Text Neck And How Chiropractic Sessions Can Help
What Is Text Neck
Text neck is a condition where you tilt your neck forward and constantly apply forward pressure on your neck because you are constantly looking at your phone. Let’s think about it.
Your head is quite heavy — it weighs about 10 to 12 pounds in a neutral position (when your ears are directly over your shoulders).
But when you tilt your head forward, the weight and pressure on your neck increase dramatically as the weight of that moves forward. At some point, you might be applying up to 60 pounds of pressure on your spinal column.
Long Term Text Neck Consequences
Although text neck might seem harmless since you are young at the moment, there can be serious issues long term if you keep up with text neck untreated.
Short-term, the muscles in your neck and traps might have to work harder. This will directly cause cramping, strains, and possibly even tension headaches.
Long-term though you could face the effects that were mentioned above and possibly even some degenerative effects on your spinal nerves and cervical discs.
Text Neck Symptoms
Neck pain is a common symptom and so your first thought might not be that you are a victim of text neck. Maybe it’s the tough workout that you did in the morning or maybe it’s that you slept in a bad position on your neck. However, the effects of text neck can be slow and scary once they settle in. The most common symptoms of text neck are neck pain and stiffness in the general area, but this can easily evolve into more severe symptoms like tension headaches, neck spasms, and even losing sensation in certain parts of your body like the ends of your fingers.
The most telling sign that text neck has gotten the best of you is when you feel a sudden sharp pain when you look down on your phone. If that’s happening, then you can almost be sure that the pain of text neck is coming from your phone.
Text Neck Solutions
Feeling all the symptoms of text neck as described above? No worries, at Wellness Docs, we prioritize not only long term reactive solutions to text neck, but also proactive treatment plans so that your text neck can go away as soon as possible.
The easiest way to get rid of text neck is going to be some simple physical therapy exercises that not only stretch, but also strengthens the neck muscles and the surrounding regions.
- Side-to-side stretches: Here you want to move your ear to your shoulder and then move the other ear to your other shoulder. This should really help stretch and strengthen the neck muscles on the side
- Wrestling neck bridge: What we want to do is lean your entire body on a wall with the only point of your body in contact with the wall being your forehead. Try to lean the rest of your body away while facing the wall and your forehead being the only contact point. Hold this position for around 30 seconds at minimum. Progress this exercise little by little.
If the neck pain just simply isn’t going away no matter what you do, come visit Wellness Docs for a consultation and we can give you our expert diagnosis and action plan for your text neck. With decades of experience handling all kinds of neck pains and issues, we provide not only individualised plans to improve your posture and restore your body so that it is pain-free, but also personalized attention at our clinic that will help you see results faster.
