnancy, side-sleeping is a no-brainer idea, recommended by many, many doctors and it may just be a thing for you. If you do adopt the Sleep on Side mentality, you will need the right equipment -- a comfortable mattress and pillow that will not only let you sleep well but will also help you stay on your side so you can get the best and most healthy rest for you and your new baby.

We may just have something to help.

(Photo Credit: pedroserapio on Pixabay)

The Good-Sleep Basics: Seeking Firmness and Loft

Mount Pillowmore (Some Assembly Required)

How did you sleep this week? Good? Bad? Did you wake up a couple times with a crick in your neck and the vague rumbling of a headache that'll probably last until mid-day? Did you have to stretch your shoulder because you got your arm trapped above your read underneath your own personal Mount Pillowmore? Did it take you a half-hour to get comfortable because you couldn't quite finish your Pillow Dance?

Before we go any further, let's be honest here. We are a pillow company. We make and sell an excellent pillow in which we have an amazing amount of confidence. We use our own pillows, love them to pieces, and want to get them under the heads of lots of people. That doesn't mean, though, that we care more about selling you a pillow than we do about making sure you get the right one for you.

So. First things first. Roughly 70 percent of us (according to a couple different surveys) are what we call side-sleepers. The other 30 percent of us split between sleeping on our back or our stomach (About 15 to 20 percent for the first and 10 to 15 for the other, depending on the survey). Our pillow is made to best-serve the side-sleeper. If you sleep on your back, our Smarter Pillow will be great for you, but it's not the optimal choice. If you sleep on your stomach, you're probably better-suited to a softer pillow with less "loft" or height. That doesn't mean you shouldn't consider our pillow, just that our Smarter Pillow is made for the particular demands of side-sleepers.

And what, exactly are those demands? First, you need a pillow with at least a medium level of firmness. If your pillow is too soft, your head will sink too far into it and you'll wake up with a stiff neck. That, of course, assumes you don't wake up in the middle of the night to fluff up your pillow or to grab another pillow and jam it under the one that's collapsed. Your pillow has to be firm enough to support your head but not so firm that it hurts your ear. Oh, hey. Did I mention that a certain pillow made for a certain style of sleep has a certain special feature that makes life better for your ear? You may also want to know that memory foam is "very good" when it comes to holding that firmness you want. No particular reason. Just seems to us like a thing you may want to know.

Now that you have an idea about how firm your pillow should be, you'll need to consider the height of your pillow. Pillow professionals call that "loft". When you go to Pillow Professional Palavers, they all stand around using words like "loft" nodding knowingly to each other. They can nod, of course, because their necks do not hurt. They have chosen the proper pillows with the proper "loft". The rest of us, who are not snooty Pillow Professionals who smoke pipes* and bandy around arcane technical sleep technology terms, simply call it "height". You want a pillow high enough to support your head all night but not so high that it makes you uncomfortable. The idea height, at is happens, appears to be 10 centimeters or a little less than 4 inches. Don't take my word for it! You can look right here at this 2015 study in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics! If you can keep your head supported roughly four inches off your mattress through the night, you're probably going to have a good sleeping night.

The question, though, is how you keep your head supported at that height given that even firm pillows tend to settle over the first 10-20 minutes your head is on them. Now, if a pillow maker took that into account and put some sort of riser-type device on the pillow that not only kept the pillow at a good height but left room for you to put your arm under the pillow as well...

...but nah. You couldn't possibly get a Smarter Pillow made with such a clever device on this Earth, could you?

Awwwww! Side-Sleeping Kitty! I bet his pillow has proper
loft and a clever riser because he is a good sleepy kitty!

(Photo Credits: manbob86 and StockSnaps on Pixabay)

*To the best of my knowledge, no one at My Butterfly Pillow smokes a pipe. There might have been brief and unfortunate candy cigarette outbreak, but I couldn't swear to it. At all.

The Pillow: A Brief Tale of Snakes, Hairdos, and Feathers

An Ancient Egyptian headrest from the Middle Kingdom
via the The Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, E.210.1900

Have you ever wondered why we even have pillows? That is, what happened in our history that we suddenly needed something under our heads as we sleep? Historians have found references to headrests in Mesopotamia that go as far back as 7000 B.C., which make them a far more recent invention than mattresses, the oldest of which dates back 77,000 years. Why do we have them?

It turns out, the first pillows had little to do with comfort. As best we can tell, they were chunks of stone with a curved indentation where you could rest your head. You used them when you slept on the ground to keep bugs and snakes out of your ears, which seems like a pretty good sleep strategy. "Keep bugs and snakes out of your ears when you sleep", the ancient Mesopotamian pillow merchant would say. "I'm going to carve that into a plinth and put it outside my market stall!" You would, of course, nod politely while you tried to remember what, exactly a plinth was.

We have found other ancient pillows, in Egypt and China. The Egyptians used wooden or stone headrests in their tombs, to keep the heads of the dead elevated, lest demons crept into their ears. As you can see, ancient people had some real concerns about various things crawling into their ears. The Egyptians were the first to decorate their pillows, often with carvings of gods or incantations from the Book of Coming Forth by Day, which we know from many old movies as the Book of the Dead. Here is a particularly useful incantation:

Doves awake thee from sleep; they alert thee to the horizon. Raise thyself, (for) thou dost triumph over what was done against thee. Ptah has overthrown thy enemies. It has been commanded to act against him who acted against thee. Thou art Horus the son of Hathor, the fiery Cobra, of the fiery Cobra group, to whom a head was given after it was cut off. Thy head cannot be taken from thee hereafter; thy head can never be taken from thee ...

Not only is this proof against ear-snakes but also against anyone who might want to steal your head. Thanks, headrest!

The ancient Chinese made their pillows from either jade or ceramics. Early on, historians believed they were used in tombs, in similar ways to how the Egyptians used them. Later, though, they came to learn that they were used most often by the living, not only to keep the head comfortable during sleep, but as a way for women to protect their ornate and complicated hairdos. They were not built for comfort, though I imagine if you used them the right way, they were better than cracking your head on a curved rock. Still, they were lovely and I imagine you'd be quite proud to lay your head on one of these beauties, even if they didn't come with an incantation against beheading.

Over time, people learned they could put padding on a headrest, or make them small enough to be comfortably portable (headrests in the ancient Egyptian style are still in use in East Africa today). Europeans appears to have pioneered the stuffed pillow, which date back at least to the 15th century. People stuffed those pillows with feathers or straw or some other plant, to make them softer. After that, the quest for the most comfortable pillow began in earnest. People sat on them, slept on them, kneelt on them, used them to whack each other upside the head, propped books or food trays on them, piled them up around themselves and named them Fort Pillowmore...

...or perhaps that was just me.

Once we humans started stuffing pillows, we also started making better stuffing for them. Nowadays, we have everything from synthetic down to medical grade polyurethane and it doesn't look like we're dong looking for the perfect pillow (though we have a suggestion). No matter which pillow you choose, we feel confident in one thing.

At least you didn't get a snake in your ear last night.

She's just here to keep your hairdo straight.
via the Victoria and Albert Museum.

What in the World is Tinnitus and Why in the World Does It Matter?

Before we get too deeply into the subject of Tinnitus, let's all stop for a moment and give thanks we don't live in ancient Egypt roughly 2500 years before the birth of Christ. According to a document called the Ebers papyrus, people who suffered from a condition known as "a bewitched ear" would be treated with an infusion of "balanites oil 1 portion, frankincense 1 portion, and sekhopf 1 portion". I don't know about you, but I don't have 1 portion of balanites hidden in my medicine cabinet behind the tweezers. Let's not even talk about trying to get some sekhopf at 11 P.M., especially if you don't happen to live in a big city in close vicinity to the Nile and some pyramids.

The interesting thing about this papyrus is that it may be the oldest description of a common, but debilitating condition called tinnitus. Tinnitus, most simply, is a persistent steady sound such as a buzzing, clicking, or whistling that is audible without a source of sound. Nearly every adult has suffered from at least a mild and temporary incident of tinnitus, most often caused by prolonged exposure to loud noises. If you've ever spent too much time too close to the speakers at a rock concert and got that ringing in your ears that lasted a few hours after the show, you had a mild form of tinnitus. In that case, what happened was the noise damaged certain fine hair inside your ears that transmit signals to neurons in your brain. Once the damage heals, the signals get to the neurons in the right ways and the tinnitus goes away.

However, some people endure lasting tinnitus that affects them in a number of ways. According to a recent paper published in The Lancet, 10 to 15 percent of people suffer from chronic tinnitus. Most who have the condition are able to function well enough with it but roughly 1 to 2 percent of people report a severe effect on their quality of life. To put that in perspective, New York City has an approximate population of 8.5 million people, which means 170,000 people have a bad enough case of tinnitus that it negatively affects their life. That's a lot of people. Spread that out over a whole nation and the numbers get a bit mind-boggling. For example, the American Tinnitus Association estimates that 20 million or so Americans have what it calls "burdensome chronic tinnitus".

Those negative effects, those burdens, are not trivial. Tinnitus is linked, at least in surveys, to depression, sleep disorders, social isolation, and anxiety. At its worst, it can drive people to attempt suicide. Though detailed medical studies are thin, scientists are finding the condition affects many parts of the brain and may, in fact, change how a tinnitus-sufferer's brain actually works. Imagine 20 million people, all over this country, enduring a persistent noise that simply will not stop. Imagine how miserable those people must be.

Now imagine some of those people are your friends, family, and loved ones. There's a very good chance you know at least one person with tinnitus, especially if that person is a soldier.

The most common cause of tinnitus is noise, though age runs a relatively close second. Because of the nature of their jobs, soldiers are especially prone to to it. In 2012, tinnitus and hearing loss were the two most-reported disabilities connected to service.  This year, the AARP noted some 2.7 million veterans receive disability benefits due to tinnitus or hearing loss. That's a lot of soldiers, and more get diagnosed every year.

Despite its prevalence, there is no sure cure for tinnitus. The ATA says that sound therapy, especially sound masking devices -- devices that make steady and pleasing noises louder than the sounds of tinnitus -- can provide temporary relief. As of right now, no one can say for sure that a certain course of treatment will work for a certain person, but a recent survey of clinical trials has shown some hope that with the right device and the right therapies, people who suffer from the worst effects of tinnitus can find at least consistent temporary relief.

And that sounds a lot better than an infusion of ancient Egyptian schmutz, now doesn't it?

Warning: This guy may be responsible for a few bewitched ears.

(Photo Credits: @chairulfajar_ on Unsplash and ArtsyBee on Pixabay)

Head Tingles and Quiet Whispers: A Quick Guide to ASMR

You are getting sleepy. Sleeeeeeeeepy.
Oh, and tingly too. Tinglyyyyyy. *crackle*

Very recently, you may have seen a beer commercial called "The Pure Experience", in which sound plays a huge role. In it, Zoë Kravitz pours a beer in near-silence, whispers into microphones set on either side of her table, and taps her fingernails against the bottle. The very intimate and "close" experience is designed to cause a very particular reaction.

When you saw it, did you get a little pleasant tingle along your scalp that ran down your spine? If so, congratulations! You just experienced something called autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR for short. That tingle was an involuntary response your body has to sensory input from the outside. You may have had a similar sensation while getting your hair cut or listening to someone leaf through a book or magazine. You may have even experiences a reaction while watching Bob Ross paint his happy little trees. Ross' show, in fact, was one of the first places people began to notice their reactions. It wasn't until they could gather on the internet to talk about what they were experiencing that people began to connect the sensory inputs to the reactions and found that they weren't rare nor were they accidental. Something for sure was happening to people, though what that is (as the song goes) ain't exactly clear.

ASMR got its name in 2010, which gives you a pretty good idea about how little time scientists have had to study what it's all about. What we do know is that ASMR is one of those things that you either feel or you don't. Lots of people do. Some people have an adverse reaction. Some people just wonder what all the whispering and microphone brushing is about. We also know that the most popular way to stimulate the response is through videos, namely videos on YouTube. One of the more popular ASMR channels is ASMR Darling, who has over 2 million subscribers and reportedly earns a thousand dollars a day in advertising. Most popular ASMR channels belong to women, usually women with accents who split their videos between whispering soothing scenes and making ambient sounds with their fingers, brushes, and crumpled paper. You can also find plenty of ASMR videos that have nothing but nature sounds as well or environmental noises like typewriters or people reading books quietly, as if you were sitting in a library.  

It's enough to make you nod off right now, isn't it? And that's really the point. Most folks who have a positive reaction to ASMR "triggers" feel more relaxed after they experience that tingly sensation. Some even report nodding off before they even know what's happening.

Now, if only you could find a way to get those sounds quietly into your ears while you were comfortable in bed, possibly with Night Owl Speakers™. That would be pretty handy, wouldn't it? Pretty handy indeed.

This is not the optimal ASMR setup.
Try something softer, with fewer wires.

(Photo Credits: PublicDomainPictures and LOC on Pixabay)

Let's Talk About the Pillow Dance

You sleep on a throne of pillows! 

Imagine this scene.

You're about to go to bed. You have a perfect mattress, squishy in all the right places and firm in all the others. Your blanket keeps you at that juuuuust right temperature and also protects your feet from the monster that hides under the bed. What? You have to cover your feet or the monster will get you. We all know this. Anyhow, you tuck yourself in, roll over onto your side, your head hits the lovely down-stuffed pillow, and--

--nope. Not working. The pillow all but collapsed and now your neck hurts a bit. So you prop yourself up on one elbow, grab the second pillow, and shove it under the first. The second pillow is one of those fancy poly-fill jobbies you got at the mall department store because it promised premium comfort. It ought to help, right? Right. You slide down into the bed again, get settled again, relax your head into the pillow and--

--oh, come on. Too high now? Yeah. It feels like your head is jammed against your shoulder. Also, your head sank into the down pillow so that part of the pillow covers your nose. So you may suffocate as well. That would be a terrible way to go, wouldn't it?

Readjustment time. You sit up all the way and notice, thanks to a glance at your clock, that you've been at this far longer than you ever wanted. But you're sure you have the solution. Two down pillows! That's the ticket! Away goes the pricey premium pillow and into the game comes the second down-stuffed sack of sleepy satisfaction! You give them both a good fluffing, trying not to sneeze as an errant feather runs halfway up your nose, situate them just so, slide back into prime sleeping position and--

--well, you get the idea. You're doing the Pillow Dance -- the same dance many of us have done night after night, in search of that perfect comfortable sleeping position. If you sleep on your side (and according to a survey a few years ago by the company Anna Linens, that's 74 percent of us) you know how tough it is to get the pillows just right. You, like many of us, have probably tried a combination of pillows and have at least two, if not 3 or 4 pillows on or near your bed, ready for nighttime deployment.

But it never works the same way twice, does it? You may find that sweet spot once, but the next night? It's as elusive as the memories of that wonderful dream that involved an all-you-can-eat chocolate ice cream restaurant and several large sacks of found money.

The Pillow Dance is exactly the reason My Butterfly Pillow exists. We got tired of tossing and turning, or having pillows drop our heads too low or jack it up too high. We got tired of the Pillow Dance and we think you're tired of it, too.

Come visit us in the comments and tell us about your own Pillow Dance! Let's see if we can be a help to you! We're ready!

The kitty wants to hear from you! 

(Photo Credits: Jay Mantri and StockSnap on Pixabay)