PSYCHOLOGICAL CAUSES OF HEADACHES

March 11, 2009, 4:04 pm

It’s sometimes very difficult to know just where to draw the line between what is normal and what is abnormal, especially where mental processes occur. For example, tension and stress occur in all of our lives at some point – but although mentally we are wearied by them, the fact that we are tense or stressed doesn’t necessarily mean that our mental processes are abnormal. In fact, some stress is necessary constitutionally to our bodies. Nevertheless, excess tension and stress can make us ill, and if we don’t recognise and deal with it, we can become exhausted mentally or physically.

Anxiety is similar – undue anxiety can be an altered way of thinking, in which we get anxious and stressed without any external triggers. At this point anxiety becomes a psychological problem.

In practice, it isn’t easy to define the point at which these processes become part of illness behaviour. Tension headaches can occur in those who, psychologically peaking, are completely normal; in others, they can be part of an anxiety state. Therefore tension, stress, tension headaches, stress management, and relaxation techniques apply both to healthy and to psychologically unwell people. Don’t assume that because you’re stressed you necessarily have a psychological illness -you probably don’t. Nor should you think that because you get tension headaches you’re psychologically unwell; again you may well not be. However, if you are aware that your mental processes aren’t quite what you would like them to be, and that your anxieties or your inner turmoil are such that they, rather than tension itself, are the underlying problem, then read on.

There is a definite group of people who have headaches due primarily to Mychological illnesses. It is a gross misconception to say that these headaches are ‘all in the mind’. It’s all real pain; it’s just produced differently.

Some people have headaches that are entirely caused by muscle spasm from Biental tension, but there is often a mixed cause; any underlying neck injury will magnify, and be magnified by, the excess muscle tension caused through stress.

There is a second psychological cause for headaches, which is much more difficult to understand. This occurs when there is no apparent external source for the pain, and no muscle tension, either. It would be easy to think that pain like this really was all in the mind, but to the sufferer the pain is extremely real, as real as any other type of headache. We’ll come to this subject in more detail later.

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