This is a guest post by Erin Knight from Engineering Radiance.
3788 American migraineurs were surveyed about their overall health and 59% reported also dealing with depression and while 56% cited anxiety (1). Both anxiety and depression occur more frequently in the migraine population, and we also know that people who suffer from anxiety are more prone to migraine headaches (2).
Despite being so common, this link isn’t frequently discussed or acknowledged. As a former migraine sufferer myself, I would have been offended if you implied that my pain and suffering was due to my high-strung personality or inability to deal with stress.
Today, looking back through a functional and holistic lens, I realize that it’s not so much that having headaches causes us to struggle with mood issues. I think anyone who has had a bad headache recently will relate to how short your supply of patience becomes and if those headaches stretch on for weeks and months, how hopeless you can start to feel, but anxiety and depression run deeper than this.
On the same token, I don’t think that excessive worrying or analyzing inherently causes headaches (as many movies and TV shows would have you believe).
The truth is that our mood is strongly tied to the health of our gut, the balance of our hormones and the burden placed on our liver…. The same foundational systems that we need to keep happy and balanced if we want to eliminate headaches.
Traditional medicine wisdom from around the globe will tell you that a toxic liver will make you more prone to anger. Modern science is confirming the importance of healthy gut flora in our body’s ability to produce neurotransmitters like serotonin. And you’ve probably witnessed first hand (if not experienced yourself), how hormonal shifts during PMS, pregnancy or menopause can drastically change someone’s mood (and trigger headaches, of course). Let headaches and moods that don’t feel quite right be a signal to you to look for deeper underlying imbalances in your biology.
If this topic interests you there are three talks in the upcoming Chronic Headache and Migraine summit that you won’t want to miss:
- Food and Mood expert Trudy Scott and I discuss the role of neurotransmitters like serotonin in migraine headaches and ways you can naturally stabilize serotonin without turning to pharmaceuticals.
- Keesha Ewers, author of Solving The Autoimmune Puzzle, talks about the vicious cycle that can occur in a relationship when your headaches force you to retreat in pain but part of your stress and emotional pain is a lack of connection and how to break out of this cycle.
- World renown researcher Niki Gratrix talks with us about the role of emotional trauma and adverse childhood events in chronic headaches and migraine. We talk about the biological stress response that your body goes through, every time this trauma is triggered as well as what you can do now to reset your thought patterns and heal your body.
Save your seat today for the Chronic Headache and Migraine Summit featuring over 30 holistic and functional health experts sharing their clinical experience and the most effective strategies for getting to the root causes of headaches. The videos will be available to watch and download starting July 10th, but the free viewing period is only from July 10-17, 2017 so sign up now to make sure you don’t miss out.
About Erin:
With her 4-step Migraine Freedom™ plan, Erin Knight helps women who desire natural solutions providing freedom from chronic migraines, so that they can experience a dramatic increase in productivity and thrive in the active life that they dream of.
Having suffered with chronic migraines in high school and into her first career as a process improvement engineer, Erin is sympathetic to the impact that headaches have on our work and social life. After climbing back from a massive burnout in her late 20’s using strategies from functional medicine and realizing her migraines disappeared as she balanced her hormones and fixed her digestion, she started her company Engineering Radiance to help women who are frustrated with the conventional management of migraines and want to get to the root causes.
Erin has her Masters of Engineering from the University of Michigan and is trained in Functional Diagnostic Nutrition™ and nutrigenomics. After a decade guiding Fortune 500 teams through root cause analysis, she now applies these problem-solving skills to our most complex system – the human body.
Erin shares implementation strategies for achieving radiant health through online classes, corporate workshops and 1:1 consulting and has a goal of helping a million women discover freedom from their migraine headaches.
