While headaches are felt in our physical bodies, headache triggers are often the result of our thought-led actions and in how we process stress. Thus, they are a true mind/body ailment. Anxiety, stress, worry, poor habits and all of our daily choices are linked to our thoughts and beliefs and to our actions like eating, sleeping and exercising. Many people who suffer chronic pain, including frequent headaches, often feel nothing can be done and their suffering will inevitably continue.
This suffering does not have to be the case. For tips on how to avoid the root causes of headaches, refer to my last two articles
here and
here. In addition, the mind/body techniques I discuss below can help you take control of your well-being and stave off those nasty headaches.
Perception is Reality
The first thing you need to understand is that your perception forms your reality. Nothing is really “true” unless you believe it to be true. In fact, you could say that life is “meaningless” until we each, individually, place our own meaning into it. In other words, someone handing you a pencil could seem like a meaningless action. However, if you were in need of a pencil to fill out a withdrawal form in the next five minutes before the bank closed, that pencil assumes great meaning. Receiving it means (to you) that you can get money, buy groceries, fill the gas tank and so on.
Now I understand this example is simplistic and maybe even outdated, but it proves a point. To the general person, the pencil loan is meaningless; but under particular circumstances, it can be very meaningful. Your perception of each and every event in your life, from a conversation with your boss to the traffic jam you sit in, holds no true meaning except for the meaning that you bring to it as based on your worldview, life experience, goals, expectations and needs.
This is an important point. It leads us to the understanding that headaches triggered by stress and anxiety, for example, can be controlled if we can control our perceptions.
When the boss sends a short email that says, “See me,” does this send you into a stress response because you have been slacking off, or a project is not going well or another employee was recently fired? If it does, that is because of the reality you infuse into those two words.
Perhaps your boss just means: “Please come a see me about lunch plans.” But your stress response, based on your perception of your inference of the email’s meaning, triggers a digestive issue, oxygen deprivation issue and muscle tension that trigger a headache.
We must learn to retrain our beliefs, our perceptions about life, our place in the world and our headaches in order to begin to improve our wellbeing and state of health. That can help prevent many stress-induced pains and diseases.
Meditation
Meditative practices are a great way to begin this process. When the mind is racing and jumping around like a wild monkey, it is difficult to think clearly, make good decisions, relax the body, let go of stress, sleep deeply and breathe without issue. There are many meditation methods out there. These include the relaxation response, mindfulness, insight, jappa, Transcendental Meditation® and others that can help you quiet the mind, know yourself, understand situations and think more clearly. (For an overview of these practices, go
here.)
Meditative practices relax the nervous system, take you out of the fight-or-flight response, restore normal respiration and help relax tension in the body. When these physiological events are out-of-control, they trigger headaches. If you can find one meditative practice and stick with it, that simple change in your daily routine can help prevent a host of headache triggers from ruining your life.
Qigong And Tai Chi
The ancient Chinese health practices of qigong and tai chi are gold mines when it comes to health and pain-free living. Headaches are painful conditions of imbalance in the body, in the mind, and in daily actions and choices. Qigong and tai chi are based on coordinating mind, movement, breath and intention (or focus).
They quiet and focus the mind, relieve stress and bodily tension, tone muscles, improve respiration, increase oxygen intake, move toxins, improve digestion and elimination and engender blood flow. In short, their practice improves quality of life and decreases pain and the onset of headaches by creating relaxation in the body and environment that can prevent headache triggers. For more on these practices, click
here.
Hypnosis
Hypnosis has become one of the mainstream ways in which people deal with behavioral issues. That is, they see a hypnotist to deal with drugs, drinking, smoking and overeating. There are even specific hypnosis protocols for headaches specifically and pain relief in general. The success of hypnosis leads to the notion that when we let down our walls of belief we can be open to change our feelings and behaviors. In other words, our perceptions do not clutter our reality during the hypnosis session and changes can be made on the subconscious level.
EMDR
A well-studied but still little-known method of changing how we perceive the world and daily situations, and thus react to them and their stress-causing headaches, is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR).
Remember that the mind controls perceptions and makes choices in thought, actions, eating and so on that affect the body and trigger headaches. EMDR sessions help us “clear” the negative thoughts and beliefs connected with events in our life.
Why would we want to do this? Often the way in which we recall an event, and the sometimes horrible memories and feelings we associate with that event, are brought front and center in unrelated and unnecessary ways.
When I was a child and I did something my mother was not pleased with, she would call out to me and say, “Mark, come see me.” That is why, in my example above, when my boss would send an email that said nothing more than “Come see me,” my body went into fight-or-flight response thinking of all the bad things I must have done to make her call me into her office. This is only an analogy, but is a direct example of conditioning in our lives that need not remain active. It is not necessary for me to feel the emotions of a negative traumatic event from childhood in order to recall it matter of factly. And there is no need for an event in adulthood to trigger within you the same emotions as a traumatic childhood event. It serves no purpose. EMDR uses specific story-leading methods with eye movement practices that reorganizes and files those feeling in the correct place in the mind. By keeping them in their rightful place, they will not interfere with today’s reality (as we perceive it), nor will they trigger an unnecessary stress response that can trigger headaches. (Read the story on EMDR
here).
Next week we’ll look at specific products and unique treatments that are safe and useful for relieving the pain and symptoms associated with headaches.
