Lying on your back is the most common sleeping position. Chinese medicine calls this sleeping position corpse lying,
In this sleeping position, the body and lower limbs can only be fixed in a straight position, and it is impossible to achieve the purpose of full body rest. When the pressure in the abdominal cavity increases, lying on your back can easily make people feel chest tightness and panic. Lying on your back like this, you will consciously or unconsciously put your hand on your chest, which will put pressure on your heart and lungs and make you prone to nightmares.
When lying prone, most of the weight of the whole body is pressed on the ribs and abdomen, which makes the chest and diaphragm compressed, affecting breathing and aggravating the heart load. Lying prone will also increase the curvature of the lumbar spine, leading to the compression of the small joints behind the spine. When lying prone, the neck is twisted to one side and the head is tilted to one side, which is easy to cause neck muscle injury.
When lying on the left side, your legs are slightly bent, which is beneficial to relax your body and help to eliminate fatigue. But the heart is located between the left and right lungs in the chest, and the outlets from the stomach to the duodenum and from the small intestine to the large intestine are on the left. Therefore, lying on the left side not only compresses the heart, but also compresses the gastrointestinal tract and slows down gastric emptying.
Chinese medicine believes that the correct sleeping position should be lying on the right side with legs slightly bent. In this way, the heart is high and not oppressed; Low liver position and good blood supply are beneficial to metabolism; Food in the stomach is pushed to the duodenum by gravity, which can promote digestion and absorption. At the same time, the whole body is in a relaxed state, breathing evenly, the heartbeat slows down, and the brain, heart, lungs, gastrointestinal tract, muscles and bones are fully rested and supplied with oxygen.
Of course, for a healthy person, there is no need to be too rigid about his sleeping position, because overnight, people often can't sleep in a fixed position until dawn, and most people are constantly changing their sleeping positions, which is more conducive to relieving fatigue.