With no negative side effects and only the possibility of increasing your health, meditation is the cure you want to try for migraines and headaches. You can use it to help accompany other treatment methods or use it as a singular treatment plan as well.
Stress Reduction
Meditation is one of the best methods to reduce stress which is one of the leading causes of headaches and migraines. There are many reasons why meditation helps to reduce stress.
From raising serotonin levels to even helping break negative habits meditation should be used in addition to any other treatments for headaches. There are no negative side effects to it and the benefits of meditation don’t stop just there.
Grey Matter Increase
Are you looking for migraine relief? Migraines are different than headaches although headaches can accompany a migraine. They can cause debilitating pain often accompanied with nausea or vomiting.
Stress can be a trigger for migraines and as you have read above, meditation offers a no
Several studies such as this one performed by J H Kim et al have shown that those with migraines have reduced grey matter volume within the brain. It was also found that a longer headache duration and more often headaches correlate to an even more significant reduction in grey matter volume.
This is meditation can be the all-natural migraine cure. It may sound crazy to think that meditation can actually change your brain physically while you may have only considered the emotional balancing effects of meditation.
Published by a team at Massachusetts General Hospital and published in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 6 brains of people who have never meditated before were measured with MR images 2 weeks before beginning an eight-week mindfulness meditation program and as well as afterward.
The participants meditated daily for an average of only 27 minutes. They practiced mindfulness meditation which is a technique to formulate objectivity by cultivating awareness of your surroundings, your thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
It creates deep focus while also teaching one to see through illusions of emotional bias and temporary physical sensations. Learn more about mindfulness here with this guided meditation.
The results of the MR images after the course showed an increase in grey-matter within the hippocampus which is commonly related to learning and memory function. The results also showed a reduction within the grey matter within the amygdala.
The amygdala is commonly associated with the role it plays in correlation to emotional processing including anxiety, stress, and triggering the “fight-flight-or-freeze” response.
This can give you confidence within your meditation practice because even as little as 8-weeks your memory will have begun to rewire your brain and ultimately make it stronger
Release Tension
The awareness that is cultivated throughout meditation guides us to become aware of our bodies. This helps us to release tension and unconscious straining of our muscles which can directly cause headaches.
Releasing tension within the neck, face, and shoulders removes the most common culprit areas for causing tension headaches. Progressive muscle relaxation meditation techniques can especially help to bring awareness to subconscious clenching.
Follow along with a progressive muscle relaxation meditation in the video below!
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