Yoshinori Sugiura, an associate professor at the Hiroshima University Graduate School, showed that migraine headaches are common in people who tend to have negative thoughts like worry (negative repetitive thoughts).It was also found that negative recurrent thoughts can relieve headaches in the short term, but they make them worse in the long term.
Previous research has shown that psychological problems such as anxiety and depression are associated with primary headaches.However, it was unclear whether negative recurrent thoughts increased headache severity in the nonclinical group.Negative repetitive thoughts have recently received attention as a common factor in many psychological problems, such as anxiety and depression.
This time, we conducted a questionnaire survey (twice about a month apart) on 426 university students (220 females, 204 males, 2 non-responders).We also investigated the elucidation of the temporal relationship that the initial measured repetitive thoughts affect headaches one month later.
The results showed that people with a higher tendency for negative repetitive thoughts were 2.48 times more likely to suffer from migraine headaches.Also, looking at the process by which negative repetitive thoughts aggravate, we find that while negative repetitive thoughts can relieve headaches in the early stages (when the problem is still being dealt with), they worsen headaches as they become more chronic. It was also shown that
Since negative repetitive thoughts make headaches worse, psychotherapy that reduces repetitive thoughts is also effective in relieving headaches, rather than using painkillers that can lead to chronic headaches.Furthermore, since repetitive thinking can alleviate headaches, at least in the short term, it may be possible to manage headaches more easily through the use of "thoughts."
