A friend recently informed me, in the midst of a conversation about something else (snoring, probably), that we all should be sleeping on our left sides.
Why? I asked, startled that there was such a binary rule of life of which I’d never heard. “For your heart,” she replied. Ever a borderline hypochondriac, I tucked that information away and we moved on to other topics.
Later online research revealed a surprising lack of unanimity on the question of which side one should sleep on, though there is a nearly universal consensus that side-sleeping is much to be preferred over sleeping on one’s back, largely because the latter is more likely to lead to sleep apnea.
The Mayo Clinic says that side-sleeping is best during pregnancy and for those with neck and back pain, but is agnostic as to which side is preferable.
The Sleep Foundation (who knew?) is distinctly left-side-biased, saying that left-side sleeping may reduce acid reflux (presumably because the esophagus enters the stomach from a slightly right-to-left angle — or so I recall from high school anatomy class), and is strongly recommended as pregnancy progresses as it improves blood flow between the heart and fetus. But contra my friend’s advice, those with heart issues are advised by the Sleep Foundation to sleep on their right side, not their left, apparently owing to the asymmetrical structure of the heart and the respective functions of the left and right ventricle.
However, If you ask OpenAI, it will tell you that the left side is best for digestive health, to enhance blood flow to the heart and “can alleviate symptoms of sleep apnea,” but that right-side sleeping, confusingly, “may help reduce snoring for some individuals.”
I was relieved to find that there’s seemingly no consensus that sleeping on one’s left side is healthier than sleeping on one’s right, because, as I worried to my friend during that initial conversation, sleeping on my left side would require that I face away from my wife, who sleeps on my right (and, usually, on her right side). In fact, when my friend first started talking about which “side” we should sleep on, I thought she meant which side of the bed.
While this question presumably has no impact on health whatsoever (all else being equal), it’s actually far more interesting, at least for someone with as chequered a domestic history as my own.
When we’re young, if we’re lucky, we sleep alone, and when we’re older, if we’re lucky, we sleep with someone. I had a single bed well into my teens, and again in college, and flopped this way and that (never a back sleeper, I’m proud to say) across its narrow width, often assuming, prone, postures of superheroes in flight that were otherwise proscribed by the laws of gravity.
The first person with whom I slept with any regularity was my college girlfriend, on the single mattress in the two bedroom suite that was afforded we “head residents” —a title accorded to certain seniors as a reward for being thought so thoroughly harmless that we could be trusted to oversee a dormfull of younger ruffians. The bed was crammed against the wall of my small bedroom, so you could only enter it from the left side (as you faced the bed), and ever the gentleman even in those libertine times, I always let her get into bed first. This meant I slept on the left side of the bed, hemming her in and, I’m sure, pressing her quite literally up against the wall. But were young, so getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom wasn’t a thing, and we had other things to worry about, like where we’d be sleeping after we graduated.
The following five years were certainly among the most incomprehensibly busy of my life, as I (a) moved to New York City, (b) graduated from law school, (c) broke up with my college girlfriend, (d) started work at a Wall Street law firm, (e) got married (to someone else), and (f) became a father — more or less in that order. By the end of this dizzying sequence I was living with my new wife and even newer child in a two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village, and in pictures of me holding my newborn daughter on my chest, I’m on the right side of our queen sized bed, which comports with my recollection of how things were soporifically organized then. Whether this had to do with habit formed in my wife’s prior marriage, or a way of encouraging me to be the one to get up and minister to the baby when she (the baby, that is) woke crying in the middle of the night, I can’t say. But on the right side of the bed I was nearer to the door of our bedroom, so I went and lay on the floor next to the baby’s crib (on my left side) and rubbed her back till we both fell back to sleep. (I may mention this when we celebrate my daughter’s 50th birthday later this month.)
Another five years — another twinkling, really, but a huge dollop of a thirty-something’s life — and I’m divorced, living in a one-bedroom on Gramercy Park, still sleeping on the right side of the bed but now just because it’s closer to the bathroom, with the other half kept conscientiously empty for as long as good sense would allow.
It would take the better part of another decade to own the place where I slept, by then in California, on the San Francisco peninsula, in the coastal woods a stone’s throw from Stanford, in an old three-bedroom frame house that I lived in alone at first, and later with one of my daughter’s teachers from New York, who visited for awhile and then stayed on. I slept on the left side of the bed in those days, nearer the windows on hot nights, I suppose, as there were many of those, and to face her while sleeping on my left side.
Then I remodeled both the house and my relationships, so that the bed moved to another wall, and the teacher moved out. I took up sleeping on the right side of the bed, closer to the bathroom door, facilitating those increasingly frequent nighttime trips to pee that accompany male middle age.
A new girlfriend had an apartment in San Francisco, in a high-rise apartment building overlooking the bay. She slept on the right side of the bed, so when I finally began to join her there, I slept on the left, but never felt quite right about it, especially when awakened in the middle of the night by the braying of the seals down on the wharves. Eventually we moved together to my house on the peninsula and got married, and I reestablished my position on the right side of the bed, which I have happily occupied ever since.
What does all this bed-sidedness add up to? Not a lot, perhaps, except that wonderful human mix of habit and adaptability that we should all strive for, even when it’s not thrust upon us by circumstance, romance, or the need to pee.
So…which side do you sleep on (in whatever sense applies)?