-Neck Pain- “I hold my stress in my neck”

-Neck Pain- “I hold my stress in my neck”

Tommy Conway, Director and Lead Physiotherapist at OneHEALTH

When the pressure starts to mount, Do you feel your stress levels starting to build? Does this build up come with pain? You know you have overdone it in work, staring at the computer too long and not doing your stretches. It can also have a set time to start, when deadlines need to be hit or when the kids are starting back in school. Your neck is always the first thing to give way. It starts with a mild headache maybe some tension in the jaw. This stiffness can last for a few weeks but then the pain starts travelling between the shoulder blades and up into the base of the skull. The muscle that runs from your neck to your shoulder feels like a “rock” and you get it hard to lift your head “It feels weak, tired”. Sometimes it can get really bad where you can’t look over your shoulder reversing the car, you lose a lot of neck range of motion. You get massages and that helps but it seems you have to be constantly doing something to help it. You look at others, they don’t stress, don’t do stretches, don’t need massages. They do nothing and still live pain free.I suppose we are all different shapes and sizes.

With most people they believe that when stress comes it's ok that this happens it’s just the way I am designed. But I have two things I want you to think about:

1. 1. Not everyone experiences stress in their neck - some experience it in their stomach or back.
2. If your neck symptoms are happening on one side only, let's say on the right side. Well does that mean your stress is unbalanced and only one sided?.

My point is there are different areas of the body that hold stress and that's because we are all different shapes and sizes One distinct shape will dictate why “I hold stress in my neck”.

Why do I hold stress in my neck?

Let’s start by discussing the role of the neck. Primarily it supports your head and the most important organ, your brain and it needs to be upright and stable to protect this powerhouse. Secondly it surrounds the road from your mouth and nose to the rest of your body. This provides the roadway for you to survive, it allows you to eat, drink and most importantly breathe. Our neck muscles primary role is to stabilise the head but also twist and turn your head to which direction you want to look. It’s secondary function is to aid your ability to get air into your lungs and then expel the air out.

Stress and breathing:

When we are stressed, three things change that we can measure. Heart rate increases, blood pressure increases and respiratory rate increases. You need to breathe in and out more to cope with the demands of the stress your body is under. What if I was to tell you that the most important area of your body to open and allow air to move freely was your upper back junction with the base of your neck. In this pandemic of Covid 19 we have seen medics reposition patients to lying face down in intensive care. This is an attempt to open the lungs at the back of your body (between the shoulder blades) as this is where the lungs have the greatest ability to expand and is commonly restricted. This restriction doesn’t only occur due to respiratory illness, it is already present amongst many of us and that's why we hold our stress there. Our bodies are begging us to open up this area, we need expansion of the upper back for relaxed deep de stressing breath.

Is this you? How can it be helped?

Does this all sound familiar? Do you feel yourself walking around with your shoulders shrugged? How you will present in a posture examination is that your mid back will be flat, it is unable to expand and round. This flat back presentation only gives your body one option to increase your breathing and that is to shrug the air in. This shrugging of the shoulders uses the “rock” muscle that we mentioned previously. This shrugging motion is not what this muscle was designed to do and hence it always feels like a “rock” because it never gets a rest. The best way to help this condition is to help change the posture. I have seen these “flat back” postural changes as early as 5 or 6 years of age and they can be helped by following a step by step programme. Also it has to be highlighted that at any age this can be improved and helped. You don’t need to live in pain and fear the next time you get stressed, if you can identify where the problem is building from then you can get a plan to stop it in its tracks.

Final tip:

You need to strengthen your chest, you need to get stronger arms wrists and shoulders as these are the muscles that keep the mid back expanded. Now I know you have “weak wrists” but my question to you is, did you crawl as a baby? If yes. Your wrists were not weak then, you have lost your strength and lost your ability to expand your upper back and breathe stress free. If you had it to begin with you can get it back, step by step.