Virtually all head, neck and back pain is caused by needless muscular holding. In other words, you’re unnecessarily tense. You’re holding on when you would do better to let go.
One of the most painful results of these needless tensing and compressing is the headache.
If you could learn to let go of your habits of tight muscles, you’ll let go of your headaches.
People tend to think that a really bad, incapacitating headache must be a migraine. If it’s so bad that they really have no choice but go and lie down, it’s a migraine.
Not so. Bad as they are, most incapacitating migraines are actually tension headaches. In truth, a bad tension headache is every bit as painful as a bad migraine.
Real migraines, besides not being more painful than a bad tension headache, are actually quite rare. A recent study found that nearly 90% of all headaches are tension headaches. The tension and pain from the headache can start in the neck, back, eyes, shoulders or even elsewhere.
There’s a good reason why people find it hard to believe that tension can cause absolutely excruciating pain. The reason is that tension is hard to feel. While you’re in no doubt about the pain, your feeling of tension is very deceptive.
Sure, you can feel tense, but extreme muscle tension rarely feels that much tighter. It’s very rare that a really tense person can feel how tense they are. In fact, extreme tension often feels less tense than moderate tension. But the pain remains — with a vengeance. This is true with pain in other parts of your body as well: when a pain gets really bad, people tend to think it must be a nerve pain.
Severe back pain and jaw pain are good examples:–
People tend to think “sciatica” when really their back pain is from extreme spasm of their back muscles.
People tend to think “toothache” or “earache” when really the pain is from extreme spasm of their jaw muscles. This spasm of the jaw muscle is what’s known as TMJ or Tempero-Mandibular Joint syndrome.
