Tech Neck – How Technology Is Crippling Us

A new robotic upgrade to your neck? Or a painful condition resulting from bad posture combined with long or excessive time on gadgets such as mobile phones and games consoles? Unfortunately, it’s the latter and it’s a very serious problem in today’s society. 

A new robotic upgrade to your neck? Or a painful condition resulting from bad posture combined with long or excessive time on gadgets such as mobile phones and games consoles? Unfortunately, it’s the latter and it’s a very serious problem in today’s society. 

 

More and more of our lives are run from a phone or computer. The result is that it is now estimated that nearly every person suffers from this to a degree. A startling statistic to help understand the severity of this is that for every extra 15 degrees you lean your head and neck forward to look at your screen, you add almost an additional 10 lbs of pressure to the muscles involved in keeping your posture in check. 

 

For 0 degrees of flexion (which is a straight neck position) the force exerted on the neck is around 10-12lbs. That’s a huge amount. Just a further 15 degrees more than doubles this force to around 27lbs. Double that flexion to 30 degrees and you add on around another 50% of pressure on top, taking the force up to in the region of 40lbs! 

 

Commonly you will see most people lurking around this figure for flexion, all the way up to 60 degrees which almost is a chin tucked to chest position. This takes the estimated force up to 60lbs, or 27kg! Just for comparison that’s more than the maximum weight allowance for a suitcase at the airport! 

 

Couple this with people reportedly spending more than an hour on average the amount of time on gadgets in present day compared to only in 2013, then you can see why have a bit of a problem brewing. Just a few of the complications of this condition include neck pain, shoulder pain, headaches, stress, and general stiffness and tightness in the neck and back. 

 

The long-term effects involving tech neck include regular pain in the affected areas, headaches, shoulder and back pain. Damage to the cartilage and vertebrae can occur, which can lead to osteoarthritis and trapped nerves, so it’s definitely something to be mindful of! 

In this day and age, with us online so much, it’s nearly impossible to avoid tech. It’s either integrated into our work life or our social life or both. In an ideal world, it’d be great to remove all tech that we’re so heavily reliant on, but that’s not realistic. Instead, we’ve got a few tips on how to avoid getting tech neck! 

 

When it comes to working at a desk staring down at a laptop it is best to change the approach of how you sit. Often, we are told that we must sit with perfectly straight posture, but this increases the pressure on the discs in the lower back and also forces the neck muscles to contract in order to hold the head up. Overall, this will cause back and neck ache by the end of the day and probably a headache to go with it. A better way to approach this is to sit with the chair at a reclined angle of around 25 to 30 degrees with a lumbar support. This will decrease the amount of force that the lower back discs are subjected to by distributing some of the body weight into the chair as opposed to the spine. 

 

Unfortunately, the same trick can’t be repeated for walking around whilst we use our phones, so the best way to tackle the inevitable is to limit the amount of time spent walking around with tech in our hands! Easier said than done, so the next thing to do is to raise the device to eye level or as near to it as possible. You should be able to draw a vertical line from the shoulder to the ear. The further the angle between the two, the higher the amount of pressure being exerted on the neck muscles is going to be. 

 

Issues involving the neck and back are always better be checked out by your therapist, because they will be able to provide information on the issue at hand and recommend effective ways to prevent and treat it.