Tech neck: what it is, why it aches and how to ease it

"Tech neck" is an informal name, not a medical diagnosis, for the stiffness and ache that can build up in your neck and shoulders after long stretches with your head tipped forward and down toward a screen. A laptop flat on a desk does it. So does a phone held in your lap. Your head drifts in front of your shoulders, your chin pokes forward, and the muscles at the back of your neck spend hours holding it there.

The fixes are mostly simple. Raise the screen so that you look at it with your head over your shoulders, break up long stretches in one position, and use a few gentle movements such as chin tucks through the day. If the pain lasts, keeps coming back, or comes with numbness or tingling in your arms or hands, see a physiotherapist or a doctor.

What tech neck looks like

Picture someone reading on a phone at a bus stop, or typing on a laptop at a café table. Seen from the side:

• the head sits in front of the shoulders instead of above them,
• the chin juts forward while the face tilts down,
• the upper back rounds, and the shoulders roll forward and often creep up.

This shape is usually called forward head posture. Everyone falls into it sometimes, and there is nothing wrong with it for a few minutes. It becomes a problem when it is the shape you hold for most of the day.

Why it can make your neck and shoulders ache

Your head is heavy, and your neck works like a lever holding it up. When your head sits straight above your shoulders, its weight is balanced and the muscles do relatively little. As it slides forward, the muscles along the back of the neck and the top of the upper back have to work harder and harder to stop it tipping further.

You may have seen dramatic figures for how much heavier your head "feels" at different angles. Treat them as rough estimates. The general idea behind them is sound: the further forward your head goes, the more work your neck has to do.

The other half of the story is time. Muscles cope well with load that changes. They cope less well with the same load held for hours without a break, and that is exactly what a long screen session asks of them. People commonly describe:

• stiffness in the neck, especially when turning the head,
• an ache at the base of the skull or between the shoulder blades,
• tight, tender shoulders,
• headaches that seem to start at the back of the head.

It helps to be honest about the evidence. Research on whether posture itself causes neck pain is mixed. Plenty of people with a forward head have no pain at all, and things like stress, poor sleep and long unbroken periods without moving seem to matter too. So the aim is not a perfect posture. It is a neck that gets to move and rest often enough that it does not stiffen up.

Fix the screen first

Most tech neck starts with a screen that is too low or too far away. Fix that and your head has much less reason to go forward.

• A laptop: lift it on a stand or a stack of books until the top edge of the screen is level with your eyes or just under, then add a separate keyboard and a mouse or trackpad so your hands can stay low. Good posture with a MacBook covers the setups, including what to do when you only have the laptop.
• A desk display: center it in front of you, about an arm's length away, with the top at or slightly below eye level. The full routine, from the chair up, is in desk setup for a Mac.
• Text size: if you lean in to read, make the text bigger on the Mac rather than bringing your head to the screen.
• A phone: bring the phone up toward eye level rather than taking your head down to it, and switch to the Mac for anything long.
• Calls: raise the laptop for video calls, so that you are not looking down at the camera for an hour.

Chin tucks and other gentle movements

These are simple, take seconds, and can be done in the chair. Move slowly, stay in a range that feels comfortable, and stop if anything hurts, makes you dizzy or causes tingling.

Chin tuck

1. Sit tall with your back against the chair and look straight ahead.
2. Gently draw your chin straight back, as if making a double chin. Keep your eyes level: you are sliding your head back, not nodding down.
3. You should feel a mild stretch at the back of your neck, just under the skull. Hold for a few seconds.
4. Relax, and repeat a few times.

It looks a little silly. It is also a quick way to remind your neck where "over the shoulders" is. A few times a day is plenty.

Shoulder blades back and down

Squeeze your shoulder blades gently toward each other and a little down, hold for a few seconds, then let go. It reverses the forward roll of the shoulders that tends to come with a forward head.

Look around

Slowly turn your head to look over one shoulder, then the other. Then tip one ear toward the shoulder on the same side, without lifting the shoulder, and swap. Keep every movement slow and easy. For a longer routine, two-minute desk stretches has more.

Break up the long stretches

One of the most useful habits is changing position often. A neck that moves every so often tends to stiffen less than one held perfectly still for three hours, however good the posture.

• Look up and away. Every time you finish a task, lift your eyes from the screen and look across the room. Your head comes up with them.
• Stand up between tasks. A minute on your feet after a meeting changes the load on your neck and back.
• Notice the drift. Most people start the day sitting back and end it with their nose near the screen. A quick check during the day catches it early.
• Swap positions on long days. Some work at the desk, some standing, some on a walk with a phone call instead of a video one.

A nudge to sit back

Catching the drift is the hard part, because it happens while you are absorbed. In Notchpals that job belongs to the Posture characters. If Sir Pounce, a posh cat who is not impressed yet, is the Posture pick in your crew, it leans out of the notch every so often between 9 AM and 9 PM with a Posture check or a Shoulders down, and some of those are about the neck itself:

Sir PounceRelax the neck. A slow head tilt, like so. Adorable, isn't it? Now you.

The visit that matters most for tech neck is Screen distance. It comes once a day, somewhere between 2 and 7 PM, and asks you to lean back and put the screen where your head can sit over your shoulders. Press Done once you have. Later sends the cat away for 20 minutes, long enough to finish the paragraph, and then it asks once more. Posture checks and Shoulders down draw on the same daily allowance as every other repeating reminder in your crew, so on the default setting they come a few times a day, not once an hour.

Blip, the Eyes character that comes with every crew, helps your neck as a side effect. Each eye break sends your gaze across the room, and your head comes up with it.

When to see a physiotherapist or doctor

Everyday stiffness that eases when you move or after a good night's sleep is common. See a physiotherapist or a doctor if:

• the pain lasts more than a few weeks, or keeps coming back despite a better setup,
• it spreads into your shoulder blade or down an arm,
• you have numbness, tingling, pins and needles or weakness in your arms or hands,
• it stops you sleeping or doing your work.

Get medical help promptly if the neck pain follows a fall or an accident, comes with a fever or feeling generally unwell, comes with a severe or unusual headache, or if you notice problems with balance or walking.

A physiotherapist can look at how you sit and move, work out what is driving the pain, and give you exercises that suit your neck rather than a general list. That is worth more than any reminder.