Text Neck: Now What Are We Doing to Ourselves?

 

One of the modern activities that irritates me some, but alarms me considerably, is that even in a restaurant, sitting around a table, a group of diners will be looking down at their mobile phone screens. Isn’t one of the pleasures of dining out to enjoy the luxury of uninterrupted conversation?

On the street, people walk in crowds, step off curbs into traffic flow, and a majority of heads are bent as folks use their thumbs to scroll down their emails. I’ve kept thinking these past years, watching all these bent necks, We are reverting to a hunched stance much like the Neanderthal man scientists tell us has been our evolutionary forbear!

In the chiropractor’s office, where I have just started treatments to correct a backward curve in my upper neck (it should be curving inward, but it is curving outward—the result of hours spent writing at my computer without hours of compensating exercises), I noticed a poster on his wall showing that the average human head weighs approximately 10-15 pounds. The upright weight of the head on the spine is approximately 12 pounds. When the head moves forward (out of normal alignment measured by the ears being straight above the shoulders), this causes extra weight thrust on the upper back and neck.

If the head moves one inch forward, that is equivalent to a 22 pound thrust. If the head moves two inches forward, that is equivalent to a 32 pound thrust. And, if the head moves three inches forward, the strain on the spine is equivalent to a 42 pound thrust. No wonder we have stress, aches, stiffness and physical discomfort across our shoulders and upper neck.

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