Tight upper traps might mean your eyes aren't tracking smoothly. Your nervous system tenses those muscles to stabilize your head when vision is poor. A smooth pursuits exercise, where you follow a slow-moving target with your eyes, trains better tracking and signals your nervous system to release the tension.
Studies have shown us that the trapezius muscle gets locked down by the nervous system when we don't track things smoothly, and it does that because it's trying to create more stability in the head so that we can see things better, because seeing things is our number one safety mechanism. So what we're going to do is an exercise called smooth pursuits to improve that smooth tracking and then allow the nervous system to relax the tension in these muscles. So to do that, it's simple. You can use your thumb. I've got a marker today, and I'm going to use the tip of the marker as my visual target.
Stop Stretching Your Neck. Try This Instead (It Might Improve Your Vision Too)
