Tech neck

Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, August 2, 2024

It’s astonishing what you’ll try. Growing up, I had a brother who would try pretty much anything from kissing a turtle on the lips to eating a smashed hot dog off the street for a dollar – which would be worth $20 today, but still. 

I won’t say I don’t try my share of new things, especially with social media and algorithms showing me daily what I should try next, based on what I might have tried before, wisely or not. You can see an 80-year-old running long distances or a 58-year-old holding a plank for 4+ hours for the Guinness Book of World Records title. Bio-hackers, neuro-hackers and body-hackers. How to do it better, be fitter, smarter, longer-lived, better balanced.

When in the history of the world have we had so many tricks, tips and hacks to try? So when I saw a post about fixing something they were calling “tech neck” or “text neck,” I took note. For one thing, this little hack purportedly applies to all of us, since, across the board, young and old, we stare down at our laptops and phones much too much of the time. Technically, it’s not an older-person hack. 

The stretch is simple: looking straight up, alternate an “oooooh” with the mouth (chin goes up) to a wide open lion’s yawn tongue out. The stretch feels so good, you’ll do it again and again. And of course, as an older person, it feels like a built in hack for “old neck,” which is a bonus.

I believe it was from this tiny click into the neck-stretching universe that I became open season for every face yoga and aging-but-not account out there. 

How couldn’t I try it, for instance, when I saw this woman telling me that with three facial exercises, the course of wrinkling and sagging could be changed? Game on. One was very similar to the tech neck stretch, so I did that. (If you haven’t noticed, the face, with its 43 muscles per side, is not often touched or massaged by most of us, and may be in great need of stimulation.) 

The next move was a very elongated and open-jawed “oooooh;” and from that place, running the tongue around the entire mouth between teeth and lips. Somewhere within the intensity of trying to keep my jaw dropped and my tongue going around to stretch that skin, I felt something kind of pop. I thought it was just my jaw clicking the way it does sometimes, like during a cleaning when it’s been cranked open for long enough to make you wonder if you’ll ever be able to close it again. My mouth shut fine, though. 

It wasn’t until the next day when I tried to look over my left shoulder that I felt a limited range of neck motion extending up the back of my head on the left side. I woke up with a headache, and only in doing a weird PT stretch I learned for my shoulder did I realize that that jaw muscle must be connected to everything else on the left side from the base of my skull down my arm. I thought I’d simply slept wrong; but, no. I’d pulled a long, important set of muscles doing face yoga. 

Is there a moral to this story? 

If this were an Aesop’s Fable, it might be the one called The Eagle and the Jackdaw, about not allowing vanity to let you overestimate your powers. One thing about vanity, though – to relate back to my theme of aging – is that even though you may be aware of it more as you age, its jaws snap at all of us.

Recently I was asked by my stepdaughter – as I was working this very kink out of my neck and explaining the potential pitfalls of face yoga – if I knew what mewing was. I shook my head. “Oh, well, then never mind,” she said, like teenagers do. It’s embarrassing to have to explain something to an adult. If you know, you know, right? 

So I looked it up. Amazingly, it is a popular trend in high schools that manages to exploit both vanity and disrespect. As a form of facial yoga, it involves pressing the tongue to the roof of the mouth to purportedly restructure the jawline and face (begun by orthodontist John Mew and his son Mike Mew). In that position, mouth closed and preoccupied, one can then signal an “I can’t be bothered” with a quick gesture of the finger following the jaw and then over the lips. Aesop’s moral for this little doozy? I wish I knew.