Headaches Behind Your Eyes? Here’s What’s Often Actually Causing Them

Dr. Amy Konvalin gives us insight:

The joints in your head

When thinking of joints we have in the body, most people think of the obvious ones: elbows, knees, shoulders, hips. Then they’ll remember the ankles and wrists, and maybe even the fingers and toes. Few will remember that the spine is one big stack of joints. And if asked to list the joints of the skull, most will say “mandible” and leave it at that.

But there are actually quite a few, and today we’ll talk about the sphenoid bone, a semi-floating butterfly-shaped bone (or wasp-shaped, if we believe the Greek name for it) behind the eyes. It articulates with eight other bones, and it is one of the main joining points of the neurocranium (the bit that contains your brain) to the facial skeleton.

The sphenoid bone and the sinuses can have some effect on each other, insofar as movement of the sphenoid bone can affect the surrounding muscles, while congestion, infection, or scarring in your sinuses can affect your eyes and head in general.

There are of course other also other potential factors that are more obvious; for example that tension, clicking, grinding, or locking in your jaw, along with tension in the small muscles at the base of your skull, can affect the muscles around your eyes because these areas are biomechanically connected. And yes, ongoing stress and the use of upper neck and shoulder muscles during breathing can increase tension around your neck, while poor positioning can cause the muscles beneath your skull to become overworked.

But you probably knew those latter things already, making the sphenoid bone considerations the real stand-out here.

In short, her advice is to start by assuming the muscles around your eyes are probably tight (based on the symptom of headaches behind the eyes), then examine all reasonable possibilities of why, rather than just massaging and hoping for the best, because temporarily relaxing the muscles will not fix the underlying problem.

For more on all of this, enjoy:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

Want to learn more?

You might also like:

Next-Level Headache Hacks

Take care!