Trauma Increases Headache Risk 4-Fold



If you suffer from tension headaches or migraines, here is a study you should know about.

Your headache may actually be coming from a trauma that you went through earlier in life…

…not just from the stress of the current day.


In fact, trauma might be why you get headaches in the first place, as the participants from this study who never had headaches before going through a trauma experienced significant and persistent headaches disorders afterwards.

And those who had a history of headache had a significant and intense worsening of the headache pain and frequency.

Researchers studied the impact of trauma on the type and frequency of headaches that survivors got months after surviving a traumatic event by following 213 adolescents who survived a mass shooting at a summer camp (where 69 students were killed by an open gunman) and compared them with over 1,700 matched controls (adolescents from the general population.)

The results were published in the Dec 13, 2017 issue of Neurology.


What did they find?


Surviving a a terrorist attack significantly and substantially increased the risk of long term, persistent weekly and even daily headaches of all types…. by 400%.  Even in patients who had no history of headache.

The trauma survivors were four times more likely to suffer from repeated and persistent headaches of all kinds, even after adjusting for all types of variables and cofounding factors, including PTSD.

Four times as many migraines.

Four times as many tension headaches.



Why did headaches increase so dramatically?


The answer is that trauma literally changes the way your brain functions, the way it is physically structured, and even the way it picks up on pain.

Even exposure to one single, isolated event can make a lasting, painful change.

Going through a trauma literally sensitizes you to pain, meaning if you have gone through a traumatic or even intensely stressful time, you will feel pain more sharply, it will hurt worse, it will persist longer, and it will be triggered more easily.

This study today is just one more way physicians and researchers have confirmed what we already intuitively know: going through trauma changes your physical body and affects your future health.

But you can reverse these changes.  And I’m here to help, with a list of free resources for you:



1.  Holistic Help For Chronic Pain:


The first resource is this video, where I talk to you about how you can help decrease your persistant pain and heal the changes that chronic pain causes on your brain.




Another way to look at today’s study is that it actually reveals really good news.  How?

Because it gives us yet another way to help alleviate pain — in this case, stopping headaches and decreasing their frequency and intensity — by directly address the traumatic events in your past.

By addressing and healing the impact trauma has had on your life and on your physical body, you can start to reverse the dynamic that is triggering your migraine (or your tension headache, or your abdominal pain, or your pelvic pain, or your fibromyalgia, or your anxiety, or your depression, etc…) so that it stops interfering with your life.

So my second resource is a list of previous articles I’ve written about trauma to help you get started.


2.  Holistic Support For Trauma Recovery:






And to go even further with helping to release traumatic life events from impacting your future health, hop over here  to join my upcoming Trauma Resiliency and Recovery Class.  


3. Trauma Healing Class


This class is an uplifting, supportive online class (yes that means you can join in from anywhere around the world!) that is totally flexible for you and totally private.  It’s researched, written and run directly by me, utilizing all of my experience as a physician and all of the best, most up to date research conducted on trauma.

You can easily fit this class into your schedule when you have the time (all the material comes straight to your email inbox, for you to access whenever you have the time) and you can keep all of the healing information, articles, videos, exercises and recommendations forever, so that you can apply what you want when you want and never run out of fresh ideas to support your beautiful, innate, recoverable health.

There are still a dozen goodie bags left if you would like to grab a goodie bag while they last!


Sign up ends 2 weeks from today.

I look forward to supporting your recover in any way that I possibly can.

xoxoxo, Laura