IT, programming, administration, engineering and even gaming – these are all jobs that sprouted along with the society’s evolution. While they put so much more than food on your table, clothes on your body and roof over your head, these are typically sedentary professions that have you stuck in a chair for hours. However, these lucrative jobs take a toll on your body which manifests through the pesky neck and shoulder pain. The main question is: can these cause headaches?

The main question is: can these cause headaches?

Neck and shoulder pain: roots and types

Whether you like it or not the pain in the neck or shoulders will happen at some point of your life. You can prevent them from coming early by exercising and engaging in activities that require a lot of movement, but they’re still coming in the old age. This tells one thing: these problems heavily depend on your lifestyle. If you’re snowed under a lot of paperwork in your office, have a repetitive task, work with drills or with your hands overhead, you’re bound to this problem. These are all physical factors that contribute to the neck and shoulder pain. However, there are also psychosocial factors such as stress that may well lead to this issue.

Are these related to headaches?

that are painful to the touch. When your neck is the specific cause of your headache then it is also called ‘’a neck headache.” What actually happens here is that a dysfunction in your upper neck joints, neck muscles or nerves start sending pain signals to the trigeminal nucleus in your brain that, then, interprets it as ”a headache”. In principle, neck headache and tension headache are pretty much the same in most cases.

However, if there is an inherent anomaly in the neck area that causes headaches it is more appropriate to refer to them as ‘’neck headaches.”

Where it all begins?

There is no single reason that triggers tension headaches. Doctors mostly blame it on the lifestyle: long sitting hours in front of a computer, lack of activity, abnormal body positions during sleeping etc. However, the origin of the issue may be in our sub-consciousness.

Deadlines, emotional ‘’roller-coasters’’ caused by problematic relationships as well as financial problems may cause stress build-up that is also a great contributor to the tension headaches.

These psychological problems are actually such a frequent trigger for the issue that tension headaches are also referred to as ‘’ stress-headaches’’. There are also some contributors that we actually don’t think of seriously, those being eye-strain, lack of sleep and sleeping in a cold room.

Symptoms

Alongside with dull pain in your head, that feels as if somebody was tightening a band around it, it is also depicted as stiffness in neck, shoulders and even jaw. The pain can last for 15 days for half an hour on a daily basis which is known as ‘’episodic”  a tension headache. If you’re suffering from this for more than 30 days, then that is ‘’chronic’’ a tension headache you’re fighting.

Who’s most likely to get a tension headache?

As a tension headache doesn’t have a unique cause it doesn’t have a single target either. Young people leading life on a fast lane can suffer from this as well as older people. Even teens can experience tension headaches as they are under a lot of pressure that meeting different deadlines and transition to college can cause.

Migraine VS Tension Headache

Both of these conditions are primarily felt as pain in the head which is why many people are not able to make a clear distinction between a migraine and a headache. However, this difference might be very important because the treatment of respective conditions is different. A migraine usually affects the side of your head. Additionally, migraine is often followed by symptoms such as nausea, dizziness or seeing flashing or blind spots which, is not the case with tension headaches.

Treatment of a tension headache

Simple OCT medications (sometimes combined with caffeine and sedative drugs) will be enough to get rid of a tension headache. Sometimes doctors prescribe antidepressants when ordinary treatment doesn’t work. Of course, there are some alternative ways to go about the pain in the neck that causes headaches such as acupuncture, massages, or behavior therapies.