Why does my neck hurt more since I started working from home?
It's almost never the neck. It's the height of your screen, the arm of your sofa, and eight hours of your head being held up by muscles that weren't designed to do it.
The short version
Because your head weighs about five kilos and your neck only has to hold it up when it isn't stacked over your shoulders. A laptop on a kitchen table puts your chin forward and down, and the muscles running from the base of your skull into your shoulders spend eight hours doing what your skeleton used to do. That's what aches. Raise the screen to eye level, get your elbows supported, and the ache usually halves within a fortnight.
Almost nobody who says "my neck hurts" has a problem with their neck.
They've a problem with where their screen is, and the neck is just the part that has to tell them about it.
What your head actually weighs
Four to five kilos, near enough. When it's balanced over your shoulders, your skeleton holds most of that and the muscles barely work.
Push your chin forward and tip it down towards a laptop, and the skeleton stops helping. Now a band of muscle running from the base of your skull, across the top of your shoulders and down between your shoulder blades is holding five kilos out in front of you. For eight hours. Every day since about 2020.
That band is where I find the tension in almost everyone who works from home. Plenty of them describe it as headache rather than as neck, though I want to be careful here: the NHS lists stress, sleep and caffeine as the usual causes of a tension headache, not posture. If headaches are your main problem rather than your shoulders, that's a GP conversation before it's a massage one.
The three places people work that cause it
The kitchen table, because the chair is the wrong height and there's nowhere to put your elbows.
The sofa, because a laptop on your knees puts your chin on your chest.
Bed, which I'm not going to lecture anyone about, but it's the worst of the three.
What actually helps, in order
Raise the screen so the top of it's level with your eyes and about an arm's length away. That's the Health and Safety Executive's own wording, and it's the single biggest thing on this list. Books work. A shoebox works.
If you're on a laptop, the HSE line is to use a separate keyboard and mouse so the screen can go up. You can't fix a laptop's height and keep your hands on it, because the screen and the keyboard are stuck together.
Get your keyboard just below elbow height and your mouse in line with your elbow, and rest your forearms rather than letting them hang. If your arms are hanging, your shoulders are holding them, and your shoulders are already busy.
Then get up. Not for a walk, necessarily. Just stand and let your arms hang for thirty seconds. The muscle doesn't need rest so much as it needs a change of position.
Where massage comes into it
I'm not going to pretend an hour with me undoes a bad desk. It doesn't. If you change nothing, you'll feel wonderful for four days and then be back where you started, and I'd rather say so than sell you a monthly appointment for a problem a shoebox would fix.
What massage is genuinely good for is the tension that has already built up and won't release on its own. Muscle that has been shortened for two years does not lengthen because you started sitting better last week. It needs working on.
For this specific pattern I'd usually do Indian head massage, which is head, neck and shoulders, half an hour, £65, and you stay fully clothed in a chair. If it has spread down into your back, an hour of hot stone at £75 gets deeper into it, because heat reaches tight muscle faster than hands alone.
Fix the screen first. Then book something.
Questions I get asked
- Why does it feel worse in the evening than at work?
- Because muscle that has been holding a position all day only starts complaining once it stops. It's the same reason your back tells you about a long drive at the services rather than on the motorway.
- Will one massage fix it?
- It will give you a very good few days. It won't fix it, because I'm undoing something you'll do again on Monday. If you change the screen height and have a massage, that combination sticks. If you only do one of the two, do the screen height.
Where this comes from
Anything here about the body, a symptom or a safe way to work is checked against a named source. The rest is what I've found doing the job.
- Working safely with display screen equipment: good postureHealth and Safety Executive
- Working with display screen equipment at homeHealth and Safety Executive
- Tension headaches: causes and when to see a GPNHS
I'm a beauty therapist of over ten years and a certified Dermalogica Skin Specialist, and I work as a mobile therapist across Sutton. Client stories here are shared with permission and identifying details are changed. More about me.