Is your smart device or computer causing your neck pain & headaches?

What’s up, Wellness Warriors? How’s everybody doing on this awesome afternoon?

If you are suffering from headaches and neck pain, and you use your smartphone and computers like most of us, you’re definitely going to want to hear what I have to say about this. But before I do, if you haven’t heard me before, my name is Dr. Andrew Smith, and we focus on helping our patients get well naturally without the use of a lot of medications. We focus with hands-on therapies and the latest cutting-edge technology to help our patients get the results they’re looking for.

We are very, very excited to bring to you the information today. If you are listening, send me a comment, let me know where you’re listening from, or you want to hit the Like button and just let me know that you can hear me clearly. Nice to see you, Ellen. What’s happening?

Neck pain, headaches, smart devices, and computers. The average person will spend three and a half hours a day on their smart device and almost four hours a day on their computer. If you put that together, every single day, you’re going to have people with neck problems and headaches developing, and here’s how. What starts to happen is you develop what’s called forward head posture, or FHP. Think about this. Six, seven, eight hours a day, your head is stretching forward. From the side, you can see the neck, it will bend forward. What’ll happen is you’ll start to stretch the ligaments and tendons and discs and nerves and muscles that are in the upper part of the spine. In the beginning, it comes on very subtle, but as the weeks, months, years go by, we begin to get this forward head positioning. While a lot of times it’s overlooked and we just kind of say, “Well, grandma and mama and daddy keep telling us, ‘Hey, sit up straight,'” it actually becomes a very big health hazard because it begins to affect nerves. Check it out. In the upper part of the neck, you have nerves, especially the first few vertebrae of the spine, that actually connect into the muscles that go up into your scalp, around your head into your eyes. You have cranial nerves. There’s one that’s called the trigeminal nerve, which is the fifth cranial nerve that actually innervates and sends signals to the tongue, the back of the throat, and the face.

If you have poor posture and you have stress in those muscles and ligaments and nerves, you can actually be creating all these symptoms and not even realize it’s coming from your posture. If you’re the type of person who wakes up every single day and wakes up from stiff neck, and you think it’s just from your pillow, and yet you’ve been searching and searching for the right pillow, it may not be the pillow at all. It may be your poor posture, slumping shoulders, forward head position. We see that a lot. It’s becoming more common. The quickest group that’s actually experiencing this is the 18 to 26-year-old category. They’re spending lots of hours a day on their smart devices.

What can you do? Well, there’s a couple of things you may want to try to help yourself with these conditions. The first thing is, you gotta be aware. Some are, things we coach people through is, hey, take some pictures of yourself. If you really want to be, put yourself under the scope, set up a video camera and put it on the side and watch yourself at your computer or watch yourself during the day on your smartphone, and you won’t be happy with your posture. But the first step is to look, check in with yourself with your positioning, and you get an idea of how much work you need to be done. The next thing you may want to try is you may want to obviously try ergonomics to fix what you have. If you’re at a computer, you want to make sure that the tip of your nose is to the tip of the screen. I often find people do a lot of hours of work on a laptop. They shop on a laptop. They surf the Internet. They read articles. They’re constantly working their job, and their head is always going forward. Creates a big problem. If you’re going to spend that many hours every day on your computer, you have to spend some time every day counterbalancing that. Again, the first thing you want to do is take a look at yourself. The second thing you want to do is make sure that you set up your ergonomics. Perhaps you might want to get a tripod stand for your mobile device if you’re going to be using it at a set station, or a selfie stick like I’m on now, which makes it a lot easier to control the angle at which your spine is going to be on.

The next thing I want to talk about is stretching and exercise.

There’s no secret that if you want to be in good shape, exercise and stretching needs to be done regularly. Our philosophy is discipline, determine, destiny. The more you do it, the easier it becomes, and the better results you’re going to have, so over time, you’re going to get the best postural correction when you do it regularly each and every day, and if you’re not sure what to do exactly, there’s Google, YouTube videos, and of course, you could always hit me up, send me a comment, inbox me. I’ll be more than happy to share the best postural exercises you can do. Another thing you may want to try is there’s these things called orthotics or support devices. They’re basically these foam pillows that are contoured to the neck, and they help you bring back the spine at the end of the day. So if you’ve been working all day on a computer or you’ve used your phone excessively that day, which most of us do, laying back on this little roll can actually help rehabilitate and stretch the ligaments in the opposite way counterbalancing some of those postural movements, and of course, exercising. You want to do shoulder rollbacks, and you want to make sure that your body is getting those strengthening between the muscles in the middle of the spine. Then the last thing that we talk about is doing things such as stretching with towels to wrap around your neck and actually extension exercises to counterbalance the forces of what you’re going through during the computer time. If you do all these things and you’re still having neck problems and you’re still waking up with headaches, obviously you gotta dig a little deeper, and that’s what folks like me are here to do. If you have any questions or if you need to dig a little bit deeper, you can visit me at theheadandneckcentersofexcellence.com or just hit us up and give us a comment. PM me if you need to get more information, and I can send you those stretches. I have a free ebook on how to take care of your spine and neck properly, so if you’re interested in that, just hit me up again on Facebook Messenger or comment here, and I will look forward to speaking to you soon.

As always, make sure that you are taking your day and trading it in for something awesome because you never get this day back.

Let’s go get it. Have a great day, everybody. Talk to you soon. Stay off the computer for hours at a time. It’s no bueno. Okay, bye-bye.