All of us at some time or other in our lives will experience the dreadful pain of having a stiff neck or maybe also some painfully sore shoulder muscles and joints.
It is usually not ever just a good idea just to stiffen your bottom lip, and so to just put up with it. Neck pain is very common and a lot of us however do suffer in silence.
Having a stiff upper lip or being stiff-necked are both signs of stubbornness. To improve anything much in life, we need better flexibility, and this is also the case when we are trying to improve our stiff neck.
There are seven vertebrae or back bones that connect from the skull to the rib cage known as the cervical vertebrae. This part of the spine and its muscles, ligaments, and soft tissues can all be sources of our neck pain.
Internal structures located in our neck such as our wind pipe, blood vessels, thyroid gland and lymph nodes can also be a cause of our pain. Pain in the neck can sometimes be coming from other parts of our body. This is generally known as referred pain.
With so many different ways for pain to enter our body or to trouble us from overusing a small part such as our neck, it is no wonder that we can sometimes suffer some pain in our neck area. A lot of different parts of our body are being packed into this small space of our neck because of the way that it’s constructed.
Getting older doesn’t help, and signs of developing arthritis are often a cause of neck stiffness when we pass fifty years of age, not to mention disc degeneration as well.
Here are a few useful tips that I use to help alleviate some of the annoying pain that a stiff neck and sore shoulders so often brings to me.
PREAMBLE
We must remember that our head weighs about the same as a medium sized ten pin bowling ball. It can weigh about 10 to 12 pounds, or about 5 kilograms. When we are positioned for too long in an awkward position, it is our neck that carries all of this extra strain. This can happen while we are sleeping, or even just from spending too much time in front of our computer screen or on our couch slouched into an awkward position while watching the television.
Any position where our neck is being asked to support our head position while being unnaturally balanced for too long a time period will begin to place undue strain onto our neck muscles.
It is always a good idea to get up from a sedentary position that has been held for too long a period, and to perform a few easy stretches, or just to do something different for a few moments. Simply going to have a drink of water will hydrate your body more, and this within itself will have an overall beneficial effect on your whole body as well.
Cartilage tissues hold a lot of water because cartilage actually utilises water to help lubricate moving joints. Your spinal discs also store water and which helps to support your body weight hydraulically. Water helps to remove waste and helps to bring nutrients to our muscles.
Drinking more water then is a great tip to help relieve some pain, and also to help prevent it from remaining so severe for you.
STRETCHING
The importance of stretching and bringing more suppleness and flexibility to the whole of your neck and also to the surrounding shoulder and back muscles should not be overlooked. Rigidity and tightness in severe cases can prevent you from full movement of your neck altogether. The tight muscles are almost painfully frozen into place.
Every morning I will perform some light overall body stretching exercises. If I have woken up with a stiff neck, I will incorporate some stretching exercises that target specifically my neck area.
I go into my kitchen and I approach a bench or ledge that is about chest high. Putting my both hands flat on top of the bench and about shoulder width apart, I will now stretch my upper body downwards towards the bench. I do this exercise several times, with minor variations. It is a bit like performing a standing up push-up, and all push ups, or similar movements are generally very good for our shoulders and chest muscles.
The first time that I perform this stretch my head is facing frontwards or slightly upwards. Later I will do this same movement while now facing my head to one side, and then finally to the other side. In this position my ear will be approaching and nearly touching the bench and I will be almost looking upwards by twisting my neck as much as possible at the same time.
Going back to the initial position, I now perform a similar exercise by dipping one shoulder at a time down towards the bench. During this exercise I will also be trying different head positions to see which position helps me the most. Sometimes looking in the same direction as the dipping shoulder seems to work best. I try to touch my shoulder on the bench if possible, or at least to move it as close as is possible for me.
From here I then cross my arms over themselves, and I reach out with my hands in opposite directions along the bench as far as is possible. This stretches my arms and shoulders very strongly. After a good stretch, I will cross over my arms again now with the opposite arm now in front and perform this great stretch one more time.
Lastly now I will place my both hands clasped behind my head. I will rest my both elbows on top of the bench and I will simply pull my head down towards the bench, stretching it most strongly again in this way. Sometimes I find that if I resist the pulling down movement it creates a dynamic tension which then intensifies even further this wonderful stretching movement.
Other simple stretches can be performed almost anywhere that you find yourself and if you begin to feel your neck muscles tightening up. Simply moving your head from side to side and up and down provides some immediate relief. Isolating your neck muscles and tensing or squeezing them as tightly as possible is very beneficial.
You can look over and across your shoulders as you do this, or try touching your ear to your shoulder. You can try to touch your chin to your chest dipping your head downwards. Another interesting movement is known as the turkey gobbler stretch. To perform this stretch you move your whole neck and head backwards at the same time together while keeping your shoulders unmoved and your head and neck remaining aligned in an upright position.
It gets the name turkey gobbler, because your chin and neck should develop a few folds now when you try this stretch.
Here is one more great stretching exercise for the neck.
Place both of your hands palm to palm together in front of chest. While pressing your hands strongly together, twist your hands at your wrists so that your fingers are now pointing inwards towards your chest. Twist them inwards as much as possible. At the same time tighten and squeeze both sides of your whole shoulder area including all of the large muscles across the top of the shoulders.
This is a great and intense stretch that will then be most deeply felt in your shoulder muscles. If you have continual pain like me, the relief of feeling a prickly tingling pleasant type of sensation gripping the sore muscles will take you to heaven before your time so to speak.
Remember that the benefit of stretching comes from holding the stretched position for a few long seconds before releasing the stretch. Ten to fifteen seconds is good to start with, and you can even build it up to thirty seconds once you are more used to stretching. Just don’t perform them all too quickly.
WARMTH
The benefits of warming your neck and keeping your neck warm should never be forgotten. You can warm the area, either by having a hot shower, by applying a heat cream or simply by rubbing and massaging the area. All of these methods bring fresh blood into the area warming up then the whole area and helping to remove toxin build up from these overworked muscles.
Remembering to wear a scarf when you go out into a cold breeze will help enormously to keep the cold from entering your stiff neck and so stiffening it up even more. A stiff neck is often only just a cold neck.
I have a cloth pad filled with whole corn (not the popping variety), which when placed in a microwave oven for about a minute or two, then holds the heat for quiet a long period of time. Placed on my painful shoulders, this direct heat is very soothing indeed. Just be careful not to overdo the ”cooking,” and burn the corn!
CAUSES
This short article cannot be a substitute for good medical advice, and you should have a good medical examination if you continue to have severe pain, and to help determine if there is any underlying structural cause or not for this pain.
Neck stiffness of course is not always associated with pain, and you can have a stiff neck without the severe pain. Usually however some pain will be incorporated or included with the stiffness coming from some part of the internal structure of your neck.
The internal structure of your neck remember includes things like your vertebrae and your neck muscles, your blood vessels and vascular system, and the lymph nodes included in your neck. This muscle pain will often usually and additionally extend right down towards the shoulder and upper back muscles, and conversely shoulder and back pain could reach upwards towards your neck.
Any type of injury or illness can bring about unfortunately an associated accompanying stiff or sore neck.
Anyone with a stiff neck will usually move their neck more slowly, very carefully and in a measured and most gingerly way. This restricting of your movement will often in itself lead you to experiencing some painful muscle spasms. Neck stiffness can lead then to strained ligaments and joints, and the pain will often travel through nearly your whole body extending itself from your neck into your shoulders, back and even into your arms.
Arthritis, stress, sleeping in an uncomfortable position plus a number of other medical conditions might be contributing to your experiencing now of a painful stiff neck.
Strangely our rigidity of thinking and our inner ways of being or of holding ourselves to certain beliefs and behaviours can also begin to affect us physically. We can sometimes identify such largely unconscious patterns that are governing our attitudes to life by examining the effects of the associated various outer results of these inner resistances to our free thinking that are being built up and embedded into the very fabric of our physical body.
Rigidity of thought often leads to us also beginning to hold our body in a stiffly regimented way as well. It has been said that everything is connected, and all affects all else. Our thinking affects our body, and our body will affect our therefore our thinking.
Also it is good to check out if any of your fixed thinking patterns of holding onto stress, and hanging onto your problems through excessive worry by shouldering them all and not sharing them with a trusted friend is not also bringing you some related symptoms of stress. The inner stiffness is perhaps resulting in stiffness now also being experienced more outwardly and that is being indicated to you now by your stiff neck.
The turtle has to stick its neck out to make forwards progress, but we should always try to keep our own neck supported in some way if we do the same thing for any extended period of time.
CONCLUSION
I have only had time here to touch on a few major issues here, and you should really read more widely in this area.
Strengthening your neck muscles, keeping your body generally as fit as possible, exercising and stretching and becoming more aware of how you yourself might be contributing to the problem through living an unbalanced lifestyle will all help you here.
This problem can develop from being too sedentary, or from not exercising sufficiently, or even from carrying too much excess body weight and by not eating complete nutritiously balanced meals or drinking enough fluids.
Anything that acts to unbalance your body will eventually lead to some type of detrimental health condition in your body.
On the other hand it might all just be a matter of simply changing your pillow.
It is amazing sometimes how the simple overlooking of small effects and causes like this will often snowball themselves into a major problem over time, if given enough time to do so and from being left untreated.
Going on from my last point, rest is always beneficial and time itself will help heal the condition if it has been only caused from overworking of the muscles and causing some inflammation, pain or other bodily reaction. This has been brought about perhaps from the type of work that you do, or maybe from working for too long in your garden when you are not used to it.
Our body does not like to be irritated for too long, as it will usually throw the irritation right back at you then.
If your neck pain is very severe however, make sure that you get it all checked out further. It might after all be only wear and tear so to speak, but it could have another more sinister underlying cause, and these types of conditions are always best treated and diagnosed as early as possible.
Sprains, strains, infections, fractures, and fevers could be involved, and the possibility of any of these conditions being present should be ruled out by consulting the appropriate medical authorities.
Finally remember to smile more. Smiling relaxes muscles both internally and externally. Love is flexible and must never be too stiffly given to remain full love. Smile and allow the love out rather than keeping it stiffly all bottled up inside by too rigidly holding it back within your body and your body structures.
