After a long day at work, you start to feel aches and pains in your body, especially in your neck and shoulders. Unfortunately, when you spend most of your time looking at a screen, it’s much too easy to slip into bad habits like not maintaining your healthy neck curve—yes, healthy neck curve.
In this post, you’ll understand more about neck posture, how it can affect you, and what your chiropractor can do to prevent it from causing you pain!
What Healthy Neck Alignment Looks Like
At first, you may think that your neck must be perfectly straight to be properly aligned. However, the neck actually requires some curvature! Your chin should be parallel to the ground directly above the collar bone. In this position, the middle portion of your neck should be properly curved.
Why a Healthy Neck Curve Is Important
While correctly aligned, your roughly eight-pound head is perfectly balanced. However, if you bring it forward, eliminating the neck curve, your neck, shoulder, and upper back muscles must work much harder to keep your head stable.
If you have abnormal neck alignment, you run the risk of causing damage to your cervical (or upper) spine. In fact, it could lead to degeneration in the vertebrae and discs that provide cushioning. As a result, you can experience chronic upper back and neck pain, stiffness or loss of flexibility in your neck, or numbness or tingling in your upper extremities from neurological issues.
Causes of Unhealthy Neck Curve
Having unhealthy neck curvature starts with improper posture. Studies vary in the specific number, but people, on average, check their phones between 70 and 96 times per day and can spend several hours on their phone each day. And that’s not counting working hours looking down at a computer screen!
This habit, the awkward positioning of the neck commonly called text neck, has become much more common and so have pain and other unfavorable symptoms.
Treating Unhealthy Neck Curve
The best way to address any malady is to direct efforts at the cause of the problem. In this case, correcting neck and upper back pain and so forth starts by “reminding” your spine how it should be aligned through chiropractic adjustment. In addition, you must make a conscious effort to alter your posture to be more healthy, spend less time on electronics that force you to look down, and try to be more active. You can also adjust the height of your computer screen to be more ergonomic.
Over multiple appointments with your chiropractor, your neck can resume better curvature, alleviating the stress on your shoulders, upper back, and neck.
Your neck curve may not be something you think about often, but by making small changes to your lifestyle and visiting your chiropractor, you can avoid facing chronic text neck and hold your neck the way it was designed to be.
About the Author
Dr. Zinovy Chukhman, called Dr. Z, is certified with the National Board of Chiropractic Examiners and has earned certification in physical rehabilitation. Proficient in many techniques and protocols, he can help you overcome chronic pain or acute injuries. If you are experiencing neck or upper back pain, it could be the result of unhealthy neck curve, and our team can do something about it! Just call our Richardson office at 972-907-2800 or visit us online.
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