PillowFacts / Problems / Someone told you to sleep differently, and nobody mentioned the pillow / I have been told to sleep on my back
I have been told to sleep on my back
On your side, the pillow fills the gap your SHOULDER creates. On your back, the shoulder is out of the equation entirely and the pillow only supports the curve of your neck. That is a much smaller distance — for most adults the required loft roughly halves. The pillow that was correct on your side is now propping your chin toward your chest all night.
This one is not a pillow question alone. Whoever told you to sleep on your back governs how long and how strictly. This page has nothing to say about that and does not know your situation — it describes only what back sleeping does to pillow height.
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.
- 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
- Pillow for switching to back sleeping
- Back sleeping neck pain new pillow
- My pillow is too high now that I sleep on my back
The pillows indexed here
Work out your own loft first → Loft comes before everything else on this list.