How Physiotherapy Can Help with the Pain of Stress-Related Headaches
Can you feel it? Starting with tension in your neck or shoulders and creeping upward through the base of your skull?
You may have even tried stretching and optimizing your work station, but if you are suffering from stress-related headaches, you know that the only relief comes from either reducing stress or taking medication.
Why live this way when headache physiotherapy can help you relieve the pain and get rid of stress headaches once and for all? Our innovative care strategies at Lake Country Physiotherapy will help you find quick relief.
What Is a Stress Headache?
Stress-related headaches, also known as cervicogenic headaches or tension headaches, start in your neck and radiate to other areas of your body.
The back, side or top of your head may become painful. Your shoulder may start to ache on the same side where your headache began.
As a result, you may even experience weakness, dizziness or nausea.
What’s Causing My Stress-Related Headaches?
Stress-related headaches are often the result of stiff joints in your neck. As these joints become immobile, the soft tissue around them becomes tight, irritating the nerves in the area.
Once communication from the nerves is limited, your brain begins compensating in an attempt to return your body to proper function. As a result, you experience pain, stiffness, tension, even numbness and tingling.
Our sedentary lifestyle is partly to blame. On average, Canadians who work full-time are sedentary for 68.9% of their day.
With more and more work happening at computer terminals, many of these hours are spent using poor posture as we slump over a computer screen and keyboard.
Of course, the natural solution has been ergonomically designed workstations that place your entire body into proper place before beginning work, but the sheer volume of time we spend sitting down during the day often contributes to the amount of stress-related headaches the typical person experiences.
4 Ways Physiotherapy Can Treat Stress-Related Headaches
1. Strengthening your muscles
You do a lot of “heavy lifting” throughout the day with your shoulders, back, and neck – even when you are simply carrying out daily tasks. If the muscles in those areas are too weak, they can easily get overworked. Physical therapy work on neck and upper back muscles involves resistance training, in order to build up the muscles.
For many people, stronger upper body muscles also equate to fewer – and less intense – stress-related headaches. Exercises might start with simple chin-to-chest nods to build neck strength, and may become more intensive as your treatment plan progresses. Free weights and resistance bands also help to build up shoulder and back muscles.
2. Correcting your posture
It is no secret that the ways in which we stand and sit can greatly influence how much pressure is put on our muscles. Poor posture compresses muscles and nerves, and for many people, these overworked muscles and nerves in the shoulder, chest, and neck area can lead to a triggered tension headache.
Your physical therapist can help evaluate your posture for areas that may need improvement. He or she will also demonstrate the correct way to move, sit, and stand, in order to avoid unwanted compression.
In addition to demonstrating chest, back, and shoulder positions, a physical therapist can also recommend helpful lifestyle changes. Modifications to certain areas in the home and workplace often have a big effect on posture. This might include a telephone headset, a raised computer monitor, a specialized chair, or even a rubber mat to stand on while doing kitchen tasks.
3. Improving your flexibility
The more that you’re able to move your neck and shoulders as you move through your day, the less pressure you put on the major muscle groups in those areas. This may also alleviate some of your undesirable stress-related headache symptoms. By participating in physical therapy treatments, you will learn specific moves to stretch your neck, in addition to loosening up your chest, shoulder muscle, and tendon groups. Doing these regularly can help relieve chronic stress headaches.
4. A hands-on approach to headaches
There are some headache prevention techniques that are simple enough to do at home. However, a physical therapist can provide a much more targeted approach to treating the symptoms of a headache. For example, alternating between ice and heat therapies is a simple but effective strategy. The specialized compresses and gentle electronic pulse wands provide soothing relief, in addition to easing muscle strain.
Manual therapy also includes massage for stress-related headache treatment, because the soft tissue mobilization relaxes tense muscles. Because of this effect, massage can provide immediate pain relief and can even prevent future headaches. PT massage treatments help to relax the muscles in your jaw, temples, neck, and shoulders, in order to lessen your symptoms.
In addition, patients with chronic tension headaches report decreased incidents of head pain when undergoing regular massage therapy. It is believed that relaxing the muscles in and around the head helps in preventing the contractions that result in pain.
Physical therapy massage also helps ease the emotional stress that causes you to tense those trigger muscles. People who get regular therapeutic massages also report getting better rest, which leads to less stress during the day, and therefore a lowered likelihood of sustaining a stress-related headache.
What Should You Expect From Your Appointment?
A physiotherapist can examine not only your current shape, they can dive into the details of your work life to find ways to help you beat the sedentary slump contributing to your headaches.
First, a physiotherapist will take a detailed history, including an accounting of how you spend your time.
This will be followed by diagnostic testing that evaluates your muscle strength, balance, ability to stand, walk and sit, and your typical working posture.
Next, the physiotherapist will prescribe pain relieving manual therapy and stretches as well as targeted exercises designed to improve your posture and help fight the immobility at the root of your headaches.
Periodically, the physiotherapist will evaluate your progress and make suggestions for getting the most out of your physiotherapy experience.
Best of all, treatments are non-invasive and do not involve prescription pain medications that may make your symptoms worse.
Ready To Say Goodbye To Stress-Related Headaches?
Still unsure whether physiotherapy is right for you?
Contact our office in Ontario to talk to our physiotherapist and find out how you can beat your stress headaches.
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