People with neck pain will search high and low for solutions, but there are 3 key things you might be doing to make your neck pain worse.
1. Avoiding all movement and activity that (might) cause pain or discomfort.
When someone is in pain, a common response is to avoid any/all movements or activities that cause pain. While on the surface this might seem good, here is why it is not. The body (and neck) was made for movement. By not moving, the neck will cause stiffening. As the stiffness sets in it will become more uncomfortable and likely painful to move through normal range of motion again. This starts down a slippery slope of movement avoidance that can become challenging to recover from. The best advice is to keep moving as much as possible. This does not mean to cause oneself severe pain but movement within tolerance. By performing regular movements this helps to lubricate the joints and can assist in reducing pain…motion is lotion.
2. Taking medication to mask the pain 
Medication as a band-aide may be helpful short-term and often harmful over the long. Pain is meant to be a guide and if we block that guide, it is possible to cause more problems unknowingly. While a person may hurt less, they are not getting to the root cause. This actually sets the person up for further issues (such as the development of chronic pain). Plus, long term pain medication usage can cause issues with the stomach or with blood pressure.
3. Waiting and hoping for the pain to go away
Bottom line…the longer a problem lives in the body (neck), the longer it takes to go away. We know from research that treatment is most effective when started within the 1st 6 weeks of a problem beginning. Should the pain in the neck become chronic (often defined as greater than 3 months), treatment response tends to be slower and sometimes less effective. So do not delay. Get to the root cause with treatment and get back to a pain-free you FASTER.
There you have it. 3 KEY things you might be doing to make your neck pain worse. Should you have specific questions or concerns, click the following LINK and request a personal phone consultation to learn the next best steps to solve your neck pain.