PillowFacts / Problems / The thing you do every night is telling you what is wrong / My bottom arm goes numb and I wake up shaking it out
My bottom arm goes numb and I wake up shaking it out
Two different setups produce this and they need opposite fixes. If the pillow is too LOW, your head drops toward the mattress and the shoulder rolls under, compressing everything running through it. If the pillow is too HIGH, you tend to push the arm up under it to close the gap, which puts your own head's weight on the arm. Which one you have is answerable: check whether your arm ends up under the pillow, or trapped beneath your shoulder.
This one is not a pillow question alone. Numbness that persists after you get up, or that happens during the day, is a question for a clinician and not a pillow. This page describes only how head height changes where the arm ends up.
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.
How people ask this
- Arm goes numb side sleeping
- Bottom arm numb at night
- Waking up with dead arm
The pillows indexed here
Work out your own loft first → Loft comes before everything else on this list.