Between endless Zoom calls and home schooling your kids, many of us are starting to develop more frequent headaches than normal. Tension headaches can be caused by many things, but if you’re spending more time in front of your computer with your head and neck in a forward position and/or spending more hours entertaining with your kids, it can definitely trigger tension headaches.
Try This Simple Exercise to Find Relief From Tension Headaches
This is a simple exercise that you can do throughout the day or at the end of the day that can help ease muscle tension.
- 1. Get two tennis balls and stick them in a sock.
- 2. Tie up the sock. The balls should be stacked one on top of each other and look like a peanut.
- 3. Take the sock and place on the back of your head right underneath your skull, where the neck muscles meet.
- 4. Lie back onto the balls. Depending on your head and neck contouring, you may slip, in which case hold the ball in place with your hands and let your neck muscles relax into the tennis balls. If you can stay there without your head moving, you can relax your whole body.
- 5. You can stay in this position for up to several minutes. However, if it feels tender or intense, start slow and work your way up.
This is a really nice way to release those muscles in the back of the neck and help with those tension headaches!
Why is it important to release the neck muscles?
Usually with tension headaches, the neck muscles right below your skull get tight. This can happening for a variety of reasons, including:
- —posturing, with head and neck forward.
- — you accidentally get hit and your neck muscles have to react and tense up.
Still having pain from Kid-itis?
If you’re still experiencing quite a bit of pain or discomfort and its something you want to have addressed, we’re doing TeleHealth sessions.
During these sessions, we will take you through a functional movement evaluation. This can help us figure out what’s going on, and we can give you more targeted exercises/stretches to address the issue. For more information, click here to request to schedule a Telehealth Session.
