A month of pillowless sleep

Reporting back:

It’s been 1 month of no-pillow sleep, and it’s been great!

I had tech neck from prolonged use of sitting down in front of the computer. Used to wake up feeling off in my neck—sometimes even neck ache—but now? Hardly ever! I only had 1 occasion of neck ache the entire last month.

It’s really counterintuitive because of all the online articles saying that no pillow is bad for your neck. But I guess we can at least say it works for me?

Ok but a few caveats:

• I still use a tiny support pillow but just to support the neck. I place the pillow (or you can use a rolled towel) in the gap between the neck and mattress. The back of my head touches the mattress.
• I sometimes switch to side sleeping in the middle of the night and the small support pillow is too low for side position, so I keep a flat-ish pillow by the side for that.
• I have a bolster that I place in between my legs when I sleep sideways. Apparently it helps with spinal alignment too.
• Every morning, I also do stretching and body weight exercises like pull-ups and push-ups to help strengthen the upper body-shoulder-neck area. If I don’t do it consistently, I can almost feel the neck aches return more easily.
• Occasionally stretching by raising my arms and pulling back the hands and arcing my upper back throughout the day also help ease tension a bit.

My hypothesis on why pillowless worked for me:

• The slight back tilt from being pillowless at night seems to help counter all the forward hunching from computer and smartphone use in the day.
• My pillow used to be pretty thick, but it never used to bother me until recently. Perhaps thickness meant my neck was again in a forward tilt angle at night, so more repetitive strain?
• The slight back tilt seems to open up my breathing passageways slightly. In the past, the moment I lay down, I feel like I can’t breathe properly through my nose, leading to mouth-breathing and snoring. Not ideal. Somehow, pilllowless helped a bit with that.

To be honest, there’s so little resources online for pillowless sleep that I feel like I might be making things up. But hypothesis aside, the lived experience is indisputable:

My neck does feel so much better.

Will continue observing and experimenting to see if this is a viable long term solution!