Hypnosis for migraines and headaches

Two different problems that both hurt your head

Tension-type headache and migraine are not the same thing, and they do not respond to the same work.

Tension headache is largely mechanical and largely stress-driven: sustained contraction in the neck, scalp and jaw, a band of pressure, worse as the day goes on. It responds well and often quickly, because the driver is a muscular pattern with an emotional trigger and both halves are reachable in trance.

Migraine is a neurological event — a wave of altered brain activity with its own prodrome, its own aura in some people, and its own aftermath. You cannot suggest a migraine out of existence mid-attack. What you can do is work on frequency, on trigger threshold, on how early you catch it, and on what you do in the twenty minutes after the first warning sign — which in practice makes a substantial difference to how much of your life migraine takes.

Where hypnosis gets leverage

• Catching the prodrome — most people have warning signs and most people have trained themselves to ignore them. Hypnosis sharpens that noticing and attaches an automatic response to it
• The stress-and-crash pattern — a great many migraines arrive on Friday evening or the first day of a holiday, when the tension finally drops. Working on the tension itself changes the pattern
• Lowering the trigger threshold — when your baseline arousal is lower, it takes more to tip you over. This is where most of the frequency reduction comes from
• Anticipatory anxiety — fear of the next migraine is itself a trigger, and it is a genuinely vicious loop to be caught in
• Warmth and vasodilation imagery — hand-warming has a long history in headache work and is easy to develop in trance
• Sleep — irregular or poor sleep is one of the most reliable migraine triggers there is, and hypnosis is good at sleep

Medication-overuse headache

If you are taking acute headache medication more than about ten days a month, some of what you are now experiencing may be rebound headache — the treatment maintaining the problem. This is common, it is not your fault, and it is genuinely difficult to unwind because reducing the medication makes things worse before better.

Hypnosis can be a real help through that window, by giving you something to do with the pain while your system resets. But the medication plan itself belongs to your physician or neurologist. Please do not change your dosing on the strength of a website. Talk to them, and I will work alongside whatever they advise.

A realistic picture of results

What clients most often report is not the disappearance of migraine but a change in its footprint: fewer attacks per month, attacks that break earlier, less of the day lost to recovering afterwards, and — the one people mention most — no longer organising their whole life around the possibility of one. For tension headache, outcomes are frequently better than that.