PillowFacts / Problems / Someone told you to sleep differently, and nobody mentioned the pillow / My arm is in a sling and I cannot get comfortable
My arm is in a sling and I cannot get comfortable
A sling does two things to the arithmetic at once. It stops you turning over, so whichever side you are on is the side you stay on all night — position tolerance stops being a nicety. And it holds the arm forward of the body, which rotates the torso and changes how the shoulder meets the mattress, so the sink term you measured healthy no longer applies.
This one is not a pillow question alone. Your surgeon or physiotherapist governs how the arm is positioned and how you should sleep, without exception. This page describes only what immobility does to pillow height and makes no recommendation about your recovery.
What the pillow has to do
- loft in measured range — Pillow loft within the range your own measurement implies. This is first for every constraint in this cluster, because no surface is soft enough to rescue a pillow your head has already flattened.
- position tolerant support — Support that does not depend on hitting one exact spot, so rolling over does not mean re-finding a position in the dark.
- adjustability preferred — A pillow whose height you can change, because the thing altering your geometry is not present every night — one fixed height cannot be right both with and without it.
How people ask this
- How to sleep with arm in a sling
- Sleeping with a shoulder immobiliser
- Cannot sleep after shoulder injury
The pillows indexed here
Work out your own loft first → Loft comes before everything else on this list.