You probably recognize the posture I’m in right now. This is cell phone posture.

I’m sure all of you have one of these in your pocket right now, in your purse, or within a few feet of you. Most people are spending at least a couple hours a day on a cell phone or device similar. It comes to tens, hundreds of hours a week, thousands of hours a year.

What this is doing is it’s really affecting your posture, causing what’s called tech neck.

Watch this video to learn how to avoid tech neck.

Watch the video now!

Prefer to read? Here’s the gist of what else Dr. Tim spoke about in this video clip.

How Tech Neck Creates Health Issues

As you can see, when I’m down like this, my posture’s hunched forward. My head is forward. It’s creating a huge amount of stress on the muscles in my shoulders, my neck, and the base of the skull.

Now this isn’t just bad posture. This is bad for your health because your posture is directly related to your spine and the function of the brain and nervous system.

The worse your posture is, the more stress there is on the nerves to your muscles, to the organs and systems of your body and it really affects how your body adapts to stress.

Recent studies show the further your head goes forward, the more it’s going to affect things like your heart, your lungs, the more likely you are to have heart related issues, asthma, allergies, and other health related problems. You will take years off your life!

Your posture really does matter. So when you’re using cell phones and other handheld devices, you want to do a couple of different things.

How to Avoid Tech Neck

Number one is try to make sure that you’re sitting more upright with the phone actually up in front of you. The idea is to have your ear over your shoulder, your head back, and a good upright posture.

Same thing if you’re on a computer screen or using any other devices, you want to make sure everything’s balanced from the side, and from the front. It takes a lot of that stress off there.

Number two is to add postural exercises to your daily routine.

• One of the big ones is to sit up straight and tuck your chin back and in and hold that.
• Another good one is you can lock your hands behind your head, pull your shoulders back and pull your chest up.

These are postural exercises you can do throughout the day. You can do them at your desk and at your workstation

Most importantly you want to be mindful of your posture. It’s so easy to get in a bad routine, a bad habit, especially with a device like this and the large amount of time that you’re spending on it.

It’s so important for your overall function, for your overall health and for long-term health success. So pay attention to your posture, watch out for tech neck, and do some of these exercises that can really help you prevent a lot of major issues, neck problems, upper back problems and health problems related to that.

Have you had the opportunity to join us at one of our community education events yet? During the community education events, Dr. Tim sifts through all of the knowledge out there to bring you key information about how to get healthy and stay that way and shares answers to frequently asked questions on chiropractic care and healthy eating. Enjoy the clips of previous events here.