Headaches are something I’ve personally fought on a regular basis. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I managed to do something about it. I didn’t enjoy eating pills. In my opinion, synthetic substances in your body can’t be all good, no matter how thoroughly they have been tested before release to the public. So I began not taking pills for small headaches and gradually worked my way up, out of pure stubbornness ;-) Still, I had to do something about the pain, so I started playing around with mental exercises. After just a few months I began finding ways to control the occasional pains in my head.

I’ve told about my techniques to a few friends and they’ve had immediate success in controlling headaches, or at least quieting them down a notch. So I thought why not write it down for everyone to read.

NOTICE! I make no promises that the following technique will work on everyone, nor do I assume any responsibility for anyone trying it (I can’t see how mental imagery could harm anyone, but people have been sued for weirder things).

Steps

1. Close your eyes and relax completely. Try to relax all the muscles in your head and neck. Calm yourself down. Usually the pain quiets down a bit even if you do nothing else.
2. Imagine a wall just behind your eyes, inside your skull. I tend to build a brick wall from bottom to top, brick by brick. Try to physically build this wall and feel it causing pressure.
3. Broaden the wall out and expand it until it sits right on top of the aching parts.
4. Feel the wall around in your mind. Think of it as a force field or something moldable. The pain is an unevenness in the wall. It can feel like a ripple or a roughness or sorts.
5. Smoothen these irregularities out of your wall, softly, again and again until the wall is completely smooth and the pain is gone. Try to feel this as soothing and relaxing. Don’t force it, even if you can’t completely loose the pain.
6. Open your eyes and feel the difference

Sometimes I still experience a small pressure where the pain was before. It helps to keep imagining the wall. At first, it took a lot of effort and it seemed very hard to keep my concentration. This keeps getting easier. After a while you don’t have to give it a second thought.

I have no idea how this technique works, physically. Headaches are usually caused by dilation of cerebral arteries or muscle contractions. I can understand that relaxing can help when it comes to muscle tension or contractions; but arteries? Maybe it’s a matter of the placebo effect. Maybe the pain is still there, I just can’t feel it. But if I can’t feel pain, can it still exist? I just know that it works.

I’ve found that practicing this method has given me not only control over pain, but also a feel for what’s happening. I haven’t had one headache in ages. I can feel the pending pain a lot before it manifests, and say to myself “OK, I’ll relax a little, now” or “All right, all right. I’ll lay off the reading for a while” and never even have to do the actual mental imagery.

Having a dialogue with your body might sound weird, but that’s just a way of putting it to words. It’s impossible to describe exactly what’s happening. Hopefully this helps someone out there, as it has me.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2004 at 13:55 and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.