trouble

My dentist found that one side wasn't working as well as the other and made me a custom splint (a mouthguard I wear at night) which trains the weaker side to work properly. It looks like the one on the right in this picture [0]. Since then, all of the pains on that side of my neck and upper back have disappeared.

The way you've described your pain seems similar to what I was experiencing, so maybe this information gives you something to go on.

One caveat though: my dentist said that the mouthguard approach doesn't work for everyone (about 30% of people get a result similar to mine) as it relies on fooling your brain in your sleep to train one jaw muscle to be stronger than the other.

"Nobody thinks clearly, no matter what they pretend. Thinking's a dizzy business, a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can. That's why people hang on so tight to their beliefs and opinions; because, compared to the haphazard way in which they arrived at, even the goofiest opinion seems wonderfully clear, sane, and self-evident. And if you let it get away from you, then you've got to dive back into that foggy muddle to wangle yourself out another to take its place.”

I didn't recognise the quote, but the author seemed familiar (Dashiell Hammett), so I looked it up and found this fascinating essay on the relationship between how Hammett's detectives thought, how Hammett himself thought, and what changed over the course of his career as his philosophical views shifted from pragmatism to Marxism.

I actually just wrote a giant post [1] about what I've learned about managing ADHD so far. It focuses on the core stuff, but I want to follow it up with a breakdown of how books like Deep Work (e.g. Flow; Farsighted; Thinking, Fast and Slow; How Not to be Wrong) have made a difference for me.