Text neck

Text neck, also called tech neck, is the head down, neck bent posture people take when they look at a phone or tablet. It is extremely common and it is linked to more neck pain, especially with long daily screen time. What the research does not show is that the posture itself damages the neck. The part that holds up is time: hours a day spent looking down. This page covers what text neck is, how common it is, what the evidence says and what to change.

What text neck is

When you look down at a phone held at chest height, the neck bends forward and the head moves in front of the shoulders. The further and longer you bend, the harder the muscles at the back of the neck work to hold the head. Text neck is not a diagnosis. It is a popular name for a posture and the aches people link to it.

It overlaps with forward head posture, which describes where the head sits at rest. Text neck is the active, task driven version: the posture you take while scrolling, reading or texting, sitting and walking.

How common it is

Very. In a study of 313 university students, 62.6% reported a text neck posture and 46% reported neck problems from phone use in the past year.¹ Neck problems were more common in students who reported the posture and in those who scored as overusing their phones.

Finding	Source
Text neck posture reported by 62.6% of 313 students	Saudi university survey1
Phone related neck problems in the past year: 46%	Same survey1
Phone use of 4 hours or more a day is a risk factor for musculoskeletal pain	Survey of 2,000 students2
Flexed neck while using a device in 91% of 859 students	Screen time study3

Does text neck cause neck pain?

These are cross-sectional surveys. They show that heavy phone users report more neck pain, but they cannot tell whether the posture causes the pain, whether people in pain use phones differently, or whether something else, such as stress, poor sleep or total sitting time, drives both.

The best review of head posture and neck pain adds a warning for young people: it found an association in adults but no clear association in adolescents.⁴ Young phone users are exactly where the text neck story is told most loudly.

That is good news. Duration is easier to change than anatomy, and nothing suggests the posture leaves permanent damage once you lift your head.

Text neck symptoms

People who link their symptoms to phone use usually describe:

• aching or stiffness at the back of the neck and between the shoulder blades;
• tension headaches that start at the base of the skull;
• tiredness in the neck after long reading or scrolling sessions.

Pain that spreads into the arm, numbness, tingling, weakness, or pain after an injury is not typical text neck. Those need a clinician. See red flags.

How to fix text neck

1. Bring the phone up. Hold it closer to eye level for long reads and videos, rest your elbows on a table or your knees, or use a stand.
2. Break long sessions. Look up and move every 20 to 30 minutes. Variety matters more than one perfect position, see how to improve your posture.
3. Look up when you walk. Head down walking adds hours of neck flexion and is a safety risk, see walking while using your phone.
4. Train endurance. The chin tuck and upper back exercises build the endurance that lets you hold a head up position without effort.
5. Check your eyes and font size. If text is hard to read, the head moves closer to the screen.

Students have their own pattern of laptops, notes and phones, covered in study posture.

How BodySignals measures text neck

AirPods with head tracking report how far your head tilts down. BodySignals learns your own upright and then measures how long you spend looking down while you sit and while you walk, including stretches of a walk with the phone in hand. Posture tracking with AirPods explains how accurate that is.

Footnotes

1. Prevalence of text neck posture, smartphone addiction, and its association with neck disorders among university students. 2022. ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Musculoskeletal pain and risk factors associated with smartphone use in university students. 2022. ↩

3. Prevalence and interrelationships of screen time, visual disorders, and neck pain among university students. 2024. ↩

4. The relationship between forward head posture and neck pain: a systematic review and meta-analysis. 2019. ↩