Is Your Phone Causing You to Have Pain from "Tech Neck?"

The advent of social media has done exactly as it says: allowed us to better connect with others through many different online mediums. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to be closer to those you care about. It doesn’t come without drawbacks, though. As we spend hours each day bent over our phone, important postural muscle balances become disturbed. This results in a forward leaning head, rolled shoulders, and round back. This combination of postural poses and the pain associated with it has been coined with the term “tech neck” by experts.

 Our bodies are originally built and purposed to move in certain ways from a neutral posture. When we spend hours at a time on our phone, Switch, tablet, or Kindle, we tend to keep our bodies in an unnatural position. When this position is held for extended periods, our body adapts and results in a “new normal” that is disadvantageous for moving about in everyday life. Over time, our bodies will start to respond by telling us we need to change in the best way it knows how—with pain.

 So, what can we do to fix it? Well, luckily research has shown us a number of things we can do to reverse this process. A personal care plan to do so includes stretching, postural exercises, and you guessed it: Chiropractic adjustments! When our posture is off, so is our movement. But restoring proper motion to our joints with Chiropractic care and then properly rehabilitating muscle with muscle work such as massage that we offer at Better Chiropractic, you can recover from pain quickly. But the journey doesn’t end there!

 Just like those postural changes crept up over time doesn’t mean they’ll go away in an instant! It’s important that you incorporate proper stretching and exercise into your daily routine and be more aware of your posture throughout the day if you want to reverse those changes!

 So if you spend time looking at a screen throughout the day, give your premier Gilbert Chiropractic Clinic a call to schedule your first appointment!