In my last entry, I mentioned that I noticed a difference in my hip and shoulder discomfort after my very first night sleeping on the 6-inch incline. Of course, one good night doesn’t tell you very much, so what I really wanted to know was whether that experience would continue.
For me, it did.
Before adding the incline, I had been having a difficult time getting comfortable and, more importantly, staying comfortable. My hip or shoulder would start bothering me during the night, I’d wake up, reposition myself, and then try to get comfortable again. I could also wake up in the morning feeling achy.
Once I started sleeping inclined, that gradually stopped being something I was thinking about. My hip and shoulder discomfort seemed to subside, I wasn’t waking up because of it, and I wasn’t waking in the morning with the same aching feeling. I was waking less during the night and feeling more rested in the morning.
I want to be careful about how I describe that because this is simply what I personally experienced. I can’t say exactly what was happening biomechanically or that someone else would experience the same thing. What I can say is that changing the angle of my sleep surface seemed to change how I experienced pressure at my hip and shoulder, and the difference was significant enough for me to continue sleeping this way.
Something else that surprised me was how quickly the 6-inch incline became a non-issue.
As I mentioned previously, when I first stood back and looked at my bed after installing the wedge, I thought the angle looked pretty extreme. But once I was lying down, it didn’t feel weird at all. In fact, I really didn’t notice the incline, which wasn’t what I expected.
I haven’t gone back to sleeping flat since I started, so I can’t give a true side-by-side comparison yet. At this point, though, I actually wonder whether sleeping completely flat would feel strange to me!
I have found one negative, although it’s purely personal: I don’t particularly like the appearance of my bed being inclined during the day. That’s really the only practical downside I’ve experienced with my current setup.
It’s also one reason I’m interested eventually in trying one of the adjustable full-body incline frames, such as the Incline Sleep 100 or 500. My foam wedge is fixed at 6 inches. With an adjustable setup, I could make the bed flat during the day and then adjust it at night to find the precise incline that feels best to me. I haven’t personally used either of those frames, though, so anything I discuss about them at this point would be based on product information rather than my own experience.
I believe I first started using my wedge around May. What happened next is probably what changed this from simply being something that worked well for me into a subject I genuinely wanted to understand.
I started reading.
And then I kept reading.
I became curious about where the idea of full-body inclined sleeping came from, what research had actually been done, what was anecdotal, what was supported by evidence, and why my own experience had been so noticeable. I also started messaging Incline Sleep with questions.
That’s really where the next part of this journey began.
In my next entry, I’ll talk about what I started learning—and some of the questions I realized I still needed answers to.