We hear (and probably experience it too) almost every day. Someone around us cringing their neck forward, shrugging their shoulders up in discomfort trying to alleviate that nagging upper back/neck pain. The answer typically lies in the sufferer that they carry all their stress in their neck. They have so much tension in their neck. Work is hard, kids are driving them crazy, holidays are coming up, traffic was bad or whatever it may be, the stress of this is weighing on the person’s neck as we yearn for that nice soothing neck rub or massage.
Well, I don’t doubt that stress is real. I myself have a family and run my own business. But is it really stress that is causing the pain in your neck? Let’s delve deeper into this. Can you touch stress? Can stress touch you? If I took a metal bat and hit you in the back, then you would feel the pain, and that is definitely from the tangible bat leaving the broken blood vessels puddling under your skin. Did stress knock you around? Simply put, no. Are there bruises on your neck from stress? No. Is your neck tense and tight? YES. Here’s what’s really happening, and how we can get rid of that neck pain.
If I was to do a Family Feud survey and ask 100 people what gives them the most stress, the answers would all be the same: money, work, driving, traffic, family, etc. A majority of these negative stressors associate and correlate themselves with bad posture. Sitting in traffic for an hour places our shoulders in an unnatural position (trust me, I live in New Jersey and spend a majority of my time traversing crazies on 287 and the Garden State Parkway). Sitting at a computer all day at work, trying to make ends meet and bring home that paycheck is the same bad posture as driving. Restless nights and lack of sleep typically place our shoulders and necks into bad posture thinking about family problems, money issues or whatever the stressor may be. So, it’s not the physical stress giving you the pain, it’s the chronic position your body adapts to as a result from the activities that give you the stress. So, let’s see what exactly is happening in our bodies.
Now, before going further, it’s important to know that the shoulder girdle and actual shoulder joint (the one where you move your arm around) are two completely separate entities, and are not related in terms of this argument. Our shoulder blades (or shoulder girdle in anatomical terms) are actually a joint that moves. It attaches to the rib cage and glides along that surface in a number of different motions. When you reach forward, the girdle protracts. When you pull back, it retracts (that’s what happens when you stretch in the morning). When you move your arms like flapping wings, they rotate. However, they also tilt, elevate and depress. When you are in a position where your arms are rotated in (i.e.: palms down driving a car, typing, texting, etc.), your girdles elevate and tilt forward. They will naturally return back to neutral position, but overtime when the same movement occurs over and over again, the movement and position becomes chronic, and the muscles start to freeze that way. So, the muscles around the upper back and neck start to get tight and tense. These muscles elevate the scapula, place our arms into this internal rotation, but more so, cringes our necks.
Imagine a bow. The top of the string is the attachment to our skulls, and the bottom of the string is the attachment to our shoulder blades, and the bow itself is our neck. If you were to tighten the string more, the bow would bend more as the two points get closer. That is what is happening to our necks in this position. And in doing so, the vertebrae are crunching together and the spacing is getting less and less. When the spaces between the vertebrae become smaller, we get herniations and impingements of the nerves that innervate our bodies’ organs, and can thus cause headaches, migraines, eyesight impairment, or anything else. Here we have the pain that “the stress” is causing, which is actually a muscular imbalance causing what we call scapular elevation and “upper cross syndrome.”
So how do we fix it? A massage feels nice, but it doesn’t fix the root of the problem. You have to undo the bad posture. You have to learn how to activate all those muscles that will DEPRESS the shoulder girdles, and rotate the girdle in the opposite direction. This is where the exercise program becomes tricky, and you gotta do some serious exercises aimed at activating specific muscles, and not just hopping on a bench and pushing out as many reps as you can. If you are always hunched forward, imagine yourself in the opposite position, which is shoulders totally rotated outward, arms out as if you’re giving blood and showing your veins. Shoulder girdle needs to be depressed and tilted the other way. A great example I like to use is pretend someone is doing a Judo takedown on you, and rotating your arm outward as you fall that way. That is actually the same concept, but done passively. And then, in the end, you can do your neck stretches.
These kinds of exercises are difficult to do, and usually require a lot of teaching, observation and manual movements to ensure you use the right muscles, and are not compensating with the same overactive muscles. Otherwise, you get nothing out of the exercise, and may actually be exacerbating the condition. So take the time to get a consultation and find out how you can get your bad posture back into good shape!
Interesting outlook.