TMJ Pain – Causes of Pain in Your Jaw

TMJ is shorthand for Temporomandibular Joint.  That refers to your temple area and your jaw bone (mandible.)  The joint is supposed to move smoothly but when it doesn’t you may end up with a diagnosis of TMJ Dysfunction or TMJD.

What can cause your TMJ to stop moving smoothly?

  • An injury or trauma that causes the joint to dislocate.
  • Overuse of the powerful jaw muscles in certain positions.
  • Sleeping always on the same side which may cause your jaw to “drop” to one side.
  • Having a “forward head” posture which puts a lot of strain on your neck and jaw muscles.
  • Dental work which Continue reading “TMJ Pain – Causes of Pain in Your Jaw”
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Yoga and Head Pain: 6 Ways Yoga Helps You Get Rid of Your Headache

How can yoga help relieve your headaches?  Oh, let me count the ways:

  1. It relaxes the muscles around your chest, ribs, shoulders and neck.  These are the same muscles that get tight and cause headache symptoms.
  2. Yoga helps reduce your stress.  When you’re feeling all stressed, your muscles “clamp down” on nerves that go to your head.
  3. It helps strengthen the muscles of your backside, and makes you long and strong; it creates muscular balance.  A strong back and a long, strong body helps you have good posture.  Good posture, with your head over your body instead of out in front, reduces headaches.
  4. Yoga gets your circulation moving and that helps move the metabolic (body) wastes out of your body.  It reduces Continue reading “Yoga and Head Pain: 6 Ways Yoga Helps You Get Rid of Your Headache”
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Yoga and Headaches – 6 Ways Yoga Gets Rid of Head Pain

How can yoga help relieve your headaches?  Oh, let me count the ways:

  1. It relaxes the muscles around your chest, ribs, shoulders and neck.  These are the same muscles that get tight and cause headache symptoms.
  2. Yoga helps reduce your stress.  When you’re feeling all stressed, your muscles “clamp down” on nerves that go to your head.
  3. It helps strengthen the muscles of your backside and makes you long and strong; it creates muscular balance.  A strong back and a long, strong body helps you have good posture.  Good posture, with your head over your body instead of out in front, reduces headaches.
  4. Yoga gets your circulation moving and that helps move the metabolic (body) wastes out of your body.  It reduces swelling which can also be a cause for head pain.
  5. It helps you become more “in tune” with your body.  When your muscles start to complain or your head starts to hurt, you will be able to figure out the cause and correct it.
  6. Yoga can help reduce your blood pressure, but if you are having high blood pressure headaches, you’d better get to a doctor immediately!

Yoga is a full-body stretching and strengthening movement program with a lot of benefits.

If you take a class, always remember:  It’s your body.  If a move doesn’t feel appropriate to you, or feels like it will make your head hurt or your headache feel worse, DON’T DO IT.  Instead, practice a different movement (pose) or breathing.

So, yoga helps take the pressure off the muscles around your head and neck, and helps you relax, and reduces stress, and improves your breathing (shallow breathing could also be a cause of your headaches by not giving you enough oxygen.)

That’s how yoga can help you get rid of your headaches.

Here’s another way I can help you get rid of your migraines and headaches:  Head Pain Natural Relief

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Headaches: How Does Your Posture Cause Head Pain?

I’ll bet your doctor doesn’t look at your posture when you tell him or her about your head pain.  Most don’t.  But, she should!

Poor posture is the most common cause of headaches.

Why?  Because muscles are responsible for most of our pain.

Tight muscles pull on bones.  Tight muscles cause bone spurs (arthritis.)  Tight muscles press on nerves and blood vessels.  Overstretched muscles get trigger points which “fire” pain into other parts of your body, sometimes quite far away.

To be fair, there are a few doctors who do look at posture.  When they don’t, it’s because they haven’t been trained in “muscular medicine” or because they simply don’t have time.

But, poor posture is responsible for most pain and dysfunction, including headaches.

You can see that there are a lot of ways for your muscles to cause head pain because muscles have many roles.

Bones act as our structure: they are Continue reading “Headaches: How Does Your Posture Cause Head Pain?”

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Waking Up With Head Pain? What Causes Morning Headaches?

Do most of your headaches occur during the night, or as soon as you start to get out of bed? Then it’s possible that sleeping positions and movements that strain your neck are responsible for your head pain.

It always amazes me that we can hurt ourselves even in our sleep, but we do.

Sometimes it’s a matter of sleeping with your head tilted (Your chin is tilted toward or away from the bed. Your neck is not in line with your spine.)

Check your neck position before you fall asleep. You may need a different pillow, or even a pile of small, flat pillows stacked to fit you better.

If you’re a back sleeper, just use a small roll behind your neck to fill in the natural curve of your neck. Use as little as possible behind your head.

If you sleep on your tummy, that can cause a lot of strain for your neck muscles.

Some people tell me that they just cannot change their sleeping habits, or cannot fall asleep in a different position.

Perhaps practicing relaxation techniques laying flat on the floor would help their muscles get used to being in a different position. It’s worth a try.

Perhaps deep breathing using their whole torso, chest and belly, would allow them to slip into sleep in a different position.

Perhaps a stretching or yoga class, to wake up all of their muscles and help get muscular balance, would be their ticket.

Sometimes you wake up feeling fine, but by the time you get out of bed, you have a headache or migraine. What’s happening?

Here’s one possibility.

I would wake up feeling well. Then I would twist my neck and stretch my head around to see the alarm clock. That twist and stretch aggravated my neck enough that I would get instant migraine!

It actually took me quite a long time to figure that out. It happened several times before I realized the cause of those migraines. When I quit doing that twist and stretch, of course the head pain quit also.

Could that be your possibility? Or, perhaps you can think of something else you may be doing to cause your headache to start when you woke up feeling fine.

If it feels like you’re straining your neck by sitting straight up, try rolling to your side and push yourself up with your arms while keeping your neck in a straight, neutral position.

One of my clients always awoke feeling fine, but by the time she was in the kitchen with her coffee, her head pain started. Right after she took the first deep drags on her cigarette, her headache started. Every morning.

What do you suppose was the cause of her headache?

Because she was a smoker, and because she inhaled strongly, using the muscles in her jaw and temples (the temple muscles are related to the jaw muscles) she caused those muscles to become tight and restricted. That caused her morning headaches. Like many morning headaches, once they started, they tended to stay all day.

So the plan is to avoid your headache in the first place.

Pay attention to what’s going on that may be creating head pain for you. Change the position, posture or movement you suspect and see if that makes a difference.

A simple change could make all the difference in the world. Awareness is the first step in the right direction.

“Because You Deserve To Feel Better”

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