Can Chiropractic Care Help You Sleep Better? Here’s What the Research Says
💤 Adjusting for Rest: How Chiropractic Care Can Help You Sleep Better
Sleep is the cornerstone of recovery—whether you're healing from injury, managing chronic pain, or simply trying to function at your best. Yet for many, restful sleep remains elusive. While sleep hygiene tips and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) are often recommended, there's growing evidence that chiropractic care may offer a powerful, underappreciated ally in the quest for better sleep.
🌙 The Pain-Sleep Connection
Chronic musculoskeletal pain is a major disruptor of sleep. It’s not just the discomfort—it’s the way pain rewires your nervous system, heightening arousal and reducing your ability to enter deep, restorative sleep stages. A 2021 systematic review published in Chiropractic & Manual Therapies examined non-pharmacological interventions for adults with musculoskeletal pain and sleep problems. The review found that targeted therapies—including spinal manipulation—can improve sleep efficiency and quality, especially when pain is reduced.
🧠 Chiropractic and Neuroplasticity
One of the most compelling studies comes from Brain Sciences (2024), where researchers used EEG and somatosensory evoked potentials to measure brain activity before and after chiropractic adjustments. Participants with chronic low back pain showed increased alpha activity in the Default Mode Network—a brain region associated with relaxation and introspection—after four weeks of chiropractic care. This shift in brainwave patterns correlated with improvements in mood, pain, and sleep.
In other words, chiropractic care may do more than relieve physical tension—it may recalibrate the nervous system toward a more restful baseline.
🛌 Beyond the Adjustment: Holistic Impact
Chiropractic treatment often includes more than spinal manipulation. Many chiropractors integrate soft tissue work, movement retraining, and lifestyle coaching. These elements can reduce sympathetic nervous system dominance (the “fight or flight” mode) and promote parasympathetic activation (the “rest and digest” mode), which is essential for sleep.
Moreover, improved spinal alignment and joint mobility can reduce nocturnal discomfort, allowing patients to find comfortable sleep positions and stay asleep longer.
📊 What Patients Report
Anecdotally, many patients report better sleep within weeks of starting chiropractic care. While subjective, these reports align with findings from the PROMIS-29 health assessment tool used in the Brain Sciences study, which showed significant improvements in sleep-related metrics after chiropractic intervention.
🌀 The Pain-Sleep Feedback Loop This diagram maps how chronic pain and poor sleep reinforce each other in a vicious cycle:
Pain → Discomfort makes it harder to fall asleep or stay asleep.
Poor Sleep → Leads to increased sensitivity to pain and reduced healing.
↑ Arousal → The nervous system stays in a heightened state, making deep sleep elusive.
↓ Sleep Quality → Less restorative sleep means more inflammation, more pain… and the cycle continues.
Haavik, H., Niazi, I. K., Amjad, I., Kumari, N., Ghani, U., Ashfaque, M., Rashid, U., Navid, M. S., Kamavuako, E. N., Pujari, A. N., & Holt, K. (2024). Neuroplastic Responses to Chiropractic Care: Broad Impacts on Pain, Mood, Sleep, and Quality of Life. Brain Sciences, 14(11), 1124. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci14111124
Papaconstantinou, E., Cancelliere, C., Verville, L. et al. Effectiveness of non-pharmacological interventions on sleep characteristics among adults with musculoskeletal pain and a comorbid sleep problem: a systematic review. Chiropr Man Therap 29, 23 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12998-021-00381-6