Health strategies prevent and relieve headaches. Consult your health care provider if you are having regular headaches for accurate diagnosis and receive appropriate treatment. Diet, exercise, hydration affects headaches you will experience.
Yoga As Headache Prevention
Recent studies on the effects of yoga in patients with a diagnosis of chronic or episodic headache (tension-type headache and/or migraine) show benefit in both prevention and relief from yoga in improving headache frequency, headache sufferers pain duration, and pain intensity in patients suffering from tension-type headaches.
Yoga mudras, or hand positions, focus your mind and calm the electrical signals. The Ganesha mudra has been said to be headache prevention. Science has codified that those hand touches do channel measurable electrical energy.
Even those that aren’t yogi’s can begin with simple stretches on a yoga mat.
Chronic Headache Sufferers
Chronic headache sufferers experience at least 15 days a month of pain causing loss of work and family time. What is worse there are significant risks from most of the medical therapies. It is important to use medication, if your provider recommends it. Realize medicines have side effects. Medication overuses induces complications including headache, gastrointestinal bleeding from NSAIDS, liver side effects from acetaminophen, addiction from the stronger opioid medications, mood, energy and memory side effects and even depression from topiramate. Weight gain, precipitation of cardiac arrhythmias have been reported from the prevention medication amitriptyline. To the extent that exercise and yoga help you minimize medication.
Migraine headaches are successfully managed with yoga as well.
A study published in the journal Headache found that regular yoga practice significantly reduced the frequency, intensity, the perceived stress, and duration of migraines in migraine sufferers. This can be true of menstrual migraines as well. Another study published in the International Journal of Yoga Therapy showed that yoga combined with conventional medical treatment led to greater reductions in migraine frequency and intensity compared to medication alone. These findings are backed up in other studies.
Yoga Types
In an article by Houle T, Nash JM. S. Headache. 2008;48:40–4 stress increased other risk factors of headache, such as sleep impairment, obesity and body inflammation, and psychopathology, all reasons to try strategies that are more holistic!
When yoga is studied for medical interventions, often there are no proscribed restrictions regarding yoga style, or length practice, of the intervention period. In fact, usually the recommendation is to just ‘do yoga.’ At Hatha we blend mindfulness, breathwork, and asanas known to be effective for health and wellness.
There are over 50 types of yoga being practiced in Western studios these days. It is known that in ancient yoga traditions the spiritual and mindful practices are associated with the greatest physical benefits. Yoga nidra has some of the most calming effects which can lead to headache reduction as well. In Western society the fitness aspects are credited with the most benefits.
At Hatha Yoga and Fitness, we suggest that performing yoga with the energetic benefits of practicing with others, the expansion of your practices by working with a teacher, and having a blend of fitness and yoga practices that will improve your chronic headaches the most.