WHAT CAUSES TENSION HEADACHES?

Mar
11
2009

Posted by: admin in Categories: Pain Relief-Muscle Relaxers.
Using Tags: Pain Relief

Anything that knots up the muscles in the neck or head has the potential to cause a tension headache. Obviously, stress is a potent factor, but neck injuries, poor posture, eye strain, congenital defects and using the neck in awkward positions are all important causes.

For many people, stress causes them to stiffen and hunch up their shoulders, although why this should happen is curious because it doesn’t seem to form any particularly useful function. Try this little test yourself: observe where your shoulders are in relationship to your head and the rest of your body. Now shrug your shoulders as hard as you can, holding it for a couple of seconds. Now let go, dropping your shoulders down suddenly. Notice how much further your shoulders drop than before – which means that at the start you were already holding your shoulders tense!

Stress isn’t the only cause of headaches due to muscle spasm. Anything that causes injury or irritation to the bones, ligaments and joints of the neck is likely to cause muscle spasm in the area as a secondary effect. Arthritis of the neck, a whiplash accident, or any exercise which involves holding the neck bent back is likely to irritate the neck joints and send the surrounding neck muscles into spasm.

What are these unpleasant exercises that bend the neck backwards? Painting the ceiling, for a start; working with your hands above your head; and swimming, assuming that you’re one of the many that can only swim breaststroke, by keeping your head up out of the water all the time!

Holding your head backwards in this way for any length of time tends to irritate the joints in the back of the neck. Because of the reflex reaction, whereby irritated joints cause the muscles around them to go into spasm, painful, irritated joints cause the muscles nearby to go into painful knots; this rams the joints together even further, which hurts even more, which causes the muscles to go into even greater spasms, which rams the joints together… and.so on.

Holding yourself tense for any reason is likely to exacerbate tension headaches, because artificially raising the tension in certain muscles tends to increase the tension in all your muscles. For example: try threading a needle and notice how tense all sorts of other muscles have become. After a period of finicky work the level of muscle tension can rise in all sorts of muscles – especially those in the neck.

Another potent cause of tense muscles is tightly screwing up your eyes – either in harsh sunlight, or because you should really be wearing glasses. It tenses the muscles in the face, and if continued for long periods, will give you a headache.

Bad positioning of the neck and head is another major cause of problems. Chief among the activities that cause this is using a computer which hasn’t been set up at the right level, the correct distance away. II is all too easy to sit in slightly the wrong position, with the monitor placed so that your head is either bent far too far forward or too far back, with your back sagging and your chin jutting forward as you peer at the screen; or else typing away like mad and not moving your head from left to right for hours at a time. Wrong positioning like this, with fixing of the posture, is almost guaranteed to produce neck ache and subsequent headaches.

just as the joint – pain/muscle – spasm reflex can cause self-perpetuating muscle spasm and headache, so a tension headache lends to self-perpetuate. Tension headaches hurt So what do you do? That’s right, you hold your head as still as possible, so the muscles in the neck stay in spasm; now they’re voluntarily being asked to contract as well.

When you next get a tension headache, notice the position of your shoulders; almost certainly they’ll be tense and raised. Now, consciously relax them. Let them drop down. Leave them like this, go back to what you were doing, and, in two minutes, you’ll find they’ve risen of their own accord, back to where they were originally. No wonder tension headaches can be difficult to get rid of – it’s that self-perpetuation again.

However, every cloud has a silver lining: this nature of tension headaches actually makes them very vulnerable to attack, because if you can break the pain/spasm/pain cycle, the vicious circle unwinds very quickly. Reduce the pain and you don’t need to hold your head quite so still. Reduce the need to contract the neck muscles and the headache lessens, which means the muscle spasm reduces … Once a tension headache starts to go, it usually goes very quickly indeed, and doesn’t come back; at least, not for some time.