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There are hundreds of potential causes for lower back pain, and it can be hard to tell what exactly is making your spine hurt. Fortunately, there are some basic things that you’re able to do to eliminate the problem if it’s something simple.

We’re talking basics. It’s amazing how many people suffer with lower back pain every day without ever realizing it’s because of something as simple as…well, let’s talk about that.

Sleep as a Treatment for Lower Back Pain

Yes, it may be as simple as getting more sleep — or as complicated, depending on your lifestyle. If you regularly get by on six or fewer hours of sleep (far too common in today’s three-part-time-job economy) you may be consigning yourself to a lifetime of backaches.

Science still doesn’t exactly understand sleep well enough to know why this happens, but we do know that sleep is a time when the body heals more quickly. It makes sense that the part of your back that holds up your organs, shoulders, arms, and head would need that to keep itself strong. The obvious advice: do whatever you can to rearrange your schedule so that you nail that vital 8th hour.

Read the Consumer Guide to Best Chairs for Back Pain Here!

On the other hand, it’s possible you get lower back pain after sleeping, which if so, you most likely need to alter your sleeping position.  Ideally, the best position is on your back.

Drinking Water as a Treatment for Lower Back Pain

Yep — it’s true. One of the major causes of lower back pain for some people is that their kidneys are unhappy. If your back pain starts a few inches below your shoulder blade tips and doesn’t reach as far down as the top of your pelvis, examine your drinking habits. An extra couple of cups of water in the midafternoon might just be the solution you need.

Not Smoking as a Treatment for Lower Back Pain

Some people get stress pains in their lower back, and they turn to cigarettes to help combat their stress. That’s doomed to failure, for a few reasons. First of all, cigarettes have a chemical in them that makes your brain feel pain more strongly than it normally would — it literally magnifies pain. Secondly, coughing — especially the deep, hacking coughs that smokers tend to develop — is particularly hard on the muscles around your lower spine.

Meditation as a Treatment for Lower Back Pain

Speaking of stress pain, it’s possibly the most common cause of lower back pain. However, there’s a caveat here that’s very important: pressure and stress are not the same thing. There’s a notion making the grounds that avoiding stress means you have to stop being ambitious and setting high bars for yourself. That’s simply not true.

Stress doesn’t come from setting high bars for yourself. Stress comes from being powerless to change your situation. It comes from pressure that you have no power to relieve. When you’re genuinely stressed, one of the best responses is meditation: the deliberate exercise of clearing your mind of distractions and letting your mind think what it wants to. It’s not “having an empty mind.” The only people with empty minds are people with empty skulls. But it’s allowing your mind to wander freely, without attachment to any of the thoughts that it’s thinking. If you can do that, you can allow yourself to sidestep the stress by letting those thoughts go and focusing on the things you can do something about.

If you’re getting plenty of sleep, drinking right, not abusing your body with toxic substances, and you’re not stressed — and you still have back pain that you can’t manage — you’ll have to try something a bit more focused. Try, for example, getting the best  back  chair, using trigger point self treatment system to release locked muscles, or fighting back-killing inflammation with nature’s best all natural ant-inflammatory. There are a lot of options you can choose that don’t involve a prescription — and we believe that’s a goal worth pursuing.