Pain in the Neck

A Few of my Thoughts on Neck Pain

Neck pain so common that “a pain in the neck” is a phase. Enough people related to that grouping of words that it became an oral meme. The neck is our blood and nerve corridor between our brain in its safety case and our visceral organs in our poorly named rib “cage”. Pain in our neck' is a sign dramatic of imbalance. 

We have 7 cervical vertebrae that differ from the 12 thoracic vertebrae in that they do not connect to the ribs. This allows a more dynamic range of motions both in the endpoint of each stretch and the subtle variations in the style in which they move. No matter what our lineage If we look back to ancestors it's easy to see the need for a healthy supple pain free neck. Imagine living amongst predators as so many people have done successfully for hundreds of generations.  Let us think of how crucial it would be to quickly and reflexively move our necks in order see if we are safe from predators. 

Today the closest we get to predators are cars, which can behave irrationally but for the most part move in predictable linear patterns. Other than looking up and down the street, they put no evolutionary pressure on us to move our necks in all the ways that we been genetically sculpted to do by more sophisticated predators. 

As we lose some of our ravenous partners in this wild culinary dance we are at the same time creating more and more of our environment. How much of your background was created by a non-human? A tree maybe. That tree will never be exactly like any other tree. A bird nest made as no other nest.   An industrialized person will create the same pattern or more accurately create a small part of a pattern that is duplicated endless times. On an evolutionary level are we getting enough stimulation from a safer more predictable environment, or are we supplementing our sensations with our technology? 

So as we all too often do, we bow our heads down to humble ourselves before our soon to be AI overlords. How does holding this poster effects our neck health? Are different hormones at least partially influenced by the poses we enact? There seem to be differing opinions about this. Many Yogic schools have mapped out correlations between  emotions and posture. Good actors act with their whole body, slouching over in one scene to convey a certain meaning only to jump to action for dramatic effect.  These diverse cultures using the same building block of knowledge for different means as well as my personal experience leads me to believe there is a connection between our posture and our emotions, despite there being mixed opinions within scientific thought.

  But even if posture has no influence on our emotional perception of events, poster certainly has influence over what you perceive.  Gaze into a fixed screen, drive a car staring linear at the road or read a book line by line our neck loses its flexibility.  Our visible world becomes that much smaller in that loss of neck movement limits where the eye can see. Paradoxically it may take longer for the neck to move from position to position creating more temporal space between shorter physical distances. 

Its is unsettled to why exactly stretching will lengthening muscle tissue. One theory which I think hold a couple of puzzle pieces is by stretching we are teaching our nervous system how far the muscle can be safely pulled. I have certainly strained my neck on various occasions as I suspected almost everyone has to some degree. To heal anything first we need to be aware of it. It's easy to ignore small injuries. So what does it mean again if neck pain is so prominent for us? How much of our realities are we not seeing because we cannot turn our head enough? How much of our metaphorical perspective, our point of view limited because it is limited in our physical bodies.

                        Anthony Bruni