GOOD QUESTION
Can You Train Yourself to Sleep in a Different Position?
Probably. But first, consider the risks.
The internet makes quite a fuss about the ways we arrange our bodies in repose.
Googling “best sleep position” turns up a cool 765 million results, and some of the top hits maintain that how you sleep — back, stomach, left or right side, fetal — has profound implications for your spine, heart, breathing, appearance, and much else. There’s even some Freudian pseudoscience linking certain sleep positions to personality traits, which seems to have about as much solid scientific backing as palmistry.
All of these claims are somewhat confounded by the fact that we all tend to sleep in a variety of positions. “You hear a lot of things about back- or side-sleeping being optimal, but the truth is we can control this a lot less than we think,” says Michael Grandner, PhD, an assistant professor and director of the Sleep and Health Research Program at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson. “You can train yourself to fall asleep in a certain position, but as soon as you fall asleep, you’re probably going to move.”
To his point, a 2017 study in the journal Nature and Science of Sleep found that, once we’re out, we tend to shift positions roughly twice…
