How do I Stop My Shoulder from Hurting when I Sleep?

Shoulder night pain is the most common complain a frozen shoulder sufferer usually complain to me. Although there are other complains like unable to comb hairs, pain during reaching the back pocket, but the pain that makes your night sleepless is perhaps most frustrating.

Winter magnifies the night pain problem.

In this article, we will be covering a simple tip to get rid of shoulder night pain.

Shoulder pain at night

Frozen shoulder is the number one cause of shoulder pain at night. Imagine if you had a continuous sleepless night for days, it will affect your job output, your day will become lazy and most important it affects your overall health.

Though shoulder pain can’t be treated in isolation, to get permanent relief from pain we have to treat frozen shoulder as a whole. Having said this it means that you have to also focus on shoulder stiffness exercises to get rid of both pain and stiffness of the shoulder.

If you are a recently frozen shoulder sufferer you want to know more details regarding this, we have a wonderful article frozen shoulder and its physiotherapy on it. We recommend you to go through it for a better understanding of your problem.

So without delay let’s get started.

Step by step procedure to treat
shoulder pain at night

The procedure/ tips we are about ot discuss is very simple can be perforemd wtih the things that is already avialable at home. And it takes only few minutes to perform the procedure.

The two things that you need is:

Pain balm– Any pain balm you that regularly use at home will do. But if it’s not available, get it from the nearest chemist shop because it is a very necessary thing for our tips.

Hot pack- We also need an arrangement for heat treatment. There are many modes for heat treatment, like a hot water bottle, electric heating pad, infra-red lamp.

However, in this article, we will discuss using hot fomentation. But before we proceed here’s a point you have to take care follow these tips just before going to bed. Have your dinner 30 minutes before doing it.

Preparing hot fomentation.

Preparation for hot fomentation takes only a few minutes. For this take a bowl of water and heat it over the gas stove to 50 to 60-degrees Celsius. You can put a spoon of table salt or use it without it.   Also, keep a towel ready.

We will discuss the process of application below but for a hint, we have dip towel in water and then apply hot towel to painful area.

So, here’s the actual step.

Step 1

Take the pain balm and apply over the painful shoulder region. The most the region would be front of the shoulder and between the shoulder and neck region.

Aplly with the fingers and give gentel massage. Remember that you have give gentle massage, not pressrise it.

After the thorough application of ointment leave it for 10 minutes so as the body could absorb the ointment.

Step 2

In the step 2 we have give heat treatment. Giving heat treatment after the application of balm magnifies the effect of balm. As i have mentioned that I recommend hot fomentaion, i would proceed with application of hot fomentation.

For this we have to keep a bowel of hot water ready. Now take a terquise towel and dip in the hot water and sqeez ou the extra amount o water form the towel

Now aplly the hot towel over the shoulder in question. Aplly it firmly and move the towel around the region.

Repeat the process till the water in the bowel comes to the normal process. Again I would like to mention that you can use other heating agent if this process find to be more cumbersome. There’s no hard and fast rule to only apply hot fomenatation.

Final words

This is an very effective tip which you can follow on other muscle pain condition. Like lower back pain due to muscle spasm, neck pain due to muscle spasm. I would like to stress on a point that for a frozen shoulder sufferer it does not solve problem permanently. You have to focus on exercises for permanent cure of frozen shoulder.

Keep Reading: What causes pain on tip of shoulder?

Sunit. S. Ekka

Dr Sunit Sanjay Ekka is a physiotherapist in practice for the last 15 years. He has done his BPT from one of the premium Central Government physiotherapy colleges, ie, SVNIRTAR. The patient is his best teacher and whatever he gets to learn he loves to share it on his Youtube channel and blog.