Everyone who suffers with headaches regularly (more than once a month) needs to be taught how to relax the muscles of their jaw, head, neck and shoulders. Unless these muscles are relaxed, they exert a constant drag on any other approach to headache treatment that might be tried. Prescribing medicine without dealing with chronically tense muscles is like putting performance additives in the gas tank of a racing car but not taking your foot off the brake; no real improvement is possible.

It is astonishing that this training is not taught at the beginning when anyone begins a cycle of chronic headaches and after a medical exam has ruled out neuropathology. In over 30 years of practice as a biofeedback therapist my most frequent referral was for chronic headaches. And, 99% of patients referred showed chronic levels of tension in one or more muscles of the jaw, neck, head or shoulders and saw a dramatic reduction in chronic headaches when this muscular tension was eliminated. Most of these patients had suffered with severe, chronic headaches for decades and were shocked to find themselves headache free so easily. And notably, this relief occurred whether or not the headache pattern was labeled as tension headaches, migraine headaches, mixed headaches or persistent daily headaches.

Couldn’t decades of suffering and expense have been avoided? We think so. If the attending physician or neurologist had simply told their patient that relaxing the muscles of the jaw, head, neck and shoulders was important in the beginning, the patient would have been empowered to start working on relaxing, noticing tension and muscular habits and would have been able to change the course of their treatment sooner instead of later. Unfortunately, without this knowledge an important dynamic driving their headache cycle remains invisible and the muscular habits fueling their headaches have a chance to become worse; more severe, more entrenched and more difficult to change.