Headaches and High Blood Pressure

When you ask someone what are the signs of high blood pressure, almost all individuals will mention headaches as the most distinctive, followed by dizziness. However high blood pressure occurs with no specific signs or symptoms, and several people have hypertension for many years without even knowing it.

Although, many people suffering from high blood pressure also experience headache this condition occurs when the blood pressure readings go too high, otherwise, headaches occur simply as they do for the rest of us, suffering or not from hypertension.

It is popular belief to think that physical effort made while you are experiencing high blood pressure leads to headache. This is not true either. As an example, lifting a heavy weight, only raises your blood pressure by 30 or 40 mm Hg, but does not cause headache, that is the reason why most doctors recommend staying active by exercising.

Feeling flushed or get red in the face are not signs of high blood pressure, nor can they warn in advance that a headache is approaching. When your blood pressure goes too high, you can experience temporary sleep disturbance, emotional upsets, and headaches that disappear as soon as the medication acts.

Headache is caused by muscle tension, and occurs in healthy people or individuals suffering from any other condition, and not necessarily high blood pressure. When a muscle is tensed for long periods, it starts to hurt, and what contributes to headaches is the chronic tension in the neck muscles or the scalp.

A study revealed that 3 out of 104 people suffering from high blood pressure, but being unaware of it, admitted they had headaches, although another 14 admitted later to this fact after discovering their hypertension. Other 96 individuals were told that they had high blood pressure, and 71 of them admitted they had headaches.

Signs of high blood pressure from this research demonstrate that headache occur because people develop mental programming. If they have high blood pressure, they must suffer from headaches... but if they ignore or do not realize they have hypertension, headaches do not occur.

Worry is the main leading factor to headaches associated to high blood pressure, but when headaches occur naturally during a stage of hypertension, treating high blood pressure with medications relieves headaches and other symptoms associated with it, like muscular tension.

For over 100 years, the belief that high blood pressure causes headache, or that headaches are a part of the signs of high blood pressure, is not easy to convince people about the inaccuracy of this idea.

The fact that migraines occur more often in persons with normal blood pressure is not enough to change this long-time association between headaches and high blood pressure.