Is too much screen time giving you a double chin? These daily tweaks will help

Technology has become integral to our daily routines, but can cause back pain, ‘tech neck’ and a double chin. Here’s how to fix it

As a journalist, my working day is ruled by tech. The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is read the headlines on my phone, and after a shift spent making calls and bashing out stories at my desk, I’ll go home and put the news on or watch a documentary before bed.
But even if your life is more exciting than mine, you likely won’t go long without looking at a screen. The average Briton spends a total of six hours a day on their phone, laptop or computer, according to one recent survey, and if you work in an office like me, your own screen time figure might be much higher than this. 
We all know that too much time on these devices is bad for our attention spans and mental health, but overusing them is officially wrecking our physical health too. Back pain and “tech neck” – a combination of pain, stiffness and inflammation in the neck and shoulders, caused by hunching over screens – are the most common complaints of those in desk-based jobs. 
It’s a problem that’s on the rise. “The number of patients needing Botox injections for this type of neck pain is definitely on the increase,” Dr Ashwin Soni, a plastic surgeon, told The Telegraph earlier this month. Most of his patients are aged over 40, and they “may have spent years hunched over their desks or smartphones and not looked after their posture very well”. 
Given that I’m only 24 and my neck is already a bit stiffer and more cramped than it was when I graduated, this news made me worry – and when I visited Maxine Valensky, The Telegraph’s office physiotherapist, it turned out that my spine was already suffering far more than I had thought.
“I can already see that your cervical spine is straightening,” says Maxine, pointing out that my head is sitting too far forward from my shoulders. “Later you might have tightness under your diaphragm, which feels like you can’t catch a full breath, and your deep core will fall asleep while you’re sitting.”
What shape might my body be in by the time I’m 60? The picture is even scarier. Maxine points to a model of a spine standing in her office. “You can see here that the vertebrae are lovely and square,” she says. “What could happen is that the body reabsorbs the edges of those vertebrae, and they’ll become wedge shaped.” 
If that happens, Maxine says, “you’ll find it very difficult to stand upright at all, and your thoracic cage will come down, so you will end up reducing your lung capacity. You risk herniation, where the disks blow out completely, which gives you sciatica and horrible pain.”
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But I shouldn’t rush to get my neck botoxed – “you’ll still have to deal with all of this once your body has absorbed the botox, and those problems will persist,” Maxine says. “Exercise is by far the best way to prevent this, as well as using your chair well.”
Here are all of the ways that tech use is messing up my health (and yours), and the easy changes that could save you a world of pain down the line. 
At 7am my alarm goes off and I reach for my phone. Instead of putting it straight back down, I’ll spend at least 10 minutes scrolling before I get up to make breakfast, bending over at my screen while I lie on my side.
“Do not do that. That’s a total disaster,” Maxine says. 
That’s because when I’m looking down at my phone, I’m bending my head at an angle and exaggerating the force of my head on my neck. 
A recent study from King’s College London found that an upright head puts about 5kg of pressure on the spine. Being hunched over can up that weight to 12kg, when at a slight bend of 15 degrees, or a much heavier 22kg if I’m really craning over at a 45 degree angle. 
“You’re asking your spine to do a whole lot of work,” Maxine says. “It’s almost like holding out a bowling ball with an outstretched hand for an hour – it’s impossible for that not to start hurting.” 
“The best thing to do is not to engage with your phone until you’re up and ready,” says Maxine. But if you’re determined to scroll in bed, it’s better to sit upright with your back supported and your elbow propped up on your leg, “so you can actually relax”. 
Instead of craning over, hold your neck up in a natural resting position, with your chin in “a slight nod”. 
The next danger faced by my neck is the morning commute. In my case, that’s likely spent leaning against the side of a bus stop or in someone’s sweaty armpit on a cramped London tube, where I’ll be reading my emails or scrolling (again) through social media. 
It is another scenario that horrifies Maxine. “When you’ve got to cram in any minute of screen time to stay abreast of things, your form really changes,” she says, pointing again at her model spine. 
This time the real problem is in spinal disk C7, right where my neck meets my shoulders. 
“What we’ll see on a lot of people is that this C7 here will begin to protrude at the back of the neck – you’ll see a bump there. The weight of your head just shunts down through all of these vertebrae,” Maxine explains.
“This can cause herniation in the neck, or what people call a slipped disk. Not only that, but that stiffness you develop there is incredibly challenging to reverse if you’re doing this day on day.” 
It might be hard to wrench ourselves away from screens while commuting, but if there’s no space to sit down, you simply must leave your phone in your pocket. 
“Wait until you can sit down properly and support yourself,” Maxine says, again with your elbow propped on your leg or a rail and your chin in a nod. 
When we get into the office and assume the posture we’re in all day, the real damage begins. As Maxine points out, “nobody is taught how to sit in a chair,” so most of us are unwittingly causing ourselves some major problems.
I’ve been sitting “like a prawn”, says Maxine, bending towards my computer screen with my neck pushed outwards and my back up straight. Rather than leaning forward into my screen, I should be relaxing back into my chair with both of my feet on the ground, letting my spine fall into its natural s-curve shape. 
“If we’re not resting in our chairs, all the musculature on the front of the body will shorten, so your shoulders will start to roll in, almost like a scroll,” Maxine says. “When you try to raise your arms above your head, they’ll get stuck, and it’ll start to cause pain too.”
Before my chat with Maxine, my seat was also too low. I should have been looking up only slightly, with my eyes on the top third of my screen. 
“Ideally when you’re sitting down and your elbows are bent at 90 degrees, you should be able to just glide onto the desk next, otherwise you’ll have to raise your arms to reach your keyboard, which causes pain too.” 
Even when we’re sitting in a way that’s healthy for our spines, it’s bad for our muscles to be stationary for a whole day, as mine often are when I’m trying to meet a deadline. 
“Somebody can be sat for many hours in the same position, which is not what the body is made to do,” Maxine says, and this means that pain that begins with tech neck “can go all the way down the coccyx and into the hips.” 
Particularly because of prawn-sitting, but also because of general inactivity, “the muscles in the back of the legs shorten, meaning that you’re sort of sitting down even while you’re standing, and some people won’t be able to lock their knees back”. Our glutes, meanwhile, “completely go to sleep”. 
As a quick fix for this, try to “get up and change position every 40 minutes or so”. Maxine suggests stretching by pushing your elbow behind your back, or reaching down to the ground while sitting in your chair, letting your arms hang naturally and your spine stretch straight out.
“But if you just go and get some water or make a cup of tea, or even just get up, turn around and sit down again, that’s a good enough amount of time to break those patterns in your brain.” 
It’s when we’re working on our laptops from home, on a dining table or from the sofa, that “you’re going to see the most prawns” like me, Maxine says. Instead of being raised above us, directly in our eyelines, our screens are all the way down by our knees, forcing us to hunch.
First of all, “your home working set up should look as much like your office set up as possible,” Maxine says, and that means having a desktop and a proper desk chair with the height correctly adjusted, for your elbows to glide cleanly onto a proper desk. 
If, like me, you live in a houseshare without room for a two-foot workspace, this is not realistic, and writing your emails on the sofa becomes tempting. 
But “you should try to be disciplined about working from a table,” says Maxine, and your laptop itself “needs to go up on a riser almost as high as a desktop computer screen”. Alternatively, it might sit on a box or a stack of books, so that your eyes comfortably find the top third of your screen. 
And “if you’re going to sit on the sofa at all, you need to be fully supported,” Maxine says. That means sitting up and resting your back against the chair. 
“You can’t be slouching, and you can’t be lying on the sofa, because you will begin to develop these rotational patterns through your trunk that cause you pain.” 
Like most people my age I use my thumbs to type. “I’ve watched you all so fast with your thumbs,” Maxine says. “It’s incredible. So there’s no question they’re going to wear out.”
By habitually typing with my thumbs rather than my fingers, “the risk of developing arthritis in this joint here [the thumb] is very high,” says Maxine. 
At the very least, “you should be switching hands,” she says, and “you should try using the rest of your fingers to type”.
Using your thumb occasionally is fine, but “you should try to have variation, even if it’s just typing with one of your fingers and then switching back”. 
When your jaw is resting on your phone as you’re speaking, or worse, your phone is tucked in under your chin as you chat, it’s no surprise that phone calls could be doing your spine some serious damage. 
If you’re doing this all day, “all the muscles on the side of your neck are going to be shortened, right up through the head,” Maxine says. 
I prefer to make calls with my AirPods in, so that both of my hands are free to type or write things down. This was my one Maxine-approved habit. “This is 100 per cent the safest way to phone people if you are doing it often,” she says. 
If this isn’t an option for you, or if it just feels too awkward, then Maxine recommends that you take calls “in a place of comfort where you can support yourself properly”, again with your chin tucked into a slight nod, holding your phone directly at your ear. 
And if you can’t put all that into practice right away, the last piece of advice from Maxine is to do Pilates regularly. It’s an excellent way to alleviate any pain from time spent on phones and computers, she says. 
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