Ticket 04 of 07

Why does my neck ache after an afternoon at the screen?

In one line. Because a head held forward weighs, to the neck, far more than a head held over the shoulders, and a laptop on a desk invites exactly that tilt for hours at a time.

The complaint arrives at the counter in the same words almost every time: fine in the morning, stiff by four, a dull line from the base of the skull to the top of the shoulder blade by the time the laptop closes. The man assumes he slept badly or is getting old. More often he has spent six hours looking down at a screen that sits a hand's width too low, and the muscles that hold the head up have been doing a job they were never meant to do all day.

The physics is simple and a little unkind. Balanced over the spine, the head is a modest load. Tilt it forward by the angle most people adopt to read a laptop, and the muscles down the back of the neck have to hold several times that load, continuously, for as long as the tilt lasts. Research has looked at how the strain rises with the angle, and the curve is steep. The neck does not complain at minute ten; it complains at hour four.

Two changes undo most of it, and neither costs anything. The first is to raise the screen until the top third of it is level with the eyes, with a stack of books if nothing else is at hand, and to plug in any keyboard so the hands can stay low while the eyes stay up. The second is to break the tilt before it sets: once an hour, stand, let the arms hang, and look at something far away for the time it takes to finish a glass of water.

Some men notice the difference within a week, mostly as an absence, the four o'clock line simply not showing up. The phone deserves the same treatment, by the way: held at chest height it asks the same tilt of the neck as the low laptop did, only with a smaller screen.

Where the desk stops. This page is about an ordinary desk habit. An ache that runs into the arm, comes with numbness, follows a fall or a knock, or does not ease with the changes above is not a desk question and goes to a physician without delay.