Muscular headaches

“Muscular headaches” can be sudden, severe, long lasting and incapacitating and are often associated with cognitive symptoms such as a “foggy head”, lack of clarity of thought, difficulty concentrating, being easily distracted, suffering short term memory loss, lethargy, poor sleep and irritability.

Believe it or not you have nine pairs of muscles on your head (not including several muscles which extend from your neck) that have many actions including raising or furrowing your eyebrows, raising and lowering your fore and aft scalp, retracting your ear and chewing, biting, and clenching your jaw. Many of these muscles are also intimately involved with various emotional and mental states.

Your jaw muscles, or muscles of mastication, in particular are often at the root of chronic head pain because they are very strong muscles that are commonly overworked. In fact for its size, one of your jaw clenching muscles (masseter muscle) is the most powerful muscle in your body. These muscles, in conjunction with your other three jaw clenching muscles, are so strong they can hold the weight an acrobat vigorously spinning on a rope. So you can imagine how much pressure they can place on the structures of your head, including your jaw, nerves and blood vessels.

There are a number of muscles that extend from your neck and shoulders that attach to your head that are frequently a source of chronic head pain. These muscles include the muscles that raise your shoulders (levator scapular and trapezius), turn your head (sternocleiodomastoid) and extend your head (suboccipital).

Because your head muscles are often activated during various emotional and mental states, ongoing pressure on your head muscles is often driven by a variety of ongoing emotional and mental states, including anger, hypervigilance (looking out for signs of threat in your environment) and intense sustained concentration.

Headaches are often associated with difficulty concentrating, foggy thinking and increased irritability, which can in turn lead to further increased head muscle tension feeding a viscous cycle of ongoing pain.

Detailed research has found that pain in the scalp tissues and head muscles affects blood flow through the major arteries of the brain and irritation of the brains membranes, which partly explains such cognitive effects.