Do I need a Neckrest?

A lot of clients come to us  believing they need a neckrest because they are suffering from neck pain. However the lack of a neckrest is hardly ever going to be the cause of neck pain.

If you have a previous injury or abnormality in the cervical spine, shoulders or upper areas of the thoracic region then you may well need some supplementary neck support, but in all other cases a neck rest is just a rest, and not a support. And it is a nice thing to relax back into if you need a short break – or maybe a long one! But while you’re looking at a screen and typing, if everything else in your workstation is set up correctly, your neck should not be feeling a neck rest.

If you are experiencing neck pain we need to look elsewhere to find the cause, and this is where a workstation assessment would be a good idea.

Here are some of the common causes we see when we do assessments that are causing the pain in the neck.

Laptop use. Laptops as they come ‘out of the box’ are suitable only for very brief periods of work. If you’re going to be using a laptop regularly and for anything other than a very short time then it is essential that we separate the screen from the keyboard. Your head weighs similar to a bowling ball and it needs to sit correctly on top of the neck and shoulders. The neck is simply not designed to hold that amount of weight hanging forward looking down at a laptop screen. 

There are several ways to separate the keyboard from the screen and how you do this will depend on you and your work flow.

When I’m at home working I can be sat at my desk for quite a while, and I’m fortunate enough to have a dedicated work space so I don’t need to be too concerned about aesthetics. Therefore I have mounted a large screen to the back of my desk. I could then continue to use the laptop to type and mouse, but I already had a bluetooth keyboard and mouse so I’ve also attached a laptop mount to the monitor arm, so I get to use my favourite keyboard and at the same time i’ve maximized my desktop space by lifting the laptop and the screen off it.

When I’m in the showroom I sometimes need to use the computer for looking at products and checking prices. There won’t be any design or spreadsheet work and I won’t use the computer much so I sit the laptop on a laptop stand which raises the screen to the correct height and I travel with a lightweight compact keyboard and mouse. 

Screen to high – generally the opposite to the above! The monitor is mounted on an arm, or maybe static screen risers but is too high. The natural gaze of the eyes is down slightly: glance across casually to the other side of the room or office, in your eyeline will be something like a door handle, not ceiling. Monitors should be placed so that the top of the window you are viewing (which will likely be different to the top of the monitor itself) is just below your eyes and about arms length.