Physical symptoms

[karenh204]

New to this, just seeing if I can find some help. I've been suffering from anxiety for a few years on and off. In the past few months I've been waking up with headaches. The doctor changed my medication several times because she thought it was causing the headaches. I am now on Progablin 50mg. I still get the headaches but don't believe it can be all these different medications! I am always tense, especially when I'm led down, find it impossible to relax my neck and jaw when I'm in bed, so don't sleep very well. Tried relaxation but I seem to be able to relax other muscles but my neck is so tense my head shakes sometimes. It's really getting me down, just need to relax. Has anyone else experienced this? Any help would be gratefully appreciated.

[sial72]

Hi, sometimes I have found that when I have a lot of tension in the body it is better to exercise to burn off excess adrenaline rather than relaxation exercises xx

[karenh204]

I have just started doing yogalaties. My neck feels worse because I must be holding it tense while doing it. It is so bad when I try to go to sleep, I would of thought that was the time to relax, I think I must still be tense when I'm asleep.

[MyNameIsTerry]

Hi and welcome to NMP :welcome:

Have you tried Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR)? Some forms include better exercises for the head than other more standard ones. There are worksheets for this, I can post one, but they are easy to find via Google otherwise.

I had Bruxism for about 6 months from starting a new med and I had a lot of headaches with that. When you use the jaw muscles you can feel those around the temples move too.

You could give Mindfulness a try to help you overall with your anxiety and it will help you to focus correctly on muscles of the body and has specific meditations for that such as Body Scanning. There are some in the thread via the link in my signature. There are also some movement based ones in the free downloads as well as 2 specific MBSR yoga ones. Usually you work through a gradiated programme which starts with things like Mindfulness Of Breath as these lay the foundations and each one adds more to make it more complete as well as incorporating other ways to do it. It might be worth a try and it does help with anxiety anyway.

Here is another thread that might also be worth a look. It contains a mostly complete online copy of a book that talks about referred pain and using trigger point massage. The navigation can jump around a bit in the book so sometimes you have to scroll page by page or it seems to skip over things. It's easy to learn and requires barely any equipment (tennis ball, wall) in the case of some of them whereas most is just your hands.

http://www.nomorepanic.co.uk/showthread.php?t=169782