Hi, I’m Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy. We have made it, it is the end of the year finally. I mean, for some of us it probably feels like it was just a few days ago that the year started, but here we are at the end of the year. The time when most of us go and travel to either visit friends or family members that we haven’t seen all year long.
Traveling for me is so much fun. I enjoy seeing new things and just getting away from the normal daily stresses, the normal routine.
Traveling is so much fun for me. But one thing that I’ve noticed possibly as I’m getting older, (although I would not fully admit to that), but hotel pillows are so uncomfortable, they look amazing. You go into a hotel room and it’s all set up nice. The comfort is beautiful. The room is set up nice and clean. It’s absolutely amazing.
If you have kids, you really appreciate how clean it is. Then you go lay down at the end of your long traveling day and you see this beautiful fluffy pillow, you’re just ready to go to sleep. Within minutes, your head is in this weird contorted position and you’re stuck there all night because that’s just how the pillow is. Even though they gave you four pillows, they all compress down and they’re like less than an inch thick altogether, right? It’s just crazy how deflated hotel pillows get.
But with that, that normally meant that I would have at least a day or two of neck pain and just be a little, at least annoyed. I mean, having to turn my whole body. It just gets old after a while and it takes away some of the joy of being on vacation and enjoying your family and enjoying that time away.
I did some research and I came up with five tricks that helped me make it through my vacation with better sleep and more time to enjoy my family and friends and no time worrying about why my neck hurts. In this week’s video, that’s what I’m going to share, I’m gonna share with you my five tips on how to prevent neck pain while you’re traveling. Let’s get started.
One, fix that pillow height. Two, stretch your neck. Three, pay attention to your posture. Four, carry your luggage with both shoulders or both arms either way. And then five, see a specialist physical therapist. I’m gonna go through each one of those now. Okay.
The first one, How do you fix the pillow height of this beautiful hotel pillow?
Right here is my trick. You go and get one of their towels. They normally have extra towels and you can always ask for more if you need them. If you fold up a towel, then what that does is it helps build up and that builds up the base. Even though your pillow sinks, that towel won’t. You just have to play with what works for you.
Now side sleeping is normally when this really bothers people. Ideally, any pillow you use should fill the space up from this side of your face to your shoulder. You don’t want to sink all the way into the pillow, but you also don’t want to be pushed out by the pillow either. In an ideal situation, if you laid on a bed, um, you should be in this exact position just on your side. You don’t want your shoulder completely contorted. You don’t want your neck stuck in an odd position.
Now, perfect, that’s probably not gonna happen. Mildly off in one direction or the other isn’t gonna cause anybody any problems, but it’s that big sinking. Most of those towels that I’ve run across, you could fold in half and fold in half. Again, maybe you need to fold it again just to get it the right height for the area that you need the pillow to be on.
That’s what’s going to give you a good inch at least, because sometimes they’re thin, thin towels, but that gives you that little bit of support. If you lay on it and you sink too low, you can add another pillow or you could add another towel depending on what it is that you need. That right there, that was a huge game changer for me. Just increasing the height of that pillow was massive to take off the stress when I woke up in the morning.
The next one, number 2 neck stretches,
Most of us have kind of played with like, you just go side to side or maybe you rotate a little bit, there are three stretches I’m gonna give you in a second. The reason they’re important is they help stretch out all the back muscles and the side muscles that are typically what are getting stressed out from just everyday stresses.
When you’re traveling, it’s carrying all the luggage, it’s running through things, it’s that extra angst that you get just because you have to make sure everything runs on time and that you’ve packed everything and just all these other things. You end up carrying that a lot in your neck.
Here are three stretches that you can do basically anywhere. You can do them sitting, you can do them standing, to help with your neck. Now I remember them by lining body parts. Trying to get your ear to your shoulder. You’re not actually gonna get it to your shoulder, but that’s the direction you want to think about. You just wanna let your head rest in this position. There are some people who think you need to pull, but honestly, if I’m really tense, just getting myself to relax into this position is hard enough, let alone adding a pull.
If you do need that extra, then you can gently pull. You’re not trying to pull your own head off, but you could pull just a bit. Again, that first one is if you’re standing up trying to get that ear to your shoulder, just nice and gentle, that should feel like a really good stretch along the side of your neck.
The next one is, if you think about where you are in space, you wanna try to get your nose to point to your hip. If I rotate about 45 degrees, there’s a little wiggle room. Then look straight down, I should be pointing my nose where my hip would be if I’m sitting. Again, that gets you a good stretch in the back of your neck. If you wanted to, you could pull. But again, I feel like some people get a little aggressive with that and just being in that position is often very relieving. That was nose to hip. You rotate and then drop down.
The third is always the one that gets a little confusing. You’re trying to get your ear to your hip. This is where you would rotate to the opposite and then drop your ear to your hip. The stretch is on the other side, but you’re trying to get that ear to look almost like you’re listening to your hip. You would hold that. If you rotate and then drop your ear, you’re going to try to aim that ear at your hip. Those are three stretches that I go to all the time if my neck is a little bit stiff, and I hope that they help you as well.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
When you travel, you’re often reading on your phone. You are in weird places, you’re standing for long periods of time, and we just get tired and we’re paying attention to other things, we’re not paying attention to our bodies. What you’ll notice is a lot of people end up very hunched forward. Either maybe their luggage is a little heavy, or they’ve been standing for a really long time and they’re just tired, or they’re sitting reading or they’re binging Netflix.
All these things that we can be doing while we’re in the process of traveling, but we end up being in this very hunched forward position and that puts a lot of stress on our upper back and our neck. As much as possible, if you just think about standing up as straight as you can to help alleviate some of that added stress on the back of your neck and your upper back.
That can make a dramatic difference just by not making your neck do all this extra work. It probably just comes naturally. It’s just a matter of paying attention and trying to stand up just a bit straighter.
Fourthly, Holding your luggage with both arms
I’m saying that kind of clunky, but really what I mean by that is you’ll see people, (I may or may not have been guilty of this myself because I have a stronger side) just throw the backpack on one arm and then you’re pulling your luggage with the other one.
That whole waiting problem causes you to have to counteract that. Whether that’s you’re shrugging or you’re leaning really far over to help counteract all of that weight, save yourself the stress. It’s very obvious if you think about it, that that is causing your body to adapt and to make accommodations that it wouldn’t normally have to do, which is added stress for your muscles and your joints.
If you throw the backpack on both shoulders and alternate which arm carries the rolling suitcase, that can make a big difference because at least it’s not all on one side, you’re helping to share that burden. One can get into whether or not you’re overfilling these bags, but sometimes that’s not necessarily within our control. Sometimes we have to bring what we have to bring.
Then lastly, seeing a specialist PT.
What happens if these suggestions help you get 75 or 25% of the way, but it’s just not all the way. It’s not a hundred percent. It still bothers you. You’re still losing sleep, you’re still on vacation with your mind going crazy, thinking about what on earth could possibly be going wrong with my neck because no pain should last this long.
Nothing should be so consistently annoying and just there and present for this long. While you’re on vacation, you don’t wanna be having that vortex of thoughts that go,
“Okay, pain that lasts this long, it’s gotta be bad.
Does that mean I need to go to the doctor?
Do I have to go to the er?
Do I need medication?
Okay, well what happens if the medication doesn’t work?
Do I need to have a cortisone shot or whatever?
What is that weird shot that everybody talks about?
Do I need that?
Would I need surgery?
Okay, maybe I don’t wanna go to the doctor because I don’t even wanna find out if I have to have surgery or do I need to go because it’s only gonna get worse.
What happens if I have to have surgery?
How bad, how much will my life change if I have to have surgery?
Will I still be able to do the things I like to do?
Will I still be able to go on vacation?
Will I still be able to do all these things?”
It’s crazy how fast we have those thoughts that go from one thing to the next thing to the next and very rarely goes from a negative thought to a positive thought. It’s like how negative can those thoughts get, right? It’s a big spiral, especially when you’re uncomfortable with something that you don’t understand.
Completely understand. I’ve been there, right? It’s very overwhelming if you don’t understand why you’re having pain and if it really affects the things that you wanna do, like sleep and be on vacation and enjoying your family. The best way to kind of go through all the different things that could possibly be causing you to have that pain in your neck is to see a specialist physical therapist.
The reason being there can be a lot of things. They don’t have to all be bad, but could actually be pretty benign, something in your shoulder that may be far less annoying to you, maybe causing some of the neck problems. Weird things with your teeth and grinding, things that you don’t think about in everyday life can be affecting what’s happening at your neck.
There’s so many things, it would be virtually impossible to Google the answer to what’s going on with your neck and get a completely accurate, honest answer because you’re not looking at the whole picture. You’re going based on one symptom at a time.
Having somebody who can take a bigger look or a broader look back at what is actually happening at your neck at that time, asking you some very important questions and kind of putting a whole picture together, that they can find the root cause for your specific neck problem.
Then create a very specialized plan for you to get you back to enjoying vacations and enjoying sleep with far less worry, far less Googling, and more time to enjoy your family and your friends.
If this is the type of service that you are interested in and you’d like to contact us to ask us about cost and availability, I’ll leave the link below and we’ll talk with you about scheduling and how the process works to work with us.
Not everybody listens to a blog post and is ready to sign up for a full one hour evaluation. Some people wanna make sure that this is the right fit for them. Maybe they’ve tried a bunch of other things, maybe they’ve tried a bunch of tips, maybe they’ve tried a bunch of medical providers. The idea that their neck pain is gonna go away doesn’t even sound like it’s a real thing. I schedule for those specific types of people.
I leave out in my schedule things called discovery visits. What those discovery visits are is a 20 minute session where we meet one on one.
We get to talk, find out exactly what’s going on with your neck, do a quick movement screening just to confirm that I’m the right practitioner for you before you have to make a commitment to a full evaluation, let alone any kind of plan of care.
If you’re on the fence and it sounds like this is a good idea, but maybe it sounds like it’s a little bit too good to be true, completely understand that, click the link below for a discovery visit. You’ll fill out a little form and then we’ll contact you about the best time to set that up for you.
That way you get to come in and kind of try it before you buy it, just to make sure before you waste your time and get your hopes up. Right? Let’s just call, let’s start with that. Let’s start and make sure that we’re the right fit for you.
Well, I hope that this information is helpful. If you know somebody that would benefit from hearing this message, please share the video or the blog post with them and until we speak, have a great day!
We understand you may want to find out a little more about the cost & availability of physical therapy before booking an appointment. If that’s you, then click the button above.
Are you unsure if physical therapy is right for you? Or maybe you would like to try our services before making a decision? All you have to do is fill out the simple form above.
MEDICAL DISCLAIMER:
All information on this website is intended for instruction and informational purposes only. The authors are not responsible for any harm or injury that may result. Significant injury risk is possible if you do not follow due diligence and seek suitable professional advice about your injury. No guarantees of specific results are expressly made or implied on this website.
