What’s up folks! Patrick Lerouge here from Evolve Restorative Therapy. You can you find me at livepainfreeprocess.com. I help people that need to live an active life, eliminate pain with self-care techniques.

Today we are going to be talking about neck pain in the morning. I was just talking to some ladies just now and they were mentioning that they use a neck pillow, yet the pain doesn’t go away. It’s not about the pillow. You have to realize that we are doing something consistently that is opposite from what our body wants to do. You are asking your body to do something different, in a harsh manner, for a long period of time. This promotes your body to protect itself. So when you wake up in the morning, your neck is stuck in a different position and your body is not going to do the normal actions that it is used to when the neck is straight. You have to realize where you are and how fast you want that neck curve to be lowered. That is the first step to take. The body doesn’t need your help all the time, it already knows what to do, and you just need to structure it in the right way. Realize where you are before you go ahead and buy yourself a pillow. You want to start buying things that will progressively get you better. So get something with a smaller curve that is going to influence your body in a subtle way. However, it’s most important to see what you are doing the rest of the day that promotes a curvature in your neck. You have to coax your body into doing something right and then follow it up with your self-care work that is all day. It has to be all the time and in incremental steps otherwise you are going to recycle yourself and cause your body to use the device that you’re using as a protective mechanism. You have to do this consistently and it has to be in small bite-size, incremental steps.

That’s all this is about. It’s a balancing game. How much more can you balance, little by little? Once you start doing that, your body is going to consistently increase the balance and your range-of-motion will get better because now your body is structured better. You’re not doing enough neck-balancing work throughout the day, to allow that neck pillow to do what it was designed to do. Don’t put all your power in your neck pillow. The neck pillow will help you at night, but throughout the day, you need to be doing trigger point work or neck stretches. Are you teaching your body to restructure itself? That’s where your focus needs to be. It’s not all about the pillow. You are not waking up at night because of a bad pillow. Everything else you did outside the pillow, didn’t line up with why you are using that pillow in the first place. Hopefully, you enjoyed that one and if you did, please share it with others. If you aren’t part of this newsletter, please sign up because I’d love to answer all of your questions. Until next time! Bye!