Neck pain when you are looking down can be caused by several factors. Understanding some of these factors will make it easier for you to see what will help you relieve your pain.
First, think of your head as a bowling ball stacked on your neck. Your “bowling ball” is easy to control and hold when it is aligned right on top of your neck. When you look down, various neck structures, like muscles and ligaments, need to work a bit harder to hold that 8-12 pound bowling ball in this new position. Rest assured, your neck is designed to handle this task…to a point. If we spend a long time looking down, knitting, washing dishes, or using cell phones, then those structures start to get fatigued and can eventually strain under the load and become injured.
My favorite advice works in this scenario: if it hurts, don’t do it. This advice especially applies to tasks that your body wasn’t designed to do. Your body was built to hunt and gather, not look down at your phone, knitting or a book for hours at a time. Set yourself up more ergonomically to align your head and neck upright in a position it is able to sustain. For example, lap desks can create an elevated work surface to knit or prop your book or smartphone on. You can add a smartphone or book stand to add more height if needed.
Let’s look at another reason it is common to have neck pain when you are looking down. There are more than a dozen joints in your neck and upper back that have to slide and glide properly to ensure pain free motion. If any of these joints are not moving as designed (too much or too little), then your neck has to work even harder to accomplish looking down. Sometimes stiff joints are painful because they aren’t moving well which starves the joint structures of the nourishment and activity they need to be healthy. Sometimes the loose joints are painful because they are moving more than they should, compensating for the lack of movement in the stiff joints. This causes strain and pain in the ligaments around the loose joints.
The best treatment for this is to stretch the stiff joints and strengthen muscles around the loose joints to help stabilize them. This is hard to do without the help of a professional (me!) to assess which specific joints aren’t moving properly. But I can offer you two bits of advice to get you started. First, please don’t spend lots of time stretching your neck. Stretching the muscles of your neck can offer some temporary relief. However, when you stretch, you are going to stretch and pull through the path of least resistance, which is through the loose joints. This leaves the stiff joints to stay stiff, and tugs on the loose joints, making them even more unstable.
What you can do is foam roll your upper back! Your thoracic spine gets stiff as you age. Foam rolling this area is one way to get the joints in your upper back and rib cage to move a bit better. When these joints move better, they can contribute to the motion of looking down which they are supposed to do. This reduces the work load off the painful joints in your neck! Here is a video to show you how to safely foam roll your upper back: How to: Foam roll your upper back (and why)!
In review, setting up your ergonomics in such a way that helps you avoid spending long periods of time looking down is the best way to let your structures heal and feel better. And foam rolling to your upper back helps get the upper back moving better which will take some stress off the painful joints in your neck when you do need to look down.
I’d be happy to do a thorough assessment to determine which joints are causing your pain and why. With this information, we can apply the best treatment approach to resolve your neck pain if the above suggestions don’t do the trick! Give me a call anytime or contact me here.
This post is intended for education and demonstration only and is not meant to take the place of guidance from your Primary Care Provider (PCP). Don’t use this post to avoid going to your PCP or to replace the advice they give you. Get clearance from YOUR PCP before using the information in this post. Use at your own risk.