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Can Neck Pain Cause Headaches

When I was a kid we went on a couple vacations every year.

Growing up in Wisconsin during spring break heading south was pretty standard for many families.

After months of frigid cold temps and snow, the idea of traveling to warm weather was very much welcomed!

Driving to Florida was something that we did multiple times…even though it was close to a 20 hour drive. That one week in Florida was always so much fun. Being able to skateboard outside again and just being able to wear summer clothes was also so great!

One year I went on a vacation with a friend’s family.

I went to bed the night before we were heading to Disney World, obviously we were all excited!

Well I woke up and I couldn’t raise my head up…I was stuck with a hunchback like Quasimodo. Raising my head more than 45 degrees caused extreme pain. Well my entire life my body has been really sensitive to pillows. I obviously didn’t get along with the pillow that I slept on at the hotel that night.

I spent the whole day not being able to raise my head all the way up.

Now what’s interesting is that night I decided to not sleep with a pillow at all. Guess what happened?!

I woke up and my neck was totally fine…zero pain whatsoever and full range of motion. I secretly think this began my journey towards becoming a chiropractor.

Later on when I became a pre-teen/teenager I started experiencing weekly headaches. Well I thought this was totally normal based on all the advertisements I would see for medications.

Now that I am a chiropractor and have taken care of hundreds of people, I constantly hear people talk about how they experience neck pain and also experience headaches. A lot of people will tell me that they will sometimes wake up with some neck pain and later in the day they will have a headache…and they know when they woke up with neck pain that they were going to have a headache later on.

Interesting….

Can Neck Pain Cause Headaches

At the same time this isn’t much of a surprise to me.

Neck pain can definitely cause headaches. It comes down to the age-old rhyming of “your hip bone’s connected to your, leg bone…” and so on and so forth. Well it turns out that your head bone is connected to your neck bone. Quite literally, as the top vertebrae of your neck is all that the skull sits on. Of course there are a ton of muscles and ligaments that keep this attachment strong and stable.

A lot of times the neck pain that people feel is due to a muscular imbalance. Your muscles might be tighter on one side of your neck compared to the other side, or both sides may be really tight in comparison to the front or back side of your neck. What is causing this though?

Head positioning is often the culprit of this. If we have a misalignment of the top bones in our neck our head will be sitting crooked. A majority of the information we receive in our daily lives is perceived from our heads….vision, hearing, tasting, smelling. With that being said the brain wants our head to always be as even as possible.

If we have a misalignment and our head is crooked what do you think the brain does?

Yeah, it tightens up muscles in our neck trying to pull the head one way or the other in order to straighten things out. This leads to neck pain!

How does this neck pain relate to headaches though?

Well this misalignment which causes tension in our neck also can cause tension in our heads. It can be a muscular tension but a lot of times it is more internal than that. This muscle tension can cause a disruption in the blood flow and cerebrospinal fluid flow to the brain.

Blood flow problems in the head area have been shown to cause headaches and migraines. A lot of the medications that are used to treat headaches and migraines actually aim at increasing blood in this part of the body.

When we have this misalignment going on that causes neck tension it also causes the nervous system to go into a state of overdrive, or a sympathetic nervous system state. This makes sense as the body is trying to regulate what’s going on and get things fixed. If the body isn’t able to fix itself it remains in this overdrive state as it’s continually working to achieve proper posture and function again. As this overdrive state persists it starts to have an impact on other areas of the body. Physiologically this state causes a constriction of the vessels in the body. It’s like a constant strain.

This constriction is how this simple thing that began as neck pain can suddenly cause headaches. What’s good is there are things that you can do other than taking medication to fix this problem. The goal is to get the body out of this overdrive state as this is what’s causing this whole issue!

At The Specific Chiropractic Center Naples this is exactly what we focus on. Our goal is to balance the body. We have the tools to analyze the top bones in the neck unlike anyone else in the area. We also test the nervous system at every single visit to see if the body is stuck in this overdrive state or if we are seeing things balance out. This isn’t a one time fix but usually takes some time to get the body to stay in the pattern that we want it to stay in so that our head is in the proper position and our nervous system isn’t in that overdrive or sympathetic state.

This is exactly what I went through as a kid, I didn’t realize it until later on when I learned more about the body in college but it all makes sense looking back on some of the experiences I had as a kid and teenager. I’m happy that I was able to get this sort of help early on as I believe if I didn’t I would be someone who struggled with migraines for a long long time and would have to be dependent on medications. If any of this speaks to you feel free to reach out, we can set up a complimentary phone consultation to see if we can help you out!