Low Back Pain: The Silent Sleep Wrecker

Low Back Pain: The Silent Sleep Wrecker

Are you among the millions of Americans currently enduring low back pain? Back pain can significantly impact daily life, affecting everything from mobility and sleep to mental health and work productivity. It can limit physical activity, lead to chronic discomfort, and sometimes cause emotional strain due to persistent pain or reduced independence. In severe cases, back pain can disrupt social life, strain relationships, and even lead to long-term disability if not managed properly.

Back pain happens for a bunch of reasons, but most of the time, it's because something's off with the muscles, bones, discs, or nerves in your spine. Here are the main causes:

• Muscle or ligament strain – Lifting something heavy or moving awkwardly can strain your back muscles or ligaments.
  
  
• Poor posture – Sitting for long periods, especially with bad posture, puts pressure on your spine.
  
  
• Herniated or bulging discs – The discs between your vertebrae can slip out of place or press on nerves, causing pain.
  
  
• Arthritis – Osteoarthritis in the spine can lead to stiffening and narrowing of the space around the spinal cord (spinal stenosis).
  
  
• Inactivity – Weak back and abdominal muscles from lack of exercise can lead to instability and pain.
  
  
• Injuries or accidents – Falls, sports injuries, or car accidents can cause anything from fractures to soft tissue damage.
  

Why Does It Hurt?

Back pain hurts because of how your body’s nerves react to damage, strain, or inflammation in the muscles, ligaments, discs, or bones of your spine. Here’s a quick breakdown of why it feels painful:

• Nerve signals: When something goes wrong—like a pulled muscle, herniated disc, or irritated joint—pain receptors (nociceptors) send signals through your nerves to your brain, which interprets them as pain.
  
  
• Inflammation: Many back issues trigger inflammation, which increases pressure on nearby nerves and tissues, making everything feel more tender and painful.
  
  
• Muscle tension: Pain often causes your back muscles to tighten or spasm to protect the area, which can make the pain worse or feel more widespread.
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• Nerve compression: If a disc presses on a nerve (like in sciatica), it can cause sharp, shooting, or burning pain that radiates to other areas, like your legs.

Back Pain Isn’t Always the Same

Back pain is rarely the same between two people because it has so many different causes and variables. It can come from muscles, joints, nerves, discs, or even stress—so how it feels and where it shows up depends on what’s going wrong and why. A few reasons why it can feel different for different people:

• Different sources: Muscle strain feels dull and achy, while nerve pain (like sciatica) is sharp, burning, and you may even have associated numbness or tingling.
  
  
• Location matters: Upper back pain (thoracic) can feel way different from lower back pain (lumbar).
  
  
• Your activity: Sitting too long, acute injury by lifting something wrong, or sleeping weirdly can each trigger pain in different ways.
  
  
• Fear, Stress and emotion: Fear or anxiety due to not understanding the pain or the source of the pain can heighten your pain experience.
  
  
• Chronic vs. acute: A one-time injury isn’t the same as ongoing back pain that comes and goes or accumulates and builds over time
  
  

You’re In Good Hands

At Mojo Health, we diagnose and treat back pain and the cause of back pain in patients nearly every day—and our treatments work, as our patients regularly testify. With our online physical therapy platform Mojo Chat, you don’t even have to leave your home to get started. Mojo Chat is available 24/7 to begin your recovery. The system will walk you through detailed questions about your back and the surrounding areas. After the questions are complete you’ll have the chance to record a video, in which you can point to exactly where it hurts, describe what happened, and share any other concerns you may have.

A licensed physical therapist will review it all and provide a clear diagnosis for you, along with a personalized 14-day treatment plan you can start right away. Mojo Chat will guide you through this plan and check on your progress daily. You can ask questions using text and video, and get answers back from our physical therapists. Our physical therapists can track your healing and make adjustments whenever needed. By using Mojo Chat you can also rest assured that, should we find that your pain is of a serious nature or sourced from something that we know would not respond to our treatment, we will immediately make a referral for in-person physical therapy, primary care, or a specialist as needed.

You Don’t Have to Suffer With Back Pain

If you’re dealing with sharp or annoying back pain, or even pain that runs down your legs, don’t wait. Start your Mojo Chat case today and take the first step toward relief. If your employer offers Mojo Chat, reach out to your HR team for a coupon code. Alternatively, you can always just use a credit card to begin your case.

No appointments. No traffic. Just expert help when you need it—anytime, anywhere.

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