Phones and Scrolling: The Silent Posture Killer
Jump to topic:
What’s Happening Inside Your Neck | Why You Don’t Notice It | 7 Ways to Fix Your Posture | What You Need to Hear
Have you ever had a dull ache that climbs up the back of your neck and won’t go away? Or have trouble turning your head in the morning because your neck is too stiff? Your phone is most likely the cause of this.
Let’s take a look at how your phone is damaging your neck and what you can do to prevent it.
What’s Happening Inside Your Neck
Did you know that your head weighs 10 to 12 pounds? Your spine was designed to carry that weight when you’re standing with your ears over your shoulders. When you tilt your head forward just by 15 degrees, the load on your spine jumps to 27 pounds (more than double what it was in an upright position). At 45 degrees, it’s 49 pounds. At 60 degrees, the position you’re in while checking your phone, it puts about 60 pounds of force on the seven small vertebrae responsible for holding up your head.
Do that for four or six hours a day, and the damage is no joke.
4 Ways the Damage Occurs
- The muscles at the back of your neck that hold you upright go into sustained contraction, trying to resist the pull of your muscles caused by you looking down at your phone.
- These muscles get exhausted, tight, and then a knot forms. The kind if knot that hurts when you press it, and you feel the pain somewhere else in your body.
- Below your muscle layer, your cervical discs are absorbing an amount of weight they weren’t meant to handle at that angle.
- The ligaments along the back of your spine stretch over time. The natural inward curve of the neck starts to flatten or, in worse cases, reverse.
When physical therapists talk about “forward head posture,” they mean your head is no longer sitting over your spine. It’s literally sitting in front of it. Roughly 10 additional pounds of strain are added to your neck when your head moves forward. When you walk around like that long enough it becomes your resting position.
Why You Don’t Notice It
Part of the problem is that your neck is strong. So by the time you have symptoms bad enough to see a doctor, the structural changes have often already been made.
You don’t feel:
- When a disc is slowly losing hydration
- When a ligament stretches slightly over months
What you do notice, and most likely ignore, are the early warnings:
- Stiffness in the morning that loosens up after you move around.
- Tiredness in your upper traps after sitting for a while.
- The urge to roll your neck or crack it for relief.
These warning signs are your neck asking you to change something.
The pattern with progress and the problem will get worse if you don’t take the steps to fix it. Chronic neck pain is nerve compression that sends tingling or numbness down into your arm and hand. In severe cases, a disc herniation presses on the spinal cord. Not everyone gets that bad, but if left unaddressed, these problems can.
7 Ways to Fix Your Posture
The neck responds really well to intervention, especially if you catch it before the structural damage is significant. Here’s what works.
1. Raise Your Phone to Eye Level
This is the most important thing on this list and eliminates forward tilt almost entirely. Your arm will definitley get tired at first, but it will become force of habit. You can purchase a phone stand to use at home. They help alot!
2. Do Chin Tucks Everyday
Sit or stand upright, then gently pull your head straight back. Not up or down, straight back. You should give yourself a slight double chin. Hold for five seconds and repeat ten times. This reactivates your deep cervical flexors, small stabilizing muscles at the front of your neck that turn off when your head moves forward. Most people have never consciously used them. Two to three sets a day will make a noticeable difference in a few weeks.
3. Strengthen Your Upper Back
Forward head posture is partially a weakness problem of the muscles between your shoulder blades, the rhomboids, and lower traps, which are supposed to anchor your shoulders back and keep your head from drifting forward. Exercises that help strengthen these muscles are:
- Band pull-aparts
- Face pulls
- Rows
4. Take Incremental Breaks
Posture is less about the position you’re in and more about how long you stay there. Thirty seconds of movement with help break the cycle of building pressure. Every 30-40 minutes:
- Set a timer
- Stand up
- Roll your shoulders back
- Walk to the kitchen
5. Check Your Pillow
Your neck pain may be worse in the morning because your pillow is putting your neck in the incorrect position. Ideally, your pillow should keep your neck in a neutral position. Your head should be in line with your spine and not propped up at a sharp angle or dropped sideways. If you wake up stiff most mornings, definitely check your pillow.
6. Stretch the Front of Your Neck, Not the Back
Pain in the neck triggers an instinct to stretch the very spot that hurts (typically the back of the neck). But the tight structures in forward head posture are at the front: the pectorals, the scalenes, the sternocleidomastoid. Levator scapulae stretches and chest openers do more than pulling your chin to your chest.
7. See a Massage Therapist
Your neck muscles stop responding to stretching and strengthening after being under persistent strain for a long time. A skilled massage therapist can work directly on that tissue, helping:
- Release the trigger points in the upper traps and levator scapulae that are referring pain into your head and shoulders
- Break up the fascial adhesions that limit your range of motion, and bring circulation back into muscles.
Myofascial release and deep tissue work on the neck and upper back can undo in a few sessions what months of stretching couldn’t do alone.
It also gives you a clearer baseline. Releasing some of that tension makes it easier to distinguish structural issues from simply overworked muscle. This makes strengthening way more effective.
What You Need to Hear
Obviously, you’re not going to stop using your phone. The goal is to stop the harmful posture you hold for a prolonged period of time while using your phone or working at your computer from seriously harming your spine.
- Raise your screen.
- Do chin tucks.
- Strengthen your back.
It’s tedious work that you have to stick with, but a neck that still functions well in your fifties is one of those things you only regret not doing sooner!