My Fundamentals — Sleeping on the Floor

During physiotherapy, my injury started to feel worse and I wondered if it was my bed. Maybe I got the wrong mattress and it’s only now starting to cause problems?

Growing up, I didn’t have the traditional Canadian upbringing and thus I rarely went to the cottage. In fact, I never went camping and I want to… badly. Recently, I’ve been romanticizing the ascetic spartan pleasure of camping because of my injury.

Having lower back pain is interesting. During physiotherapy, my injury started to feel worse and I wondered if it was my bed. Maybe I got the wrong mattress and it’s only now starting to cause problems?

With some research, I discovered folks find sleeping on the floor alleviates some pain, mostly because it’s harder for your spine to enter a neutral position on a mattress.

Floor it is, I had nothing to lose.

I go back and forth between the floor and the bed these days, depending on how I feel. The experience made me think about the bed differently. Why do we require so much comfort for sleeping? For thousands of years we slept on the ground… hell my parents grew up sleeping on the floor and none of them have back problems.

Aside from the pain reprieve, there is a real humility to sleep on the floor. I’m not elevated in comfort, “grounding” me with gratitude about my hardships.

Humility through sleep discomfort is a welcomed fundamental that ironically brought me a lot of comfort to my life. Best of all, I will never have to worry about sleeping anywhere. I can camp anywhere, just get me a pillow and a quilt and I’m good.

Word count: 249
Twitter: @bhavprajapati

My Fundamentals Series — For the indefinite future, I’ll be writing posts about my renewed fundamentals to live by. I’m not making recommendations or providing medical advice, rather I hope the posts serve as thinking prompts. My intention here is to help people review their own life. I trust readers have the agency and wherewithal to take their own action.

Fiftytwo250 (Fifty-Two Two Fifty), a collection of random, recurring, ruminations written with patience for depth and brevity. Each post is written over the course of a week in 250 words or less as a personal exercise of freedom and focus in a time of placid tumult and despair.