If you suffer from stress headaches, you’re certainly motivated to find a cure for them. Very often, the best approach is to look at your whole lifestyle and see where you can make positive changes, especially ones that reduce the amount of stress you’re under. You can take a pain reliever for your headaches but this isn’t a good permanent solution if you are stuck with the headaches a lot. The following remedies for stress headaches can point you in the right direction.
You can ease your stress headache with an ice pack. You can use a cold towel, perhaps wrapped around a bag of ice, or even a bag of frozen vegetables. Lie down and try to relax while putting the ice pack on your forehead and moving it every few minutes to the top of your head and your forehead. If one spot hurts more than another, make sure it gets extra time with the ice pack. Ice acts as an anti-inflammatory which helps lower the amount of pain you are feeling. While this won’t cure the cause of your tension headaches it can offer some quick and temporary relief. Drinking a cold caffeinated beverage like iced coffee or iced tea is a great way to quickly cure a headache. Both the cold temperature of the drink and caffeine within it are good for reducing the size of the blood vessels that are causing your tension headache. You do need to be careful with this technique however because consuming too much caffeine can cause headaches in the long run when you start to go withdrawals after failing to get your “fix.” So if you are having bad tension headaches, cold caffeinated beverages might help but you also need to think about lowering your stress levels and the other factors that might be causing your headaches.
Stress headaches can be eased quite a lot by exercise. This might seem obvious, but you probably aren’t going to want to go to the gym when you’ve got a bad headache. What you should be thinking about, however, is getting more exercise in general, which can have the result of your getting fewer headaches. Aerobic exercise is the best way to raise your circulation and get more oxygen which can help you prevent your headaches. You shouldn’t try to work out while you have a headache; just start including it in your routine a few times each week and you should see the frequency of your headaches get smaller.
The are, as we’ve seen, many possible ways to deal with stress headaches. You probably want to use a ready made cure like an over the counter pain reliever or caffeinated beverage if your headache is bad but it is also important to look into the cause of the problem if you really want to cure it. You don’t have to live with stress headaches, they are usually a message from your body that you need to lower your stress in your daily life.