4 Reasons You’re Getting Exercise-Induced Headaches | Henry Ford Health

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October
16,
2018
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Henry Ford Health Staff

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Whether you’re a marathon runner or a Zumba fanatic, headaches caused by exercise are painful and frustrating – especially when you’re just trying to do something good for yourself.

While rarer than general headaches or migraines, exercise-induced headaches still happen, and you should first see a doctor to rule out any secondary causes. Before you start to dread the end of your workout more than the start of it – or give up on exercise all together – Ashhar Ali, D.O., a neurologist at Henry Ford Health, has some advice on why you may be getting these types of headaches and how to prevent them.

1. You are out of shape. Getting fit is a process, and if you are overworking yourself too soon, you might find you get more headaches when working out. Your body, unless used to intense workouts, may ache, cramp or bring forth headaches as a result, Dr. Ali says.
   
   The fix: We all want to be fit, but start slow. It takes time to build up your fitness level and your brain may not be used to it at first.
2. You are dehydrated. “From cramps to blurry vision, being dehydrated negatively affects the body in numerous ways,” Dr. Ali says. “Headaches are another side effect of not drinking enough water.

   The fix: Drink water or sports drinks before, during and after your workout to stay hydrated and replenish any fluids you lost.

3. You are overheated. Do you spend your summers running outside at noon? Work out in a small, poorly ventilated area? Your headaches could be caused by your body overheating to compensate for the environment you’re in.

   The fix: If you exercise indoors, set up a few fans to keep air circulating and the temperature lower. Also, pay attention to the clothing you are wearing. Are you outside in the summertime heat in all black? Do you wear heavy sweat pants while lifting weights? What you wear can play just as important of a role in your head pain as the actual activity you partake in.

4. You are working out at a higher altitude. Whether you’re traveling for work or pleasure, working out at a higher altitude where the oxygen is thinner can lead to headaches – especially if you’re exerting yourself.

   The fix: When traveling somewhere at a higher altitude, take the first few days to get yourself acclimated to the oxygen level. Another tip: Focus on exercises that are less taxing on your breathing, such as yoga or Pilates.

Related Topic: New Ways To Head Off A Headache

According to Dr. Ali, there are two types of headaches: primary and secondary. Primary headaches do not have a visible cause but are common, such as migraine and tension-type headaches.

Secondary headaches are the result of something else, such as an active sinus infection, ear or dental problems or, in rare cases, even a tumor.

If you suffer from exercise-induced headaches, there are options to help you. Talking with your doctor is the best place to start, as they can prescribe medications to ease your head pain.

Do you experience exercise-induced headaches, migraines or just frequent headaches? Make an appointment with a primary care doctor at henryford.com or by calling 1-800-HENRYFORD.

Dr. Ashhar Ali is a neurologist seeing patients at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit and Henry Ford Medical Center – Bloomfield Township. 

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Exercise and Tension Headaches: What Workouts Are Best

Written by Alice Oglethorpe

Medically Reviewed by Jennifer Robinson, MD on January 12, 2017

• What to Try
• Core and Cardio
• Resistance Is Useful
• Do This First

The moment you feel your head start to pound, you might want to reach for medicine or close your eyes and lie down in the dark. But if it’s a tension headache, there’s a surprising solution: exercise.

If the last thing you feel like doing is going for a run or sweating it out at the gym, no worries. Save the sweaty session for another day. What you need now is a different type of fitness fix.

What you want is a workout that can lower your stress and unwind muscle tightness — two of the biggest causes of tension headaches. Certain types of exercise soothe both those problems.

You want to do something that’s low-impact and that relaxes you, especially in two key areas.

“The two areas your workout should focus on are breathing and neck or spine relaxation,” says Merle Diamond, MD, managing partner of Diamond Headache Clinic in Chicago. “If I had to pick one workout, I’d say that yoga would be perfect. It helps you stretch and unwind your body, improve your posture (especially if you’ve been hunched over your computer all day), and breathe more slowly — all things that can help reduce a headache in the moment.”

It really does work.

“When I feel a headache coming on, either from stress or spending too many hours in front of my laptop, I get down on my yoga mat and do a series of moves like cat-cow, seated neck rolls, and bridge,” says Amy Palanjian, who’s in her 30s and lives in Des Moines, IA. “Going through those motions helps relieve the tension that has built up in my spine and neck, and almost instantly, my head starts to feel better. ”

If yoga isn’t your thing, you could do some light cardio on an elliptical trainer or walk around your neighborhood. Or do Pilates, or core exercises, such as in a barre class. “They stretch out your neck and back while also teaching you how to breathe slowly,” Diamond says.

It’s not just about going through the motions. “So many people can’t relax enough to sit and do a meditation,” Diamond says, “but these types of exercises will give them similar stress-relieving benefits.”

Another good workout is to use resistance bands for strength training. Research shows that if you have neck and shoulder pain and regularly get headaches, a daily 2-minute workout with these bands may reduce how often you get them.

The key is to use the bands to strengthen your neck, back, and shoulder muscles, the areas that get tight when you sit at a desk.

“Anything that activates your muscles, gets blood flowing, clears your mind, and helps you breathe more can be very helpful if you have a headache,” Diamond says.

The most important thing is to make sure you warm up gradually instead of jumping right into a workout. If you go too intensely, too quickly, you might actually trigger another headache or make your current one worse.

Exercise doesn’t just help you tame a tension headache in the moment. If you make it a habit to work out, you might get fewer, less-intense ones in the future.

Chalk it up to natural feel-good chemicals.

“Having an exercise habit helps your body produce endorphins, which naturally help your body treat pain,” Diamond says. “On top of that, exercise is amazing at relieving stress … you blow off steam, clear your mind, and focus on your health.”

As for how much exercise to do to prevent tension headaches, aim for at least 20 minutes, three times a week. It’s fine to do more.

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Psychosomatics of migraine | Publishing house AST

Headache, migraine

Headaches are episodic, one-time and chronic, often recurring.

How to deal with a one-time headache caused by lack of sleep or fatigue, fever or, at worst, a hangover, each of us knows.

It is enough to drink a tablet of analgin, aspirin, paracetamol or any other pain medication, and after 10-15 minutes such pain will disappear.

But chronic, recurring headaches can be more difficult to deal with.

First, you need to understand that there are several different types of chronic headache. In fact, these are completely different diseases, and they also need to be treated differently.

The most common types of headaches today are tension headaches and migraines. They occur with about the same frequency.

Tension headache is primarily a disease of “sedentary” workers: office workers, accountants and cashiers. In general, all those who, by the nature of their activities, combine two unfavorable circumstances: sitting in a sedentary crooked position – at a computer, desk or at a cash register, that’s one thing. And the second is constant nervous tension or frequent and strong hassle.

Long periods of sitting in an uncomfortable position cause chronic painful spasm of the neck muscles (spasm of the suboccipital muscles) in many sedentary workers. This spasm eventually leads to severe aching in the neck and to pain in the back of the head or under the back of the head.

The pains usually worsen in the evening, especially if a person, as is often the case now, works overtime and spends 10-15 hours a day at a computer or papers instead of the allowable 6-8 hours.

Nervous tension also contributes and aggravates the process – against the background of constant stress, the neck muscles tighten and “stiffen” even more.

Therefore, after any stressful situation, a quarrel, an emotional showdown with relatives or work colleagues, after a “dragging” by the boss, and even a simple rush job at work, tension headache often becomes stronger.

Tension headache is most often not very difficult to treat, it can be eliminated with a gentle relaxing massage or special anti-spastic exercises for the neck, which we have on the YouTube channel “Reasonable Medicine of Dr. Evdokimenko”. The video is called “Gymnastics for the neck.”

***

Migraine is a disease described by historians and classics of Russian literature.

A migraine usually hurts on one side of the head, right or left. Pain is most often concentrated in the temple and eye area, but may radiate to the ear or to the back of the head.

Unlike tension headache, migraine does not cause headaches all the time, but comes in attacks about 3-4 times a month on average. The attack lasts from 2 to 48 hours, and the pain of a migraine is so severe that “you can’t even move.” Literally. An attack can throw a sick person (more often a sick person) into bed for a day or two.

Although sometimes some lucky people manage to stop the beginning migraine attack “in the bud” – with the help of a tablet of citramone, spasmalgon, paracetamol or no-shpa. Then you don’t have to lie down and wait until the attack passes.

The “physical” causes of migraine remain a mystery to most physicians. Migraine is known to be related to hormones. They say something about spasm and vasodilation. But this is still somehow unconvincing. There is no clear explanation why all this is happening.

But now I will reveal to you some of the psychosomatic aspects of the onset of migraine.

Psychosomatics of migraine

It is known that women suffer from migraine attacks much more often than men.

However, not all women suffer from migraine, but, as a rule, especially refined natures. This is still the classics noticed. From their novels, we can understand that in former times, young ladies from the institutes of noble maidens often suffered from migraine attacks.

But note: in no classic novel you will find a mention of a migraine attack that happened to a peasant woman, a seamstress, a laundress, and in general a commoner.

This is earlier. What now? Yes, about the same. “Commoners” do not suffer from migraines. But girls and women who grew up in the “right” families suffer from headache attacks very often.

And what unites them? Usually these representatives of the weaker sex are smart, diligent and ambitious. While other girls play, go for walks and meet boys, our smart girls sit behind textbooks, try to get good grades, go to college right after school, and after college they make a career.

The trouble is that by trying to be the best in everything, striving to always “correspond”, these girls and women overload their nervous system. But they absolutely don’t know how to relax, they don’t know how to “break away” and “let off steam”, because they consider entertainment to be a waste of time, something unnecessary and “irrational”.

However, an overloaded nervous system needs at least some relaxation. Here the nervous system is discharged with an attack of headache, which makes a person distract from business and lie down in bed for a couple of days. In other words, a migraine attack plays the role of a kind of “steam release valve” and accumulated nervous tension. In some ways, this is similar to the discharge of static voltage, which occurs in a computer when it is rebooted.

Is it possible to avoid such attacks? Yes – if you learn to let off steam in time in peaceful ways.

For example, you can relieve accumulated nervous tension through “bodily” physical activity – through sports games, fitness classes, with the help of dancing or … sex.

And of course, we must not forget that life is not only work and deeds. That you still need to be able to rest, you need to try to get enough sleep, and in general it is desirable, if possible, not to overwork yourself too much.

Everything is in your head: popular psychosomatics (and how to treat yourself)

Skin problems immediately alert you and push you to take a deep breath and stop being nervous. “Stress is the main enemy of healthy skin,” say doctors specializing in psychodermatology, a special branch of medicine that studies the relationship between the psyche and the skin.

An uncontrolled change of emotions is usually accompanied by the release of a hormone from the pituitary gland, which tries to overcome stress hormones, which in turn leads to hormonal changes and, as a result, skin problems. Stress also causes blood vessels to dilate, giving way to inflammatory cells. The more nervous we are, the more likely we are to develop blackheads, acne, or even psoriasis.

Your treatment:

Training . Physical exercise is the best anti-stress, for which the skin will definitely thank you. Daily exercise reduces the risk of psoriasis in women by 30%.

Stick to a clear daily routine . In a period of increased stress, another effective medicine in your arsenal is the control of personal affairs. If there are problems at work, do everything so that there are no force majeure at home. Controlling at least part of your life sends positive signals to the brain, which also helps fight stress. In addition, go to bed, get up for work, have dinner at the same time – this disciplines and does not allow emotions to take over.

Digestive problems

According to recent research, our gut contains more neurons than our spinal cord. Moreover, scientists have found that certain types of bacteria living in the intestines are able to literally communicate with our brain using special signals – hormones and neurotransmitters. If you are a nervous person and worry about every little thing, then you are much more likely to catch irritable bowel syndrome than those who are not used to worrying about trifles. This is especially true for those who have been mentally traumatized in childhood. According to doctors, about 60% of patients with irritable bowel syndrome confirm the stress experienced in their youth. This is presumably due to the fact that it is the stress experienced in childhood that upsets the balance of the nervous system, and also affects the intestinal bacteria.

Your treatment:

Keep things simple. You may want to de-stress with grueling gym workouts, but if you have bowel problems, moderate your ardor – vigorous exercise will only exacerbate unpleasant symptoms. As gastroenterologists comment, moderate physical activity is your best friend. Swimming, walking, yoga are great.

Hypnotherapy . One of the latest studies has found that hypnotherapy aimed at treating bowel disease really relieves acute pain in the gastrointestinal tract, and also has an anti-stress effect on the body.

Research by the University of California, Los Angeles, has confirmed that the consumption of foods with probiotics and prebiotics significantly reduces anxiety as well as symptoms of IBS. It will not be superfluous to include kefir and sauerkraut in your diet.

Headaches

According to many studies, sensitive people who are easily prone to stress and anxiety suffer from headaches and migraines many times more often than others. Stress triggers the release of chemicals that dilate the blood vessels that lead to the brain, eventually causing headaches.

Your treatment:

Drink plenty of water and eat regularly. When we are too busy or anxious about something, we tend to skip meals, which is a direct cause of migraines, neurologists comment. Water will also help reduce pain – at least 1.5 liters per day.

Cut down on caffeine and painkillers. Oddly enough, a headache also occurs with excessive medication. Here, doctors advise, first of all, to give up bad habits and products such as coffee, strong tea and even chocolate. In the first few days of being unaccustomed, you may feel worse, but in the long run, the body will thank you.

Menstruation

Often, stress completely disrupts our menstrual cycle, which can eventually lead to many gynecological diseases, and in extreme cases, to infertility. Researchers from Emory University set up an interesting experiment. Inviting women with elevated levels of cortisol in the blood (the stress hormone), who at the same time stopped ovulation and menstruation, the scientists suggested that they undergo anti-stress therapy. The result exceeded all expectations: 80% of women started menstruating again.

Stress aggravates the process of PMS, as it leads to increased secretion of the hormone testosterone, which, in principle, is not characteristic of the female body. Even the way you think about your mental health can have a detrimental effect, researchers say. The fact is that many girls are still terrified and disgusted with the nature of menstruation, and many adult women live with this feeling for the rest of their lives.

Your treatment:

Explore your body . Consider the onset of PMS as your body’s signal that it’s time for you to rest. When you get your period, try to protect yourself from any irritating factors as much as possible.

Take magnesium . Magnesium perfectly relaxes muscles and relieves stress. The best way is to take salt baths, because this way magnesium will also enter your body through the skin, which is doubly beneficial.

Balance your diet. If your diet includes a huge amount of sugar and carbohydrates, then you run the risk of experiencing an increase in insulin in the blood. The consequences can be the most unpleasant: for example, your testosterone level will increase, which will not only adversely affect your beauty, but also bring big problems with the menstrual cycle.

Joint pain

Incessant stress can negatively affect the brain’s ability to produce the hormone dopamine, as well as other chemicals that can relieve physical pain, including in the joints.

Your treatment:

Do not ignore pain. Many osteopaths believe that pain is our body’s way of telling us that something is wrong. For example, pain in the back and shoulders indicates that we work too much in the office, and our body can no longer endure it.