Stiff Neck After Sleeping? 5 Morning Stretches for Relief (plus Pillow Tips)

What Causes A Stiff Neck After Sleeping?

Many people think a stiff neck after sleeping is caused by sleeping wrong.

But chances are good that you probably slept in a fairly similar position last night as you did in the previous night.

(And the night before that, and then night before that...)

So why did you wake up with a stiff neck today and not the previous days?

Usually, a stiff neck after sleeping is caused by postural factors that accumulate over time. This includes both the position you're in during the day as well as the position that you're in at night.

Why Is Hard To Turn My Neck After Sleeping?

When people wake up with a stiff neck, they often have difficulty turning their neck.

Often it's more difficult to turn to one side than the other, and often that stiffness is accompanied pain.

Many people describe the feeling as if they've pinched a nerve in their neck.

Usually the pain or pinched nerve feeling is in the middle to lower part of the neck.

However, it's often the upper neck muscles right underneath the base of the skull that are actually stiff.

Because the suboccipital muscles get stiff, it causes the joints down lower in the neck to move more.  It's that excessive movement that usually causes the pain.

How Do You Fix A Stiff Neck After Sleeping?

In order to fix a stiff neck after sleeping, you want to improve the stiffness in the muscles that are actually stiff, not necessarily in the area that hurts.

Again, the pain may be from areas that are moving too much.

Neck Exercise 1

One exercise that is particularly helpful is to stretch the suboccipital muscles at the base of your neck.

To do that, tuck your chin downwards.

You can give it a little bit of assistance by kind of pulling upwards with one hand behind your neck while gently pressing down on your forehead with the opposite hand.

Basically, you're giving yourself a little self-traction.

This exercise stretches the suboccipital muscles on both sides of your neck. Again, these are typically the muscles that get stiffest first thing in the morning.

Neck Exercise 2

After you've loosened up the suboccipital muscles by doing that little self-traction, it's good to start doing some gentle side-to-side movements.

Right after sleeping, you don't want to try to push as far as you can to increase your range of motion.

That's probably just going to further aggravate things.

Start by turning your neck slowly side to side thinking abut turning chin toward shoulder.

Do about 10 gentle neck turns toward each side.

Just do what feels easy at first, and you should gradually loosen up over time.

Neck Exercise 3

Next, we'll move on to a neck side-bending exercise.

Tip your ear toward your shoulder while keeping your face straight ahead.  Just do gentle, small motions with an axis of rotation through your nose.

Again, just do what feels easy.

Alternatively you can put your hand on top of your head head and compress down a little bit.

This helps isolate motion to the top part of the neck.

Neck Exercise 4

After doing the gentle upper cervical warm-up exercises above, you can start to progress further into the range of motion.

One good way to do this is to use a towel, which will help increase your total neck rotation range of motion.

Place the towel around your neck and grab one side of the towel with the opposite hand. Pull down with this hand.

Then reach over top with the other arm and grab the other side of the towel. You want the towel to hit kind of right at the base of your skull. Then bring it around and pull across your cheekbone.

Use the top arm to help you turn your head to the side until you feel a stretch, but don't go to the point of pain.

Do 10 repetitions one direction, and then switch hands and do 10 repetitions in the other direction.

If you notice one direction is harder or feels stiffer than the other side, you may try doing a couple of extra repetitions to that side.

Neck Exercise 5

If your towel is long enough that you can sit on one end of it and pull the other end over the shoulder.  Alternatively, you can use a dog leash, belt, or stretching strap as shown below.

Pull down on the strap toward the opposite hip. Then gently tip your head away from the strap.

The strap helps stabilize your first rib, while tipping your neck stretches the scalene muscles that attach to the first rib.

How To Prevent A Stiff Neck After Sleeping

So, those were the five stretches to help if you wake up in the morning with a stiff neck after sleeping.

However, ideally, you'd probably like to prevent having a stiff neck in the first place, right?

In order to prevent waking up with a stiff neck in the future, we need to talk about posture.

That includes both your sleeping posture as well as your posture during the day.

Both of those contribute to muscle stiffness, which tends to increase while you're sleeping and not moving your neck.

Pillows To Prevent A Stiff Neck After Sleeping

People often ask which pillow is best for neck pain.

However, the answer is different for everybody because everyone has a different body size and body proportions.

If you're sleeping on your side, it should fill this space between your head and neck and the tip of your shoulder so that your neck is in a neutral position.

And because every person is a different size, there's no one universal pillow that does that.

If you're lying on your back, it should support your head and kind of fill the gap in behind your neck, the cervical lordosis. However, it shouldn't be so thick that it pushes it out excessively.

Pillow Tip To Prevent A Stiff Neck From Sleeping

To make any pillow into a "neck pillow", take a towel and roll it up in a log.

Put the log at the base of the pillow to support your neck.

Depending on the size of your neck and the size of your shoulders, you may have to experiment with different sizes of towels.

What Pillows Are Best To Prevent A Stiff Neck From Sleeping?

Again, there's no one-size-fits-all neck pillow.

Therefore, if you're looking to buy a neck pillow, I'd suggest one that has some adjustability.

That way you can fit the pillow to your own body size or and proportions.   Here are a few examples of neck pillows below.

Additionally, gel pillows can also help support your neck while offering a cooling sensation.  This is actually the pillow that I use at home.

Again though, what works for me might not work for you.

Posture Tips To Prevent A Stiff Neck

In addition to pillows, you also want to pay attention to your posture during the day.

If you're persistently in a forward head posture, where you develop a lot of muscle tension in your neck muscles during the day, then when go to sleep and you're not moving all night long, those muscles can tighten up even further.

Check out posture tips in these posts:

3 Best Posture Correction Exercises

How To Correct Hunchback Posture the EASY Way

 

Need Help For A Stiff Neck?

If you live in the St. Louis area and need help for neck pain, we'd be happy to help you at More 4 Life.

Just tap the button below to request an appointment with one of our orthopedic manual physical therapy specialists.

Request An Appointment