Goal: Stop slouching
Sitting tall when your neck aches
Dr Nicola Tik
By mid-afternoon, your head has drifted towards the screen, your chin is poking forward and the back of your neck feels tight. When your neck already aches, it’s natural to wonder whether the way you sit is to blame. The full picture is more interesting, and more reassuring, than “sit up straight”.
You may have seen the claim that tilting your head forward puts the weight of a small child on your neck. That figure comes from a computer model, not from measuring real people, and your neck is built to handle these loads. Studies looking at sitting position haven’t found a clear link between any one position and neck pain.
What seems to matter more is how long you stay put. In one six-month study of office workers, people who regularly changed position while sitting were much less likely to develop new neck pain: 17% compared with 44%.
Your head tends to go wherever your eyes need it to. If text is small, a screen is low or far away, or you’re squinting at a laptop, your head drifts forward to get a better look. People who wear varifocal glasses often tilt their head back to read through the lower part of the lens, which can leave the back of the neck working hard.
So when your neck aches, it’s worth asking what your eyes are doing. Making text larger, moving closer to the screen or raising it so the top is around eye level can let your head settle back over your shoulders without you having to think about it.
Holding your head up is the job of small, deep muscles at the front and back of your neck. Studies have found that people with neck pain often have less endurance in these muscles, so they tire sooner and bigger muscles take over. This is one reason sitting tall can feel like hard work at first, and why your goal videos gently build this endurance over time.
Your neck and shoulders are one of the first places stress tends to land. Research has found that mental stress, like a tight deadline or a tricky email, can increase activity in the muscles across the top of your shoulders, even when you’re sitting still. If your neck feels tightest on busy days, that link may be part of it.
Noticing it can help. A slow breath and letting your shoulders drop, whenever you catch yourself braced, can ease some of that tension.
Rather than holding one “good” position, it may help to aim for lots of small changes through the day: standing for calls, looking away from the screen into the distance, or using the 30-second VIDA videos when you notice yourself sinking.
Each time your neck feels tight, check what your eyes are doing. Is the text too small, or the screen too low or far away? Change one thing and notice how your neck responds.