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Rachel woke up to a new day, knowing right away that this day was not starting well for her, like many other days she had had during the last 30 years. The tension started to build up, sending waves of pain throughout her neck to the lower part of her head. She knew that if she didn’t act soon, this pain would escalate into a monstrous migraine headache that would ruin her day. Quickly, she reached to her medicine cabinet, swallowing her cocktail of prescription drugs to save herself from the pain and hopefully get through the day. She had become tired of the vicious cycle of pain aggravating her headache, leaving her feeling like a zombie. By now, Rachel had become an expert on migraine headaches. Having gone through the headache attacks for years, she tried to single out the triggers for her headaches: extreme hot weather, eating dairy, too much sugar, etc, and the list went goes on and on; she couldn’t be sure of any of these and it drove her nuts. Things got scary for Rachel when she noticed that at times her vision became blurry and she felt numbness in her hands. She started to worry about a possible stroke, or brain tumor. After having a battery of tests, nothing alarming was found and she got a clean bill of health. Rachel learned from her doctor that her symptoms are common for migraine headache sufferers.

Headaches are one of the most common medical complaints people have. Yes, nearly everyone gets a headache once in a while, but over 45 million Americans (about one in six) suffer from chronic headaches each year. Headache pain is a thief. It steals precious time and joy from our life. When we have a throbbing pain in the head, it is hard to focus at work or home, and we get snappy and frustrated easily. When it gets really bad, we just can’t do much and it can become very debilitating.

The conventional cures for headaches are pain relievers, or other synthetic chemical solutions. They can help temporarily but it wears off after a few hours. Sometimes, these chemicals can make headaches even worse! Doctors call this rebound headaches. Natural solutions like chiropractics and acupuncture can help bring the body back to balance, reduce nerve pressure, muscle tension, and alleviate the pain. In many cases, the relief is only short-lived until the ‘invisible switch” turns on again to produce another headache.

So what is this switch in our body that researchers find to be one of the most common triggers for headaches? It is called the stress response. This mechanism (also called the fight or flight response) kicks in whenever we feel under a threat. It drives us to fight or run away from a scary situation to protect ourselves.

To understand the connection between the stress response and headaches let’s look at what happens in our body while we are having the stress response. The heart beats faster, blood pressure rises, blood flow increases, muscles contract, sugar levels go up and we hyperventilate (increased breathing pace). All this takes place to provide the body with energy and power to deal with a situation head-on or escape away to safety. All our energy is diverted to the muscles and the brain. Our senses become more acutely sharp. We can become hypersensitive to sound, light, movement, smell and taste. Our perspective narrows down as we need to think and emote in a survival mode. Our body and mind do all that in order to deal with danger. This is a great survival response to have in real dangerous situations, like when we are chased by a vicious dog, or being physically attacked. Too many times we get so wound up over daily life problems or even imagined ones (the scary movie scripts in our minds), and our stress response switch turns on.

So why is the stress response activated when our survival is not really threatened? Overall, our stress response is designed to give us a temporary energy boost. It makes us extra fast, extra strong, extra sharp for a little while, just long enough to get ourselves out of immanent physical danger or deal with short term challenges like an important test or a sports competition to maximize our abilities. But the response is not useful when it is comes to coping with emotional stress over a prolonged period of time. When we feel psychologically threatened from relationship conflicts, strong emotions of anger and anxiety, resentment or loneliness, the stress response gets triggered. Over time our physiology is affected and we develop physical symptoms. Our brain often imagines and obsesses over "what ifs" and "catastrophic scary outcomes" which keep turning the stress response switch on unnecessarily. Over time, the stress system turns on and off, on and off, repeatedly and the switch control eventually gets exhausted and stops working. After some time, the stress response stays on all the time and can’t switch off back to a relaxed mode, even if things turn out to be quite all right.

So, what happened to Rachel that triggered her stress response? In her highly demanding work environment, she was constantly afraid of making mistakes and disappointing her boss. Although she was periodically praised for her performance at her job, she had an underlying fear of failure – a fear she was carrying in her psyche since she was a girl. Her parents expected her to achieve academically no less than excellently, and any grade lower than "A" resulted in their disappointment, anger and giving her the cold shoulder. She tried very hard not to fail them so as not to lose their love and approval. The stress and the anxiety over failing were overwhelming to her and triggered her stress response in the form of migraine. Rachel developed migraine headaches when she was a in her teen years and they never went away. Her terrifying memory of being afraid to fail got played and replayed with her boss at work. She had no idea how powerful was the connection between her stress response in childhood and her symptoms as an adult.

Researchers who study stress medicine found that prolonged stressful life experiences can alter our brain’s response to stress. A study of inflammatory blood tests showed higher levels of inflammatory biomarkers in the bloodstream of adults who had stressful early life experiences compared to adults who didn’t suffer unusual stress levels in childhood. Today it is well recognized that negative childhood memories can stay imprinted in our body memory unconsciously and retrigger stress responses and symptoms like headaches due to everyday stressful situations in adulthood. People who are hypersensitive to sounds, lights and certain foods may be experiencing hypersensitive stress responses and bring on an onset of migraines, allergies and a variety of immune response symptoms.

Clinical studies also show a connection between post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and migraines. PTSD is present in about 25% of patients in headache clinics. About 50% of combat veteran clinic patients suffer from headaches.

Dr. Uri Kenig and Dalia Kenig, MA, practice Integrative Psychotherapy in their private practice in Encino. They developed IPEC Therapy®, an innovative body-mind approach that reduces the emotional stress underlying many stubborn physical problems like migraines, asthma, eczema, digestive problems, fertility issues and more. In Rachel's story, IPEC Therapy® helped her to eliminate her migraine headache pattern using a unique neuromuscular biofeedback (NMB). This powerful assessment process enabled us to track the emotional components of Rachel's symptoms and clear them from her system. Once the old traumatic memory was released psychologically and on a cellular level, the symptoms disappeared. Now her stress response switch has been restored to a healthy adaptable one that turns on when a real danger is present.

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