Chronic tension headaches and migraines can lead to a vicious cycle of avoiding activities that trigger your pain. As a result, you may feel like you’re missing out on what’s important in life. Maybe you’re isolating and cancelling plans with friends and family for fear that getting out will cause your headache to flare up. Or you may be putting off applying for a new job or taking a new class for fear that your headache will get in the way. Over time, this pattern of avoidance can lead to loneliness and depression, which in turn can amplify your pain, causing the whole cycle to repeat itself indefinitely.

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You may even experience a sense of shame because of your headaches. Perhaps you tell yourself: Everyone experiences headaches. How could something so trivial affect my life so much? Even your loved ones may tell you that you’re just being dramatic and that your pain is in your head.

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Deep down, you probably wish there was someone in your life who would validate your pain instead of minimizing it or telling you to just pop a pill. If this is the case, then we would be honored to offer support. Therapy for headaches is a chance to get compassionate support from someone who knows that your pain is real and can equip you with practical skills for reducing you suffering.

Many People Think Chronic Headache Sufferers Are Faking Their Pain

Headaches and migraines are a worldwide issue. Roughly half of all adults in the world suffer from headaches annually and about 30 percent report dealing with migraines. For many people, however, headaches are not just episodic and short-lived—they disrupt every aspect of their lives.

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Nonetheless, people with chronic headaches are often dismissed as malingerers and treated as if they are faking their pain. Others may tell them to just take a Tylenol and get over it. But for chronic headache sufferers, medication isn’t powerful enough to control their discomfort and no amount of mental toughness will make a difference.

Unfortunately, we live in a culture that values being overworked and not getting enough sleep. Put simply, most of us have too much on our plates and don’t get enough rest, because our culture teaches us to ignore our body’s limitations in order to succeed. This constant cycle of sleep deprivation and chronic stress only perpetuates and exacerbates headaches.

Therapy Can Help You Reduce the Tension and Stress That Your Headaches Cause

The paradox of dealing with headaches is that the harder you try to control them, the worse the pain gets. How, then, is it possible to reduce the intensity of your headaches? Therapy is a chance to explore this question anew. Rather than focusing solely on pain relief, we want to help you interpret the sensations of pain differently, improve your sleep, reduce the anxiety and depression associated with it, and overcome the unhelpful reactions that make your headaches worse.

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One of the main approaches that our therapists utilize in therapy for headaches is called biofeedback. The goal of biofeedback is to train your nervous system to regulate itself more effectively. There are two parts of your nervous system that biofeedback seeks to balance: the relaxation part and the stress-activation part. When you’re in pain, the stress-activation part does not have a way to shut itself off and the relaxation part is not strong enough to regulate it. Biofeedback can strengthen the relaxation part of the nervous system in regulating stress activation. It can also help you reduce physiological and emotional overactivation by teaching you skills to recognize and reduce muscle tension. With this approach, we will record what happens to your muscles when you perform daily activities. You will be able to see your muscular activity live on a computer screen, allowing you to recognize rising tension and reduce it before it triggers a headache.