I can honestly only sleep well on my right side. I think it has something to do with being right handed. I am very heavily right handed ( you can see my right shoulder bone sticking out of my chest but not my left). I think a lot of this has to due with wrestling all my life, as it takes a toll on your neck.
But I’d like to hear a more thorough explanation. Maybe it’s a common thing (cause I have heard from others who can only sleep on one side). And then, the most peculiar thing, on the off chance that I do sleep on my left side I inevitably have nightmares.
Anyway . . . I’m also very right-handed, and I always start out sleeping on my right side . . . but invariably have to switch several times during the night.
I am left-handed, and can only fall asleep on my left side, but I sleep throughout the night in different positions. I will posit that most people get used to sleeping in a certain way, and then can’t sleep any other way, or at least not well.
I’m left handed but only sleep on my right side. I think it comes from 30+ years of sleeping facing away from my wife in order to avoid a blast of middle of the night stink breath.
I also can’t sleep without the fan running. For years I worked night shift and slept during the day. Running a fan helped block outside noises. When I finally got on a regular shift I found I couldn’t sleep without the white noise hum of a fan. Even now that I’m [semi] retired I gotta have a fan running. It took a long time for my wife to get used to that.
That’s what I’m thinking. I know that if I laid on my right side all night long, I would stay awake all night long. Sounds crazy, but it’s true. Some people just can’t get to sleep unless everything is the same as usual. And then there are people (mostly men) who can lay down anywhere, any time, in any position, and immediately fall asleep. I hate those people.
I can comfortably sleep only on my right side, mostly because any other position seems to stimulate my myclonus (still recovering from that cervical spinal injury).
All my life, I have only been able to fall asleep on my right side. I’m relieved to see that I am not alone.
In my case, I need to have the feeling of pressure against the right side of my face, to counteract the nearly continuous outward, slightly itchy pressure which most or all of my right-side sinuses (including the one behind the eyebrow) have due to congestion in there (and, in turn, they are more easily congested because all the paces and connections between them, including the ear canal, are congenitally more narrow than their left-side counterparts).
Since in addition my jaw is rather more loosely connected to the rest of the skull than average, my jaw is noticeably shifted over to the left; they tried to fix this somewhat when I had orthodonture as a teen, but it will always be thus. It’s most noticeable in my asymmetric smile, which I hate, but what can you do!
I once read somewhere that parents of infants should gently turn their babies over if they notice that they are favoring one side or the other when they sleep.
Either you’re talking about steak, or you mean “median”. If it weren’t 10:00 a.m., I’d make a pun out of it. But it is early, so let’s just pretend I made everyone laugh, ok?
OP: Try switching sides of the bed. Then try putting your head at the end of the bed and your feet at the top. See if you still have to sleep on a certain side. It could just be that you have to, say, face the window, or you have to face the outside of the bed. We eagerly await your results.
I would guess it’s conditioning too, and your collar bone difference (I assume you meant collar bone) is probably the result of poor posture - unless you’ve had a break or something. If you’re heavily right handed, you probably carry your bags on that side, tend to carry the most weight with that arm when bringing in groceries, primarily use that side to push or pull (doors, etc.) and in doing so, you’re much stronger on the right then the left, causing a significant imbalance in both strength and flexibility.
Get someone to take pictures of you front and back. I would bet my cat that your right shoulder is higher then your left.
If you care to fix it, you might eventually find that it’s easier to sleep on your left.
