Posture & Digital Stress – AKA ‘Text Neck’

Text Neck, it’s the modern day epidemic.

How is your phone changing your posture? Right now you’re probably hunched over it, or a tablet, or slumping at the desk to read this off your computer!

Your posture and spinal health are being ruined by the excessive use of digital devices.

Time spent on digital devices is time spent with your head either looking down or positioned forward of your body. This means time spent with poor spinal alignment and a serious increase in stress on the muscles and joints of your neck and spine. This syndrome had now been nicknamed Text Neck. In the short term, it may lead to neck and upper back pain, shoulder injuries, headaches and more. But day after day, week after week, year after year all this time on digital devices results in an accelerated trend towards spinal degenerative disease.

As clinicians, we are now seeing spinal disease in children!

Something we only used to see in later adult life. For a child, nowadays the use of devices starts as soon as they can hold a phone or tablet. This means the way they develop their posture and learn muscular control is affected from a younger age.

For an adult, poor posture and faulty muscular control of the head and neck can become drivers for pain and injury. For example, you go off to the gym to get fit, head to the park to play with the kids, or walk a few blocks with the dog – but you end up feeling worse after your intentionally healthy activities than you did before.

This is because working out with poor posture and a lack of control is not dissimilar to taking a car with bad wheel alignment around a race track and wondering why the tyres are wearing quickly and unevenly.

As it becomes more commonplace to spend increasing hours on digital devices. It also becomes commonplace to have poor posture and increased stress on the neck and spine. The label text neck didn’t exist five years ago! Over time this text neck becomes the new ‘normal’ and we begin to accept the consequences of the modern digital age as a normal part of day-to-day life.

There is nothing normal about daily aches and pains. Actually, there is nothing normal about poor posture, even if it doesn’t hurt right now!

So here are some tips:

Make certain parts of your day sacred, with no use of phones or devices.
Lift your devices to eye level, to take the stress and strain off your spine.
Stand, rather than sit whenever possible.
Add more variety to your routine, try a class or activity you haven’t tried before.
Last but not least… Get your spine checked by one of our qualified chiropractors at Better Health Stanmore or Well Aligned Cammeray!

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