Why (and How) Bed Rest Can Damage Your Body

By Your Health Magazine

Your Health Magazine

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Why (and How) Bed Rest Can Damage Your Body

You strained your ankle. The doctor checked you up and told you to rest for 10 days. Luckily, you have friends who bring you food, so all you do is watch TV and rest. The only time you get up is to go to the bathroom.

After those 5 days have passed, you notice that your back now hurts more than the ankle, and your legs feel super weak and wobbly. If you stand up, you immediately get dizzy.

What’s going on? You were perfectly healthy. Why are you suddenly an 85-year-old man? The rest was supposed to make you better.

How come you feel like you’re falling apart?

What Changes When You Stop Moving

Doctors used to prescribe bed rest for everything, but now they know better because bed rest isn’t as easy on the body. Movement is extremely important because it’s what keeps your blood flowing, it keeps the muscles active, and it brings fresh oxygen to your tissues.

Without it, you’re in trouble.

The first thing to talk about is blood flow. So even when doing simple movements (e.g., walking around, adjusting your posture while sitting, etc.), your muscles will still contract, squeezing blood back to the heart muscle.

Now, if you take countermeasures and lie down flat for hours (or even days), your circulation will slow down, especially in your lower extremities.

Now, instead of circulating – as it’s supposed to – blood starts pooling in your legs; this means that nutrients and oxygen aren’t reaching tissue cells as fast as they’re supposed to. But it’s not just receiving nutrients, it’s also blood taking out waste products from cells. The entire system slows down.

Your muscles will notice this almost right away.

It only takes a few days for your strength to drop, so it’s no wonder that people feel weaker after being in bed for 3 or 4 days. And the thing that makes this even worse is that the small stabilizing muscles around your spine and joints break down early. And you don’t even think about them, but you definitely notice something’s off.

This has to do with the fact that whenever you try standing up, you feel weak and wobbly/shaky. Once you get back on your feet, you’ll notice that the movements you took for granted all your life are not harder.

It affects your breathing, too.

When you lie low, your lungs can’t expand as much as they do when you’re sitting or standing. And that means you get less oxygen exchange out, so your body has to run on a lower fuel mix. If you stay in bed for a long time, fluid and mucus will have a lot easier time building up in the lungs because you don’t cough or breathe deeply to clear all that out.

During all this, your skin isn’t having the time of its life, either.

Lying down puts pressure on the same places (e.g., heels, hips, lower back, shoulder blades, etc.) day in day out, which also means you’re always under load instead of relaxed. No relief whatsoever. And blood supply to those areas drops because the weight of your body is squeezing the tiny blood vessels so much that they’re almost shut.

And you don’t see any of this right away.

It all looks fine on the surface, but inside, your muscles are getting smaller, the blood is slowing down, and the lungs are taking a vacation.

Where Problems Start to Show Up

Here’s where you’ll notice problems first.

Problems With Circulation

If blood isn’t moving, that’s bad news. Your legs and feet will start to swell up because fluid should be pumped back towards the heart, but it isn’t. That swelling will make you feel heavy, and your skin will feel tight. And what’s underneath is even more concerning.

If blood stays in one place for too long, there’s a good deal of risk of a clot forming.

If it breaks loose, a clot is harmless, but you never know. It can also travel somewhere it shouldn’t, and the scariest of all is that you don’t even know you have a clot until it causes problems. Serious problems.

Strength Drops Fast

People make the wrong assumption that you need to be doing nothing for weeks until you lose muscle, but that’s not the case. 2 to 3 days of bed rest is all you need for your muscles to start breaking down, and you’ll notice the consequences within a week.

Your biggest problem isn’t even that you’ll feel weaker, but that losing strength will make the recovery go slower. If you spend 5 days in bed, which isn’t a lot, it might be 2 weeks of therapy until you’re back to normal.

Balance and coordination will also take a hit from this.

Breathing Becomes Worse

When you lie down, you don’t breathe the same as you do when you’re standing up. This is because your lungs aren’t able to fully expand while you’re in that position. This basically means that your lower parts are getting less air than usual, meaning you’re getting less oxygen in and less carbon dioxide out of your cells.

Naturally, the risk of respiratory infections goes up (especially if you’re older or you already have preexisting issues with your lungs). That happens because the tiny hair-like structures that clear out mucus can’t do their jobs, since you’re not helping them with breathing deeply or coughing.

So, instead of being cleared, mucus sits in the lungs and… Waits.

Pressure Starts Showing Up on the Skin

Your bed feels nice and soft to you, but your skin doesn’t like it. If you’re in the same position for hours, you’re constantly putting pressure on specific spots. That squeezes the blood vessels to the point where they’re almost shut, so the tissue underneath can’t get fresh blood.

Damage starts where you can’t see it, so if you don’t relieve that pressure, it spreads through layers of tissue.

This is how people develop severe pressure ulcer damage. You can recover from this, but it takes a long time, and it usually causes complications. Plus, if the fault is someone else’s, then you’re also left dealing with the legal consequences of it all, which can slow down healing because of all the stress you’re experiencing.

Conclusion

Bed rest has a purpose, and sometimes there’s no escaping it.

This article wasn’t meant to trash bed rest or to tell you to walk off a broken bone or a heavy flu. However, it’s good to know what happens to your body after a long period of being in bed. If you can, try to change positions or move around a little. If you can’t, that’s fine, too. Your focus should always be on recovery, and at least now you know that feeling dizzy and wobbly once you’re finally able to get up isn’t anything unusual.

So, rest when you need to, but not longer than you need to.

2 Interlinking Opportunities:

From https://yourhealthmagazine.net/article/vascular-health/understanding-blood-pooling-causes-symptoms-and-solutions/ with anchor blood is unable to efficiently return to the heart

From https://yourhealthmagazine.net/article/heart-disease-stroke-and-diabetes/boosting-circulation-naturally-lifestyle-changes-for-improved-blood-flow/ with anchor proper circulation