Headaches, particularly muscle tension headaches and cervicogenic headaches, can be a real pain in the neck (literally!). While the exact cause of each person's headaches are complex, muscle tightness, vertebral misalignment, and nerve irritation in the upper back, neck and jaw play a significant role in developing the most common types of headaches.
Muscle Tension: A Tight Web of Pain
Imagine you're hunched over your phone or computer, your neck craned forward. This throws your whole posture out of whack, straining the muscles in your upper back, neck, and scalp. These muscles under constant tension are unable to rest and get proper nutrition from the blood because there is not a normal contract-relax cycle.
Healthy muscles go through regular contract-relax cycles every minute, contracting and tightening to do a movement and then relaxing as another muscle takes over. Relaxed muscle easily allows oxygen rich blood flow into a muscle and the contraction squeezes, pushing waste product filled blood out of the area. This pumping action is essential for healthy muscles.
In tight and overused muscles, reduced blood flow can lead to a lack of oxygen and nutrients reaching the muscle tissue and as a result, the muscle becomes weak from lack of available energy. Muscles thrive on a steady supply of oxygen and when deprived they become irritable and prone to pain from even very minor strain and movement. Another problem is the inability to eliminate waste like lactic acid from the muscle. Lactic acid is a waste product produced by muscles without oxygen; when our muscles are constantly tight, we create lactic acid without the ability to get rid of it and the muscles build up lactic acid inside causing a burning ache and pain.
If that wasn’t enough, over time, if muscles stay too tight, muscles can develop hypersensitive areas called trigger points. These trigger points act like tiny knots within the muscle fibers. When pressure is applied, they can send out intense pain signals not just locally but also to seemingly unrelated areas - a phenomenon known as referred pain. As if muscle pain and tightness wasn't bad enough, tight muscles are more susceptible to strains or tears. When a muscle is overworked or under too much tension, it can develop micro tears in the muscle fibers. These tiny tears can cause significant pain as the body tries to repair the damage.
Whenever posture is poor, muscles don’t relax or we have trauma, it also causes misaligned vertebrae in your spine that join the pain party, further tightening these muscles and setting the stage for an even worse headache.
Spines Get Bent, Nerves Pay the Rent
The intricate network of nerves in your body relies heavily on a healthy, well-aligned and constantly moving spine to function properly. When your spine experiences misalignment or altered biomechanics, it can wreak havoc on these nerves, leading to headaches and nerve irritation.
Your spine is a 26-piece bony protective shield that moves and protects the spinal cord as it runs through the center of your spine, acting as the main information superhighway. Branching out from the spinal cord are numerous spinal nerves, similar to on-ramps and off-ramps, which carry messages to and from your brain throughout your body. When vertebrae (the individual bones of your spine) or intervertebral discs (the shock absorbers between the vertebrae) are misaligned or move poorly, they can act like roadblocks on this information highway.
Altered biomechanics refers to how your spine moves and functions. If your spine isn't moving properly due to stiffness, weakness, or injury, it can put undue strain on different areas like the intervertebral disc and facet joints. The body tries to compensate for the improper movement by tightening nearby muscles. These tight muscles create uneven stress distribution throughout the spine. This uneven stress on the spine can lead to damage to spinal structures and inflammation which can compress the nerves, exacerbating headaches and nerve irritation.
Nerve inflammation: Can you hear me now?
Imagine the network of nerves in your body as a vast communication system. Each nerve fiber acts like a tiny cable, carrying messages – mostly about touch, temperature, and even pain – from different parts of your body to your brain. Now, picture inflammation setting in along one of these cables. The insulation around the wire, which keeps the signal clear, gets irritated and swollen.
This inflammation disrupts the normal electrical messages traveling through the nerve. Instead of the usual crisp signals, the inflamed nerve starts sending out jumbled, exaggerated messages. It's like a faulty microphone screeching instead of transmitting clear speech.
Here's where radiating pain comes in, leading to headaches. Because nerves often branch out like a tree, the inflammation can irritate not just the main nerve pathway but also its neighboring branches. These neighboring branches, though not directly inflamed themselves, can pick up on the distorted signals from the inflamed nerve.
Think of it like crosstalk on a phone line. The scrambled message from the inflamed nerve leaks over to the healthy branches, causing them to send out their own confused pain signals. This creates a domino effect, where the pain radiates outward from the original source of inflammation, even though areas like the head might not be directly affected.
This radiating pain can be sharp and shooting, or it can feel like a burning ache. It all depends on the type of nerve fiber involved and the specific way the inflammation disrupts the signals. So, the next time you experience a pain that seems to spread beyond its initial location, it could be your body's way of telling you that there's an inflamed nerve sending out distress signals through its entire network. This is true for headaches, sciatica or even carpal tunnel, which are all inflammation-related nerve pain processes.