Almost all of my clients have tension in their necks, symptomatic or not. It’s why the cervical spine is one of the first things I assess with every new client. If you can believe it, issues in the neck can lead to a cascade of issues all the way down to the feet. In this article, while I won’t get into every assessment I do for the neck, I will talk about a few surprising things that can contribute to neck pain, and a few tips and tricks for how you can alleviate it when it does show up in your life.
The Head
The head itself houses some of the finest tuned muscles in the body, responsible for keeping us alive and oriented, and critical for every function in the body. Muscles like the ones in the jaw are not just for chewing, but talking, breathing and lifting weights. Muscles in the eyes need to balance left to right so our vision is clear. Even muscles in the face can contort the orientation of the sinus and ears, causing challenges in how we experience the world.
But when’s the last time you thought about the muscles that roll your eyes in a circle? As we grow more attached to our devices, looking straight forward (or worse, down), those muscles can get lazy, tight and pull an eye out of sync with its partner eye. You won’t notice this, because your wonderful brain simply takes in both images, and combines them into one picture. But, the challenge is that those same eye muscles tug ever so slightly on the skull itself. If these muscles get tight, it can cause rotation forces on the cervical spine, causing some low level stress in those neck muscles.
The jaw is also a big issue for a lot of people with chronic pain. If you hear clicking at all when you open your mouth, or if you find yourself grinding your teeth, chances are your jaw tension left to right is out of sync. That imbalance, just like the eyes, can cause a lot of tension in the neck muscles, and even disrupt breathing at night to the point of sleep apnea.
As a practitioner, I assess all of these and more in my clients to get a sense of what the lead domino is. But, what you can do yourself is to go get these basic systems checked every year, and take corrective measures. For example, hearing exams are free for Costco members, or quite affordable with a local audiologist. If, like one of my former clients, you find out that one of your ears hears 40% better than the other, the body will constantly turn that head towards sounds, causing neck tension. Getting the eyes checked, and finding a biological dentist that looks at the entire skull are also massively helpful.
Self Censorship
Ever find yourself gritting your teeth during a conversation? As if all you want to do is scream at the person that they are being an idiot? Or maybe your boss asks you to do something you don’t want to do, but you can’t tell them to kiss your behind? I’m willing to bet that your jaw was tight, neck was constricted, and even the breath might have been held.
The neck houses the vocal chords, and the jaw helps to shape our words and intentions in a way that we can be understood by other people. But often I find people with neck pain have a lot of challenges talking about themselves or others in a ‘balanced’ manner. For example, it’s either all their fault, or all the other person's fault. Or, they find themselves saying yes when every ounce of them wants to say no. Often this stems from a fear of being judged if you say your truth, but I find that having some awareness of that part of the body when communicating can help a lot of people reduce their neck pain.
Breathing
There’re LOTS of different breathing techniques out there, and all of them make the nervous system respond in different ways. I’ve written about a few of them, filmed more videos on others, and even dedicated a big section of my last course (The Movement Reboot) to breathing mechanics to help people understand how breathing works. But for the purpose of this article, I’ll simplify breathing into fast vs slow.
When we breathe slowly, our diaphragm becomes the primary muscle of inspiration. We oxygenate the body well, and feel a sense of calm, like the weight of the world is off our shoulders for a bit. But, when we breathe fast, secondary muscles of inspiration kick on; neck muscles like the sternocleidomastoid, scalenes, upper traps and levator scapulae all work their butts off to lift the rib cage to expand the lungs instead. This results not only in less oxygen getting into the system, but over time, it also leads to chronic tension and ultimately pain in those muscles.
Taking an immersive breathing course can help immensely, but a simple and free option would be to download one of the many breathing apps available for your phone as a breathing pacer. I’m fond of a 5.5 second in and 5.5 second out breath rate, as studies show it to be majorly effective for improving heart rate variability (the measure of how well your body can respond vs react).
Cut the Puppet Strings
Lastly, in almost every case of neck pain I’ve come across, the hips are dysfunctional and weak. This weakness causes the neck and shoulders to overwork to stabilize and move the body, as if we’re walking around with puppet strings helping to move us. Strengthening the hip flexors, core, glutes, and especially the hamstrings creates a foundation for the spine that allows the neck muscles to let go and do the job they’re designed to do.
Once the legs are foundational again, then it’s finally time to go after the neck. One issue people run into is that they immediately try to stretch what hurts. That works with big muscles like the thigh or lats, but small proprioceptive muscles like we find in the neck tend to get destabilized when stretched too much, leading to temporary relief, but long term dysfunction. I posted a video about my favorite way to do it with clients, called the Lewitt Technique, that mobilizes the cervical thoracic junction to help increase blood flow and improve range of motion through the entire area. It’s easy to do, takes only a few minutes, and can be used to treat the area of discomfort, or better yet, prevent the issue in the first place.
Surrounding the Dragon
If you’ve got a small cut, bandaids work. An occasional small, or acute problem requires a small, acute solution. But with any chronic issues in life, especially big ones like chronic neck pain and migraines, it’s futile to only go after one avenue of therapy that may be effective for a short time. A good place to start is with a quality assessment to figure out all the avenues of attack so you can attack the problem from all sides.
If you’ve got chronic neck pain, it’s important to look into the possible issues I’ve outlined above, and surround the dragon, so you don’t just mask the symptoms. Otherwise, it’ll come back, worse than before. If you’re looking for help, I offer free consultations to help you find out what those avenues of attack are. Visit my website fourlightswellness.com for more info.
I hope this information is very helpful to you all. As always, have a happy and healthy rest of your day. I’ll see you in the next one.
If you liked this, check out my course at Four Lights Wellness, where I cover both physical and mental aspects of wellness: Healing (e)Motions: Trauma Release Exercises for People with Stress offers targeted physiological exercises aimed at reducing stress and mental health dysfunctions that can contribute to physical pain.