Ouch, I've got a crick! Neck pain 101

Life Kit

NPR

Health & Fitness, Self-improvement, Kids & Family, Education, Business

4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Have you ever woken up with a crick in your neck after a bad night's sleep? Or feel like you can't rotate your head? Many people will experience neck pain at some point in life. Luckily, there are science-backed treatments and exercises to ease those nagging aches. This episode, a spine surgeon, sports medicine doctor, sleep expert and physical therapist give tips on working through neck pain.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation, working to create access to opportunity for people and communities by tackling tough social and environmental problems.
0:12.0	More information is at waltonfamilyfoundation.org.
0:15.8	You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.
0:20.7	Hey, it's Mariel. You ever wake up with a stiff neck that just ruins your day?
0:26.8	Maybe you slept on it wrong, or you carried around way too much stuff in that messenger bag yesterday.
0:32.0	Either way, now you can only turn your head to the right, and you feel a headache building.
0:38.4	Soon enough, you start feeling pain in your shoulder, too, and your back, and on it goes.
0:43.7	Because, you know, the song, the head bones connected to the thine.
0:46.2	This is Charlotte Fisher, an orthopedic spine surgeon at the NYU Langone spine center.
1:00.5	The pain can not only radiate to other parts of the body, but then you can start to have
1:05.8	compensation for that pain. So, for example, if it hurts to lean forward with your neck, maybe you're
1:14.4	going to start to lean forward with your lower back, just slightly. The other thing is that the muscles
1:21.3	in the, in the neck connect to the head. And so they can, if they're spasming, you can start to get headaches that way.
1:29.7	And those are just two examples. The bones in your neck or cervical spine are part of your
1:35.0	axial skeleton, 80 bones that form and protect the central core of the human body, the skull,
1:41.6	the spine, and the rib cage. And the muscles, by the way, in our axial
1:45.4	skeleton don't get to rest a lot. After all, they have to hold us up all the time. Our neck
1:50.6	muscles specifically have a big job. They help to support our heavy heads to keep us erect
1:56.2	when we walk. And they're constantly fighting the pull of gravity. It makes sense that they'd get tired, mixed up, overworked.
2:04.6	I would guess almost everyone has neck pain at some point in their life, just like everyone
2:10.6	experiences low back pain at some point in their life.
2:13.9	But there are a lot of different types of neck pain that can have a lot of different causes. So how do you know when to worry or how to feel better? That's what we'll cover in this
	...

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