Yoga Poses That Relieve Headaches

While infrequent headaches can cause irritability, extreme pain and trouble functioning in work and home life, chronic headaches can be debilitating. The ancient practice of yoga helps to align the body and release tension. These features make many yoga poses a helpful way to treat headache pain.

Potential

More than 45 million Americans suffer from chronic headaches, reports the Yoga Journal website. In addition to stress and illness, genetics, food intolerances, hormones, lack of sleep and a sedentary lifestyle can all contribute to headaches. Migraines, a particularly severe type of headache that manifest with blinding pain and nausea, can cripple sufferers for hours or days. Headaches are often treated with medication, biofeedback training, stress reduction and elimination diets. Yoga offers the potential for a non-invasive, patient-controlled therapy.

Appropriate Poses

To tackle headache pain, you may perform individual poses or flow a sequence together for a longer practice. Child’s pose, head-to-knee pose, standing forward bend and downward dog help to release tension in the neck and shoulders that can cause or aggravate headache pain. Reclining bound angle pose and supported bridge pose help to open the fronts of the shoulders--helping to promote better posture--and promote relaxation, which reduces stress. Even if you perform no other pose, spend a few quiet minutes in corpse pose--savasana--with a weighted sandbag resting partially on your forehead and partially on a yoga block adjacent to the top of the head to further reduce tension.

Benefits

Yoga promotes relaxation and perspective, which can help you deal with life stresses better—ultimately leading to a reduction of tension headaches. Some physicians, including Tomas Brofeldt, M.D. at the University of California's Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, maintain that most headaches result from muscle tension in the back of the neck that occurs due to poor posture. Yoga helps you align your neck and spine and reduce tension in the shoulders, and therefore, reduce headache pain. Yoga also helps you hone body awareness, so you can identify the early symptoms of an oncoming headache and address symptoms before they become severe. Yoga poses also help you to breathe more efficiently, which may also help to alleviate headache pain.

Expert Insight

In the Indian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology, a study published in October 2007 found that participants treated with yogic lifestyle techniques reported significantly lower pain levels than participants undergoing medical intervention only. Another study in the journal Headache from May 2007 demonstrated that migraine headache frequency reduced significantly in patients treated with yoga over the course of three months. No Western-based studies on yoga and headaches exist.

Considerations

Yoga poses may not be a substitute for medical treatment for migraines or cluster headaches, but they can augment medical therapies to help reduce symptoms. Some types of headaches cannot be treated with yoga poses. Certain medical conditions such as tumors, food allergies and sinus infections or trauma-induced headaches need a physician's treatment. If you suffer from recurrent headaches, be sure to check with your doctor.