Best Pregnancy Pillows for Back Sleepers

The short answer

First, the thing you are probably worried about

Waking up on your back is extremely common and is not a crisis. Your body generally wakes or shifts you before a position becomes a problem, and briefly being on your back is not the same as sleeping that way all night.

The practical, widely given advice is that side-sleeping is preferable later in pregnancy, and that if you wake on your back you simply turn over. Guilt at 4am helps nobody. Ask your own midwife or OB about your situation rather than relying on general information, particularly if you have any pregnancy complication.

What this page is actually about is the harder practical problem: if you have slept on your back your entire life, side-sleeping is uncomfortable and unfamiliar, and that is a genuine obstacle to falling asleep at all.

The halfway position, which nobody mentions

The most useful thing we can tell a lifelong back sleeper is that you do not have to go straight to a true side-lying position. A semi-reclined position — on your side but leaning back by maybe 30 degrees into something supporting you — is much closer to what you are used to and much easier to fall asleep in.

That is what the outer arm of a U-shape gives you, and it is why the U tops this page rather than the shapes that score better on our general comparison. A wedge behind your back achieves the same thing for far less money, with the caveat that it has to stay there.

Make rolling flat awkward, not forbidden

Willpower does not operate while you are asleep. The effective approach is physical: put something behind you so that rolling onto your back requires climbing over it. People who try to simply remember not to roll over tend to spend the night half-waking and checking, which is worse for sleep than the position would have been.

If your pillow of choice does not do this, a single cheap wedge behind the back alongside it is the fix.

The other two problems you will hit

Your hip. New side sleepers are surprised by hip ache, because they have never loaded one hip for hours before. The answer is something firm between the knees — see the hip-pain picks.

Your shoulder. Numbness in the lower arm is common and comes from compressing the shoulder under your own weight. The fixes are a head pillow tall enough to keep your neck neutral rather than tilted, and something to hug so the top arm is not hanging.

How we picked

Six axes, weighted for this page toward whether a pillow supports a semi-reclined position and physically discourages rolling flat — neither of which appears on a spec sheet, so we read them out of the geometry and the reported experience. We have not slept on these; the method is on how we pick.

If side-sleeping is genuinely intolerable

Some people cannot make it work, and a propped, semi-reclined position with the upper body raised is more comfortable than either flat on the back or fully on the side. If that is you, raise your whole torso rather than stacking pillows under your head, which bends your neck.

Discuss it with your own provider rather than deciding alone, because the right answer depends on your pregnancy. Our guide to sleep positions by trimester goes through the options stage by stage, and how to sleep when pregnant covers the broader picture.