How to get rid of a headache quickly!

Oh my goodness, the extreme heat of the past 3 days fried my brain and I really couldn’t think straight! Last night around 2 am I awoke with what I would call a tension type headache. I haven’t had a bad headache for several months, so this one took me by surprise. Happily, I remembered a technique I read about many years ago for how to get rid of a headache, if you can catch it early. I am sorry to say I cannot remember the name of the book or the author, but I do remember he was a clinical psychologist. Somehow, he developed this technique for his own use and he said it was remarkably effective if he could go to a quiet room by himself for 10 minutes or so, right after a headache started. In that quiet room, he would think about the headache and ask himself the following questions:

1) What colour is the headache?

2) What temperature is it?

3 )What substance is it made of?

4) If it was a 6 year old, what would it say?

5) If it was a well, how deep would it be?

I know these questions seem strange, but I have always found them effective to get rid of a headache, as long as I caught it within the first half hour.

I once asked a very wise art therapist, Ed Hagedorn, how the expressive arts heal. He said, “They allow us to externalize, transform and then reintegrate a problem or issue.” I think this is how asking ourselves the headache questions works too. We become able to see what the message of the headache is. Once we get the message, it seems the headache has served its purpose, and it can go away. Pretty cool, eh?

I invite you to write the headache questions down and keep them in a place where you can readily access them the next time a headache arises. I will be excited to hear whether or not they work for you too!