BY 
After you mess up your posture, sleeping can be a real issue with every position uncomfortable.
You may think your mattress is too soft, or that your spine is not straight enough in bed.
Before going out and sleeping on the best futon mattress you can find, watch this MobilityWOD video where Kelly Starrett states that your mattress is likely too hard if you have to cross your feet or tuck one foot under the other knee (like a half-lotus) or sleep with an arm over your head.
All of these tendencies are to try and get your lower spine out of extension.
Think about it. If you lie down on the floor with your arms lying by your side and with your feet out straight, your lower back will be arched off the floor (as well as your neck tilted back which is why we use pillows).
When you sit with your knees pulled up you will notice that your back flattens out and that your spine is neutral.
A good night’s sleep is down to understanding posture
Basically we need our pelvis to sink into the mattress enough for our lower back muscles not to be switched on all night. If your mattress is too hard and you end up having to cross your feet, then a quick fix is to simply recreate the position with your knees up by putting a pillow under your knees.
Ok so mattress sorted, now onto the pillow which was even harder to source/fix until I found a company called Dormeo (I use their Siena pillow) where each end is rounded and one end is raised up.
You put the raised edge (at the bottom of the shot) right up to your shoulders and the curve supports all the facet joints in your neck and the subtle drop towards the center allows your chin to tilt back to a neutral position. In the Mobility WOD video Kelly was warning that you need to make sure your head doesn’t fall back into the pillow as you end up in a broken position all night and so I was wary of this backward tilt but by putting my hand behind my neck every segment is in alignment and it feels magical.
The only problem is that it may take you a bit of time to be able to be comfortable with your head lower than on a ‘normal’ pillow as you are likely used to being propped up higher and having your chin tucked in.
In order to wind down before bed I use a variety of tools to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system into a state of ‘rest-and-digest’, pictured below:
I first of all arch my upper back (body facing up) over a large 55cm swizz ball to release tension in the upper back in a global way.
I then move to arch my thoracic spine gently over the foam roller (mentioned in the mobility chapter) and then use the double lacrosse balls to find individual stiff segments; although in this case, I use a softer Yoga Tune Up massage balls by Jill Miller as I don’t want to do anything too active before sleep.
I then use these same balls (taken out of the peanut bag) to massage my Temporomandibular Joint as I tend to clench my jaw as a reaction to stress throughout the day and this can lock up at night time too - there’s a great video by Jill of how to use these balls to release stress in your jaw below.
