Is Your Phone Causing Neck Pain?
The human body is very finely tuned. When everything is working as it should, we feel great, have good endurance, and find it easier to perform any sport or complicated activity.
However, the body requires certain conditions to work in such an efficient and highly coordinated way over the course of our years.
These conditions usually include…
being well hydrated
getting good nutrition
exercising our muscles
We all know how important hydration, nutrition, and exercise are. But we usually miss one huge factor: our joint health.
Joint pain is a huge limiter on our bodies, and can hold us back from optimal health.
What causes joint pain?
Our body adapts to gravity in such a way that the skeleton supports most of the body’s weight. The bones of the skeleton, especially the spine, are stacked on each other so that the weight of the body passes through the center of each joint...ideally anyway.
We have optimal joint health when we are sitting and moving in such a way that gravity passes through the joints where they are best shaped to accept that weight.
But when these conditions are not met, we get joint pain. Often, we sit or move in a way that makes our weight pass through one side of a joint...not the center. This puts a lot of stress on our joints. We end up with many aches and pains with various diagnoses. Here are a few you are familiar with:
disc problems
headaches
arthritis
tendinitis
muscle strains
back pain
A diagnosis is basically a description of what hurts. It doesn’t really tell us why and how we got that way. The majority of the time, it’s a biomechanical problem. Meaning, it’s the way we use our bodies.
That's true when it comes to joint pain too. Most chronic joint issues stem from a problem in our posture or the way we move.
Understanding neck pain
The head weighs a little more than 10 pounds and is balanced on very small vertebrae in the neck.
You can imagine the elaborate mechanisms needed to keep everything in place and moving just the right way, so that we can perform the many functions of our head: seeing, eating, talking, and hearing.
There are many ways to upset the mechanisms of the neck and put too much stress on the vertebrae. But one of the most common causes of neck pain is using our phones!
Bending forward to look at a phone is kind of like taking a stick (our neck), and putting a weight on the end of it (our head).
The farther forward our head is, the more it weighs.
If you bend your head forward to a 45 degree angle, it’s as if it weighs 50 pounds. Your poor neck! That’s really too much to ask the joints, ligaments and muscles to do over and over, all day long.
How to prevent neck pain from using your phone
I know it's tempting to hunch over your phone without a thought to your posture. But here is a little nudge from your friendly neighborhood physical therapist: try to give your neck a break. A little posture awareness now will save you a lot of chronic pain later.
Here are several tips for avoiding neck pain caused by using your phone:
Hold your phone up higher. Sit tall and bring your phone up to meet you instead of bending down to see your phone. It's better that your arms should get tired than all the sensitive structures in your head and neck be affected.
Put your arms on your bag or briefcase. That way, your arms won't get tired holding your phone higher.
Get a phone stand.
Use dictation function instead of texting.
Take more breaks from your phone.
Go to physical therapy for treatment. Learn some postural exercises, and have some hands-on therapy to relieve pain and tightness.
Listen to your body, and take care of yourself!
This post was originally published here on LinkedIn.
