Outages can be a literal pain in the neck, but they don't have to be

Consider these situations:

• You're in the middle of an outage.
• A sprint is coming to an end, but you still have tickets to go through.
• You're writing a reply to a frustrated customer.
• A big customer just cancelled a deal.

A common side effect of stressful situations is shoulder stiffness, which is in turn one of the main contributors to neck pain.

While these situations are inevitable, the pain is avoidable.

Why do tense shoulders lead to neck pain?

In a stressful situation, our nervous system sends a signal to our muscles—brace. You might have noticed this most prominently in your jaw and fists. Neck and shoulders are less obvious at first, but more dangerous.

When we sit, most of our muscles are in a place where they cannot move much, so the tension usually goes to places that are more available. The tension should go away after the threat passes, but in reality it rarely does.

During prolonged periods of stress, our nervous system can forget what the world without tension looks like. It still knows that muscles should let go, but it's not exactly sure by how much.

Little by little, the baseline keeps changing—tense shoulders are interpreted as a normal state. When the situation becomes extreme, our shoulders feel stiff.

This impacts our everyday life. For example, looking around should largely be a movement of your torso and shoulders, with neck and eyes doing only fine adjustments. When the shoulders are stiff, we turn more with our neck. This puts a big strain on our neck muscles. Lo and behold, neck pain.

Good news is that we can remind our nervous system to let go of excess shoulder tension with a few minutes of moving with awareness.

Exercise - Resetting the shoulders

Time: 5 minutes

The most important bit in this exercise is doing it with awareness. You're not training your muscles—you're teaching your brain to better recognize the difference between a tense shoulder, and a relaxed one.

Before you begin, notice how your shoulders feel. How would you describe the feeling?

Right shoulder

1. Breathe as normal.
2. As you inhale, gently lift your right shoulder.
3. When you finish the inhale, hold your breath and the shoulder in place for a few seconds.
4. As you exhale, lower your shoulder to a place that feels neutral.
5. Rest for a few seconds.

Repeat this cycle a few times until you notice your mind drifting off.

Left shoulder

1. Continue breathing as normal.
2. As you inhale, gently lift your left shoulder.
3. When you finish the inhale, hold your breath and the shoulder in place for a few seconds.
4. As you exhale, lower your shoulder to a place that feels neutral.
5. Rest for a few seconds.

Repeat this cycle a few times until you notice your mind drifting off again.

Both shoulders

1. Breathe slightly deeper than usual.
2. As you inhale, gently lift both shoulders.
3. When you finish the inhale, hold your breath and shoulders in place for a few seconds.
4. As you exhale, lower your shoulders to a place that feels neutral.
5. Rest for a few seconds.

Repeat a few times, and then notice how your shoulders feel. Is it different than in the beginning?

Exercise Notes

• Tie the movement with the breath. In other words, if you inhale slowly, the movement is slow. If you take a long breath, the movement is long too.
• I don't recommend skipping to the part with both shoulders. Isolating each shoulder allows you to be more aware of changes that happen at the end.
• While you can do the exercise at any time, I would recommend doing it soon after stressful situations. It may help calm you down, but will also release some of the built up tension.

If you found this exercise useful, please share it with a tech colleague. If you have any questions, let me know at seb@healthyfolks.tech.

Thanks for your time,
Seb. 🙇‍♂️