Original request:
https://www.reddit.com/r/posturepals/comments/1bn6m8f/forward_neck_posture_help/
I can give you some tips, here is my 2 cents worth:
Before I talk you through what is actually happening with your posture, I must bring to your attention that you have a major misconception about what a human posture should look like.
There is may ways to look at human posture and there is also a lot of contradictory advice out there. What I am about to tell you is most likely contrary to what you have been thinking up to now, so in order to proceed, I will first make some definitions.
First of all, how do you define "good posture" and why is that? Ask 100 people and you will get 100 different answers. It will be up to you to make your mind up, but I can certainly tell you how we define a "good posture" and I will also tell you why we think so.
For us, we look at human posture as a mechanism operating in a field of gravity. It's basically a set of solid members (bones) with articulations between them (joints) with actuators (muscles) and the whole thing is connected with elastic springs (fascia). To judge whether posture is good (or bad), we simply look at the mechanism and reason out how it should best operate in the field of gravity. It's not hard, it's just basic anatomy, physics and mechanics.
A "good posture" is such organisation of the mechanism where each and every part of it is working according to it's design. Correct disposition of the different entities of the body allows for free movement, correct breathing, circulation, digestion. Load is well distributed to all parts, especially to your fascia.
A "bad posture" is any other organisation that isn't correct.
So in other words, to be able to even talk about human posture, we first need to know the "model of a correctly functioning mechanism". This model turns out is contrary to what most people think.
Now, let's look at the image you provided.
Let's challenge your current concept of what a human posture should look like: You think that you have "head forward posture". The first think I would be asking is: "head forward" in relation to what?.
You will soon see, that you actually retract your head too far back (in relation to your torso).
See the green dashed plumb line? That has been placed to the part of your body furthest to the front - your abdomen. You actually have what we call "protruding abdomen posture". You can clearly see that your head (face) is behind the green dashed line. It's retracted backwards IN RELATION TO YOUR MIDDLE TORSO. (To be precise, it would be your breast that are the furthest forward, but that's just because you are a woman. don't take the breast into account).
So to be able to have a meaningful conversation about ones' posture, we have to define some landmarks first. We use bones as landmarks, because bones don't change their shape. They are solid.
Let's now talk about what posture you actually have:
We use the green vertical line (plumb line) as our reference. It's always placed to the purple point at the front of your ankle. Asking why? Well, it's your talus bone, a bone where the weight of your entire body gets distributed into the arch of your foot. So we just defined a specific point in the body, where to place the reference line.
Then, we got few more points we know where they should be (in order for the mechanism to function properly).
The front of the knee (blue spot) is slightly too forward of the reference line. That is because your ankles are not in full extension - you are loading the front of your feet instead of the back.
Pelvis is rotated forward and down at it's top (APT) as the blue arrow suggests. You can see your iliac (anterior superior iliac spine - the blue spot at your waist) being too far forward and down and that means that your top of the sacrum is lifted far too high up. Iliac and sacrum are just 2 points on the same object - pelvis. So if pelvis rotates this way, blue point goes down, green point goes up.
Let's skip the red curve in your lowerback for now, we get back to it later.
Your ribcage. It's another part of your mechanism and is defined by the sternum bone at the front (yellow line with top and bottom marked with blue points) and by the straight bit of the red curve at the back (your thoracic spine). Again you can see a rotation of the ribcage, this time however in the opposite direction to the rotation of the pelvis.
Now, let's define more terms:
Torso = lower torso (pelvis) + middle torso (spine + abdominal cavity) + upper torso (ribcage).
Legs, arms, neck and head are NOT part of your torso.
Ok, so now we have your lower torso (pelvis) rotating one way, and your upper torso (ribcage) rotating the other way. And the middle torso inbetween, being made out of highly articulated set of joints (vertebreas) is then taking a shape of a arch as you can see marked with the red curve. The shape of the middle torso is determined by the forces applied from above and below. It's the rotations of the massive body parts of upper and lower torso that affects the shape of the spine in the middle.
Well, also notice that the front of your abdomen is sort of copying the shape of the spine.
Now, this curve in the middle of your back is what we call "shortening of your torso" and it's the primary source of your problems. The fascia in your torso is completely out of action / slack and therefore isn't transferring any useful load.
As I said earlier, you are heavily retracting your arms as well as your head / neck. Your head is NOT forward. Your head is too far back!.
What I just described above is your current situation. It's just really commenting on what we see on the image.
What you would like, in order to improve the functioning of your posture is to completely flatten the red curve at your lowerback (yes, flatten) and you would want to bring all of the blue points ONTO THE GREEN LINE.
To achieve that, you would need to learn how to reverse the rotations of your ribcage and pelvis (amongst other things).
However, I can assure you there will be absolutely no change in posture until you wrap your head around what a mechanically correct posture is. The posture you've got now is a direct result of your conception you have.
Sometimes, it's hard to wrap ones head around it. If the above info isn't enough for you to understand, reach out and I have other ways to change your perspective on the issue at hand.
Feel free to reach out if you have more questions.