What’s Causing Your Headaches?

📍 📍 Hi, this is Dr. Goodpaster with Proactive Spine Care, and today we’re going to be talking about headaches. A very common cause of headaches is stress, okay? Stress causes tension. Tension usually builds up on the backside of the head right here in what’s called your suboccipital muscles. Now that’s a tiny group of muscles that sit on the base of the skull here, but they can wreak a lot of havoc when they tighten up.

And these can cause a lot of tension and result in some pretty major headaches at times. Another major cause of headaches is going to be screen time, which means looking at your phone, looking at your computer, laptop, iPads, TVs. We’re constantly getting bombarded with the, with these things and we’re constantly looking at these things.

This puts a lot of stress on the eyes and over time starts to overstimulate some things. eventually results in headaches. And now another major cause of headaches is going to be posture. Okay. So this kind of goes hand in hand with neck pain. Usually posture related neck pain is going to end up resulting in headaches over time.

So this is what I was talking about earlier with these suboccipital muscles, but our posture, if we’re sitting far forward, if we’re sitting at a computer desk all day, Sitting far forward with our shoulders forward, our head forward. That puts a lot of stress on the backside of our neck here.

Those muscles try to compensate for that by pulling your head back or keeping it where it needs to be. And they’re just not designed to do that. So over time it puts a lot of pressure and a lot of tension on those muscles and it ends up causing headaches.