Ten Common Ways To Strain Your Neck

1. Inadequate Lighting

The neck has a tendency to crane forward while we are working at the computer, watching television, and performing various other activities when there is a lack of ambient light.

2. Bifocals

For the younger generation who wear contact lenses, bifocals are glasses that are specially made to allow the user to look through the bottom portion of the lens to see close objects, while having a different prescription in the middle portion of the glasses for normal vision. When reading, bifocal users tend to tilt their heads back in order to look through the bottom portion of the glasses. Not a good idea.

3. Head Banging

It is never a good idea to bang your head against anything. Even smaller motions that are repetitive in nature can have a cumulative effect. Heading a soccer ball, collisions with helmets on, or even “banging your head” into the air at a rock concert can all have profoundly negative effects.

4. Swishing Your Hair

Yes, this one sounds ridiculous, but we actually have seen women patients with neck pain who swish their bangs to one side repeatedly.

5. Headstands

For obvious reasons, headstands are risky. For more information, read this earlier blog post. The evidence abounds…

6. Watching Television While Lying Down

Please sit up if you are going to watch television. Most people will inevitably prop their heads up to see the screen, thus bringing the neck into either a side-bend, rotated, or forward flexed position.

7. Reading While Lying Down

See #6

8. Falling Asleep Drunk

When your body experiences muscular pain while sleeping in an uncomfortable position, your brain subconsciously sends motor signals to your body in order for your body to adjust into a more comfortable position. If you have been drinking, you lose this ability.

9. Workstations That Are Not Centered

If you are seated at a desk all day with your monitor positioned in such a way that you have to turn your head excessively to one side, you will eventually have neck pain. Get everything that you have to look at as close to midline as possible.

10. Various Gym Exercises

Straight bar pull-downs behind the neck and explosive heaving movements of heavy weight can sometimes strain the smaller muscles of the neck. It is always a good idea to get comfortable using lighter weight before trying heavy motions that may involve breaking form.