Medical expert of the article
New publications
Pain in sleep
Last reviewed: 04.07.2025

All iLive content is medically reviewed or fact checked to ensure as much factual accuracy as possible.
We have strict sourcing guidelines and only link to reputable media sites, academic research institutions and, whenever possible, medically peer reviewed studies. Note that the numbers in parentheses ([1], [2], etc.) are clickable links to these studies.
If you feel that any of our content is inaccurate, out-of-date, or otherwise questionable, please select it and press Ctrl + Enter.
If a person experiences pain in their sleep, it is rarely considered as an independent problem. Often it has an exclusively speculative, everyday character, which points to sleep as a physiological phenomenon that relieves and heals.
In fact, in many cases sleep is credited with relieving functions. For example, it can act as the only means of relieving certain types of headaches.
At the same time, large-scale epidemiological studies conducted in the United States indicate that sleep disorders due to pain are much more common than the beneficial effect of night sleep on the course of the disease. Thus, among the population over 18, about 94 million people complained of pain during sleep, and 56 million had pain during sleep that disrupted normal sleep (31.6% of respondents). Thus, it turned out that every third US citizen suffers from pain during sleep, which leads to sleep disorders (insomnia).
92% of people who suffer from pain in their sleep may also experience it during the daytime. But approximately one third of them report that the pain worsens at night.
Back pain (64%) and headache (56%) predominate among pains during sleep. Myalgia and other types of pain are observed in 55% of cases.
People who experience pain during sleep, according to the study, lose approximately 2.4 hours of good sleep each day, which leads to a steady decline in quality of life, affecting the health of the body, performance and mood.
[ 1 ]
Diseases that cause pain during sleep
Pain during sleep is a more significant factor of maladaptation than pain that occurs during the daytime, so the doctor must give a correct assessment of the pain syndrome in the "wakefulness-sleep" cycle, select medications, taking into account the duration of their action, the time of administration, the effect on the mechanism of sleep and pain.
Over the past decades, sleep medicine has developed, which is a very important section in functional neurology, which studies the clinical manifestations of disease in relation to a certain functional state of the brain, in our case during sleep. Thus, during sleep, the clinical picture of many pathologies in which pain syndrome dominates intensifies or develops:
- migraine;
- cluster headache;
- neurogenic pain.
It is known that pain has a signaling value for the body and is capable of triggering a whole series of physiological adaptation reactions that are aimed at reducing the harm caused by an external or internal stimulus. This is physiological pain.
In addition, there is another type of pain that does not perform a protective function for the body, and, on the contrary, causes a number of pathophysiological reactions that worsen the course of the disease and the general condition of the patient. Such pain is called pathological.
Pathological pain can have a somatogenic or neurogenic origin. Examples of somatogenic pain in sleep include post-traumatic or post-operative pain, a wide variety of myofascial syndromes, pain in people suffering from oncological diseases, and others.
Neurogenic pain is caused by disorders in the central or peripheral nervous system. These include trigeminal neuralgia, radiculopathy, traumatic neuropathy, phantom pain syndrome, thalamic pain, and others.
Pain, which is the direct cause of insomnia, can have different origins, depending on the nature of the disorders, including:
- headache;
- back pain;
- dysfunction and pain syndrome of the temporomandibular joint;
- arthritic pain;
- fibromyalgia, which can cause pain in tendons, ligaments and muscles;
- neuralgia;
- premenstrual cramps.
Severe injuries, surgery, and serious illnesses such as cancer can also cause pain during sleep.
The intensity of the pain syndrome is not the main reason why you cannot fall asleep. Changeable pain sensations that intensify on certain days are the main cause of insomnia. If you have been experiencing pain for months, then you probably know how to deal with it. But if the pain in your sleep occurs spontaneously and has a different color each time, you can get used to it, and it will constantly interfere with the full course of sleep.
Sleep migraine. The onset of these attacks is associated with specific stages of sleep, in particular, it differs from wakeful migraine by its greater intensity, the presence of an aura, left-sided localization, emotional lability, asthenia, and pronounced sleep disorders. Many patients experience decreased performance, weakness, lethargy, and daytime sleepiness, which intensify in the afternoon. Most of them need additional sleep during the day.