The eye-neck connection: a scoping review of visual feedback, cervical sensorimotor rehabilitation, and yoga eye exercises

Imagine your body is a high-tech robot, and your head is the camera mounted on top. For this robot to walk straight, the camera needs to stay level, and the robot's neck needs to know exactly where it is in space. This "knowing where you are" is called proprioception—it's like an internal GPS that tells your brain, "Hey, my neck is tilted left, let's fix it." But here's the twist: your robot's camera (your eyes) and its GPS (your neck) are best friends. They talk to each other constantly. If your eyes are tired from staring at a screen, or if your neck is bent forward like a turtle sticking its head out, that conversation gets messy. This messiness is why so many people today, especially those glued to phones and computers, end up with stiff, aching necks and bad posture. Scientists have been trying to figure out how to fix this broken conversation. They've found that giving your neck a visual "mirror" to look at while exercising helps, and that training your neck's internal GPS works wonders. But there's a third idea floating around: what if doing special yoga eye exercises could fix the neck too? That's the big question this paper decided to investigate.

This paper is a "scoping review," which is basically a giant treasure hunt where the authors didn't just look for one specific answer, but tried to map out the entire landscape of research on this topic. They scoured through thousands of studies published between 2016 and 2025 to see what we actually know about the connection between our eyes and our necks. They were looking for three main types of "treasures": exercises that use visual feedback (like watching yourself in a mirror while you move), cervical sensorimotor rehabilitation (training the neck's internal GPS), and Yoga-Based Ocular Exercises (YBOE), which are ancient yoga techniques for the eyes like rolling them around or focusing near and far.

After digging through 706 potential studies, the authors found only 13 that were good enough to include in their final map. The results were a bit like finding two solid gold bars and one very faint, blurry sketch. The gold bars were the studies on visual feedback and proprioceptive training. These studies showed that when people with forward head posture (that turtle-neck look) or chronic neck pain did exercises while watching a visual cue, or specifically trained their neck's sense of position, they got better. Their necks straightened up, their balance improved, and they felt less pain. It's as if giving the robot a mirror and a GPS update made it walk perfectly again.

However, the sketch was the research on Yoga-Based Ocular Exercises (YBOE). The authors found plenty of studies showing that these eye yoga moves are great for the eyes themselves—they reduce eye fatigue, help your eyes focus better, and even lower pressure inside the eye. But here is the crucial part: none of the studies they found actually proved that these eye exercises fixed the neck. The paper explicitly states that while it makes sense on paper that fixing tired eyes might help a tired neck, there is no direct evidence yet. The authors are very clear that we cannot recommend eye yoga as a cure for neck pain or bad posture based on what we know right now. It remains a "maybe" that needs more testing.

So, what's the takeaway? If you have a sore neck from looking at screens, the science says you should try exercises that help your neck feel its position and maybe use a mirror or screen to guide your movements. That part is backed by solid proof. As for doing eye yoga to fix your neck? The paper suggests it's a cool idea that might work, but we simply don't have the proof yet. The authors are calling for more high-quality experiments to see if combining all these methods—visual feedback, neck training, and eye yoga—creates a super-rehabilitation team. Until then, we know the mirror helps the neck, but the eye yoga is still just a hopeful theory waiting for its moment in the spotlight.