Tech Neck: A Toronto Therapist’s Guide to Fixing Text Neck Pain

Your head weighs about 12 pounds. Tilt it forward 45 degrees to look at your phone and the load on your neck jumps to roughly 50 pounds. Now multiply that by the four-plus hours a day the average Canadian spends on a screen and you have the perfect recipe for what we call tech neck — a constellation of headaches, jaw tension, tight traps, mid-back aches and that constant feeling that your shoulders live somewhere up by your ears.

What’s actually happening in your body

When your head drifts forward, the deep stabilizers at the front of your neck go to sleep, the muscles at the base of your skull (suboccipitals) shorten and grip, and the upper traps and levator scapulae work overtime to hold your head up. Your thoracic spine — the middle back — slowly rounds and stiffens. The result is referred pain into the head, jaw and shoulder blade, plus reduced lung capacity because your ribcage can’t fully expand.

Three things you can do today

• Raise the screen, not your chin. Your monitor’s top edge should sit at eye level. Phones go up to your face, not your face down to the phone.
• Reset every 30 minutes. Stand, roll your shoulders back and down, gently tuck your chin (think “double chin”), look at something far away for 20 seconds. That’s the whole reset.
• Open your chest, not just your neck. Stretching the back of your neck without opening the front of your chest is half the fix. Try a daily doorway pec stretch, 30 seconds per side.

When to bring in a therapist

If you’ve had recurring tension headaches, jaw clicking, numbness or tingling into the arms, or pain that wakes you up at night, you’re past the self-care stage. A combined approach — RMT to release the tight tissue, osteopathy to mobilize the upper back and ribs, and a few targeted exercises to re-train the deep neck stabilizers — will undo years of screen posture in a handful of sessions. The fix is rarely just “more stretching.”