Written by: Cheryl Whitelaw, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Ever wake up with a stiff neck? And wonder what you did to make it so stiff?
We do this – feel something we don’t like, like a stiff, sore neck and look for a cause, something we did – did I sleep funny? Did I strain it? We search through our personal story of stiffness to make sense of the stiffness, to look for an event, a plot point in which I was here doing this and then something happened and now I am stiff. The story of stiffness makes more sense when we can trace it from some kind of action to our current sense of stiffness as some kind unhappy outcome.
The story of stiffness is a more interesting and complicated story. Rather than being a science fiction story, it is a science reality story that is wonderful and strange and occasionally mind-blowing. The story of stiffness starts with neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is an essential property of your brain that enables it to change both how it functions and how it is structured as it responds to your activity, thoughts, sensations and feelings. Stiffness is a way that your brain organizes your body in response to what you do and to what you think, sense and feel.
I train aikido and tai chi; on somedays I am training up to 4 hours a day. The next morning, I am often stiff and sore. In my mind, I explain this stiffness through events that happen in training. In aikido, there are two roles – the attacker and the person who responds with a technique. The attacker role can often be the more demanding role. I attack my partner throughout the technique, responding to whatever forces my partner introduces as they perform the technique. It can mean moving from standing to deep squats, to lunges, to standing on tiptoes and typically ends in falling or rolling to leave the confrontation. No two rounds of technique are the same and all parts of my body are recruited as I attack, lose my balance and regain it again and again.
And that could be the story – doing the activity leads to stiffness. But there is a villain hiding in the shadows of the stiffness story; that villain is tension. Because it is not just doing movement that creates stiffness. How we move, how we activate our muscles, tendons, fascia, how our nervous system and brain function together to shape our movement, our experience of our actions all shape how our brain is structured. Each move, each experience we have changes us and shapes how we act the next time. How our brain is structured and functions shapes our movement; our movement shapes our brain.
It’s mind-blowing!
Tension is a sneaky kind of villain; it hides out in our movement and posture habits. Do you tilt your head to one side when you listen to someone speak?
With all of the online meetings I attend, I sometimes observe how many people sit with a small tilt of their head throughout the meeting. So we might want to blame our stiff neck on lifting a heavy chair but the accumulation of muscular tension in our habit of head tilting is a much more likely suspect for our stiff neck than the more obvious effort of straining to lift.
In the hidden story of stiffness, rather than relying primarily on our spine to hold our head up, we lean on our neck muscles to hold our head up. These muscles are built for this job and can work all day. But when they are used with extra effort, head tilted, meeting after meeting, it changes our brain. The tilt feels familiar and becomes a set point in our posture. We don’t notice in this familiar way of holding our head to one side, that the cost of this habit is tension. Another common head holding habit is the chin forward and down position. Next time you are in a coffee shop, try to find anyone reading their cell phone screen without holding their chin forward and down.
We notice stiffness after events, like shoveling snow, lifting a heavy chair. But these movement events happen on top of our hidden habits of tension, ones we have been doing for hours that silently set us up for stiffness the next day.
If tension is our villain in the story of stiffness, why do we create tension?
One plot twist in our story of stiffness is that there is a non-stop competition going on in our brain. Neuroscientists found the activities that we do regularly take up more and more space in our brain, taking over real estate and resources from other areas of our brain. In the study of chronic pain, researchers have identified that the brain centers that activate in response to pain signals, these brain centers also process thoughts, sensations, images, memories, movements, emotions and beliefs, when they are not processing pain signals.
This is the bleaker chapter of experiencing persistent pain. The presence of pain competes with other kinds of functions for space within our brain. It’s why when we feel pain, we can’t concentrate or think as well, we have trouble sensing something other than pain and might become less tolerant of loud sounds or bright light. It’s why we can’t move as easefully and why it feels more difficult to control our emotions when we are feeling pain. Our brain centers that manage these functions have been taken over with the demand of processing signals related to pain.
But this is not pain’s story; in my story today I am telling the tale of neck stiffness and the villain of stiffness, tension.
What you do and what you feel most often has the greatest influence on the functioning and structure of your brain. Silent habits of movement like tilting your head to listen or protruding your jaw to read on a screen create tension and feed the competition in your brain to create stiffness and ultimately pain. A stiff neck is your brain’s protective response, to limit what else you do on top of the way you are already unconsciously using your neck muscles.
This competition in your brain operates like a bar fight that spills out onto the street. Tension, stiffness, pain and chronic pain shapes the pain system in your nervous system and brain to activate and send pain signals more easily. As pain signals create inputs that compete for territory in your brain centers, those pain maps can increase and spill onto adjacent parts of your brain. This is how we can develop referred pain, when pain or stiffness in your neck can also be felt in your jaw, around your eyes or across the back of your head. It is also how we can feel pain more often, more easily. The stiffness or pain in your neck could happen when you feel upset, anxiety or stressed.
The happy ending in our story of stiffness is that we can write the next chapters.
We can use the functions that share brain centers with our pain system, our thoughts, sensations, images, memories, movements, emotions and beliefs to win back territory within our brain centers. Our neuroplastic brain is shaped by what we feed it, changing both how it receives signals and what it does with those signals. Re-writing the story of a stiff neck requires sensory work, learning to listen to our sensations before they become pain signals. It requires us to become aware of the connection between our thoughts, emotions and what we perceive in our bodies. It requires us to re-write unconscious habits, to identify and interrupt unconscious habits of movement and posture so we can positively shape our brain to support healthier habits. This is not a story of taking a pill and waiting to heal. But we can become the heroes of our own healing journey by positively shaping our movement habits and ourselves.
Cheryl Whitelaw, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Cheryl is a leader in using movement to improve brain and body performance, reversing the impacts of aging. As a child, Cheryl asked, “If we can do war, how do we do peace?” Her lifelong exploration of that question led her into embedding transformative learning technologies into adult education, coaching, inclusion, and diversity training and supporting people to recover their personal sense of wellness and wholeness after injury and trauma. A devoted practitioner of aikido, Tai Chi, and Feldenkrais, she is committed to her personal evolutionary path to integrate body, mind, and spirit in service of peace in the world. She has coached individuals in private, public, non-profit organizations, unions, and utility companies from over 12 countries around the world. She is a published author in the field of diversity and inclusion and is well regarded for her blog on how our movement can help us create a more potent and peaceful self in the world. Her mission: Move more; react less, and live more fully with no regrets.
