It is Friday. The weekend is upon us. But I have not done my Friday night sleep yet, so this is a journal entry for last night’s beauty sleep. If you think I’m about to say that I did not get 8 hours of sleep last night, you are correct. I went to bed after midnight. I think I probably went to bed after 1 o’clock in the morning. And yes, I tossed and turned. And I think I slept mostly on my sides and stomach. So I did not get much in the way of beauty sleep last night, and my face showed it when I woke up in the morning. I think my face this morning was the worse I have seen my face look in a few. I even had a pimple on my forehead to show for putting my face down on the not so sanitary pillowcase on my pillow. So that’s another point in favor of the suggestion that sleeping on your back helps to improve your appearance.
But is sleeping on your back really going to ‘improve’ your appearance?
If you ever pay attention to the promises that get made by manufacturers of anti aging products, you will notice that they word things very cleverly. But if you interpret the wording correctly, you will understand something about the way these products work. They don’t really fix anything. They don’t get rid of your wrinkles and all your other signs of aging. They just minimize the appearance of your wrinkles and other signs of aging. And that is why, if you stop using them, you will start seeing the very wrinkles, spots and other signs of aging that you thought the product had repaired. I think the same is true for sleeping on your back. It isn’t going to fix anything permanently. It only minimizes things so you think they are going away, but they are not in fact being erased, evened out, shrinking or in any real way being reversed. So just one night of not sleeping on your back, and you wake up the next morning looking like hell, because the reason you weren’t looking like hell on the mornings of waking up from sleeping on your back, isn’t that skin was magically repaired. It’s that your skin had a chance to relax and you see the evidence of it and think wow, I don’t look like hell this morning.
So doesn’t that mean that your face isn’t as wrinkled and damaged as it looks in the morning, and the benefit of sleeping on your back is that you see a truer condition of your face than the condition of your face when you wake up from a harried night not sleeping on your back?
It would seem to make sense wouldn’t it, that if the haggard, wrinkled face you see in the morning is caused by not getting a good night of sleeping on your back, or just a good night of sleeping regardless of your sleep position, then the relaxed, less haggard, less wrinkled face you see in the morning after a getting an adequate amount of sound, healthy sleep, more accurately reflects the true condition of your skin?
I would say that the truth lies somewhere between the haggard morning face and the relaxed face that makes your wrinkles and other signs of aging look more diminished than they are in reality.
For example, every morning when I wake up, there are plainly visible lines underneath my eyes, but by the time I go through my morning cleansing ritual and apply my creams and moisturizers, the lines are barely visible. Did they disappear? No, They are just minimized now that I am awake and I’ve applied all my skincare products. In the morning when they are more visible, is that an accurate reflection of the true situation with regard to the lines under my eyes? Or are the lines maximized due to all the stress from tossing and turning, having bad dreams, sleeping and being unable to sleep soundly through the night? I want to say that the lines look worse than they are in reality first thing in the morning, especially waking up from an unsettled sleep. And they look less visible during the day, unless I put on make-up that does not do a good job of not settling into lines and creases, at which time they look even worse than when I first wake up in the morning.
Sleeping on your back with or without an anti-aging pillow is not going to reverse aging
So don’t expect that sleeping on your back is going to reverse aging. At least, I should speak for myself and say that I don’t have any expectations that sleeping on my back is going to reverse my existing signs of aging or stop me from developing new signs of aging. But I do believe that since I have started trying to train myself to sleep on my back, I have seen a more relaxed face during the day. Particularly on those days when I got at least 50% of my sleep on my back. I can see the difference in the photos and videos that I take every day. My face looks more relaxed and less broken. The bags under my eyes are still there but they are not so enormous that I have to be embarrassed. And the sides of my face are still swollen but they aren’t drooping on top of that. And they aren’t so swollen that they start to meet the bags under my eyes and have me looking like I’m making one of those faces where you’re grimacing or scowling or showing scorn over something you hear or smell.
I hope you had a good night’s rest on Thursday, and since I am publishing this post pretty late and it’s bedtime again on Friday, I hope that you are able to get a good night’s rest tonight and that, if you are trying to train yourself to start sleeping on your back, you get a step closer to that goal tonight.
Happy Friday and have a great weekend.
M