Information sheet: Tension Headaches
Tension Headaches
At some time we have all suffered from a tension headache
According to recent research, 47% of the population suffers a head-ache once each month, over 20% fortnightly, 9% weekly, 9% two to three times weekly, and 5% daily. 52% of women have been found to suffer headaches at least once each fortnight; this can be due to natural hormonal and menstrual processes and, especially, the stress of bringing up children in one-parent families on low incomes. 5% of women are more prone to migraines than men.
Current research has identified "general stress" as the cause of 54% of headaches. Some stressors cited have been overwork, missed meals, hangovers, "bad moods," traffic jams, news of disastrous world events, and staring at computer screens.
Headaches can result from defence against stress
Unconsciously, we try to shield ourselves from the impact of difficult people and situations by holding in our out-breaths and tensing our muscles. The resulting reduction of our respiratory and muscu-lar energy renders us safely unresponsive and we can avoid the feared consequences of "inappropriate" actions and words. We might then take it all on the chin and shoulder our difficulties while using our heads to try and think things out. Such efforts of thought may "save face" but at considerable cost in terms of tension in the muscles of the forehead, jaw, neck and shoulders.
This can result in tension headaches that may be linked with stresses in other areas of the body. Emotional stress can result in reduced blood supply to the digestive system, producing nausea and a sick headache. Side-stepping conflict by keeping our heads down and maintaining low profiles imports tension into the muscles of the neck and shoulders. Soldiering-on regardless – as when working at a computer – requires a stolid fixity of eye and neck muscles and a robotic rigidity of arm, hand and leg joints. All of these subsidiary tensions can feed into a tension headache accompanied by general fatigue.
Headaches may become a habitual response to stress
Our reactions to current stresses may be based on patterns of response that developed in infancy and childhood. Getting out of the tight corners in which parents, teachers, bullies, etc. may have trapped us meant we had to use our heads and think very hard to explain and acquit ourselves or spy out opportunities for escape. Headaches may have become a way of life. Usually we feel the best response is to quietly withdraw, often with the excuse that "I've got a headache".
Headaches may sometimes be internalised complaints
Research has found that many migraine sufferers are hard-working people who rarely complain. Repeated migraines can be seen as accumulations of unexpressed grievances that have been held inside. Typically, a migraine "attack" comes some time after a stressful event, when one is at rest, during the evening, at the weekend, or at the beginning of a holiday.
A migraine sufferer's hypersensitivity to light, sound, touch and movement may arise when a present event triggers off an emotional charge from painful events in infancy and childhood. Our openness during infancy to the full impact of painful stimuli may then be re-experienced in adulthood in the form of the shattering sensory overload of a migraine.
What can we do about recurrent headaches?
Hounded by pain yet conditioned to believe we ought to be functioning, many of us take refuge in the variety of painkillers that are persuasively promoted as magic formulas for pain-free life-control. We are rarely told about other options and are therefore more likely to become resigned consumers of pharmaceutical products rather than active investigators of our own life-circumstances.
Paradoxically, over-reliance on painkillers may result in more headaches. In time, we may build up an immunity to moderate analgesics (such as Hedex, Panadol and Anadin) and seek out more powerful over-the-counter drugs (such as Solpadeine, Panadeine and Co-Codamol). We may take them frequently to try and counter-act not only the headache we've got but the headache we fear we're going to get. This can result in what has been called medication overuse headache: when the brain is tricked into not feeling pain it responds by ceasing to produce its own bio-chemical painkillers (endorphins). This creates more pain, which in itself has a self-heal-ing purpose: to draw our attention to a persistent stress whose cause needs to be resolved.
Counselling and therapy can help us help ourselves with tension headaches
Through counselling we can discuss our problems at our own pace with an experienced listener, thus emptying ourselves of the people and concerns that have got locked up in our heads and developing self-understanding about how pain got into our system when our needs were not met and expression of our feelings was not accepted. Therapy provides an opportunity to discharge the misery of an aching head through respiratory and muscular release of the held fears, tears and rages that may underlie it. We can become acquainted with our natural inner self-healing resources and discover how the energy of the body has the power to lighten the burden of the head.