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By Veronica Beltran

Is your bad posture due to your device?

TYH: Are your electronics causing you ache and pains?

Sep 17, 2019 | 12:25 PM

Head up, shoulders back–that’s how my mom always told me to sit and walk.

However my posture has changed dramatically over the past several years, and originally, I wanted to attribute it to my chair at work, however…one day it hit me. The neck pain I’d been dealing with wasn’t from my chair…it was from my phone! I noticed it one morning on my way to work, I was holding my phone in my lap, with my head hung over it. When I sat up I felt the pain in my neck completely electrify me–that’s when I put two and two together.

I came to the conclusion, with some of the other journalists in the office, that I was probably not the only person suffering from aches and pains related to electronics. So we decided to head over to Phoenix Physiotherapy where we spoke to Shannon Busto, a local Physiotherapist.

She confirmed our suspicions, saying that neck pain and thumb pain can sometimes be attributed to electronics. “For some people it’s neck and shoulders– for some people it’s actually thumb tendonitis–they spend a lot of time texting. We see a huge amount of people in the kind of environment and…some people come in for esthetic reasons,” she told us in an on-camera interview.

She mentioned that aches and pains can come from being in an incorrect position for too long– so it’s not technically your phone…its your posture when you’re using your devices. ” Even just gentle mobility exercises throughout the day, whether it is a neck or shoulder stretch, having a little resistance band where you activate your back muscles in your shoulders throughout the day. That can really help and it’s also in our free time, not spending 10 hours at the office and then going home and gaming for five hours, and then you go to bed and do the whole thing over and over again,” said Busto.

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There is a way to check and see if you have incorrect posture, stand up and look at yourself in the mirror, does your head align with your shoulders and are they aligned with your back? If not, she suggests getting up and walking around regularly, and ensuring that you are staying active outside of the office.