“Why am I so stressed?” – fighting headaches with resilience

Stress is an undisputed factor in the development of headaches and migraine. Relaxing and calming measures are important pillars of migraine and headache prevention, and current research supports this approach. According to unanimous advice, people with headaches should create balance when there is too much stress on the agenda in time to reduce the risk of severe headache and migraine attacks. In this article, we would like to explore in slightly more detail why stress is so personal; we will ask why stress affects different people for completely different reasons and show what, according to current studies, can benefit all affected people.

Resilience is as varied as people are

We all know that one person who always seems to remain calm. Difficult, muddled, or hectic situations, that even have us sweating a little, leave them completely unfazed. Others, however, appear to be real bags of nerves, who very quickly reach their limit when something does not go to plan. Everything quickly becomes “too much” for them, and many situations make them feel overwhelmed.

Clearly, all people are different in this respect. Resistance to internal and external overload varies. Human biologists and psychologists refer in this context to a person’s “resilience”. The term stems from the Latin “resilire” which can be translated as “to spring back”. This word makes vividly clear what we mean here. High resilience helps us to brave adverse circumstances, hide our losses and disappointments, and to recover rapidly from illness and exhaustion. We could also describe resilience as a kind of “spiritual elasticity”.

How can we find our personal resilience?

Resilience already develops in the early years of childhood when we learn, in ways appropriate to our age, to cope with unexpected, disappointing, or otherwise challenging circumstances. It is never statically fixed but develops in a situation and age-dependent way, based on the different life stages. If a person’s resilience is not strongly pronounced, this can have significant effects on their general wellbeing. The effects of exceptional demands will then trigger a more intense feeling of stress. Phylogenetically speaking, we could say that when resilience is not very pronounced, this moves us more towards a flight response, while high resilience allows us to react to challenges in a relaxed and confident manner and in emergencies even lets us shift into “fight mode”.

The different factors of resilience

The factors which determine our resilience are varied. Generally speaking, they can be described as aspects of our personality. This includes, for example:

• Willingness and ability to communicate
• Self-efficacy (the conviction that you can handle problems and crises on your own)
• Life experience (the knowledge that crises will occur and can be overcome)
• Humour
• Impulse control (this helps you not to overreact to incoming information or stimuli)
• Empathy
• Positive self-perception
• Positive and constructive culture around mistakes (Culture around mistakes as feedback culture; mistakes are not ignored or punished, but understood as opportunities to further develop ourselves)
• Causal analysis and goal orientation (realistic assessment of the situation and forming your response to it in a way that brings you closer to your goal)

Furthermore, there is a stance which could be described as “treating yourself with gentleness and understanding”; it helps enormously if we do not overwork ourselves or treat ourselves too self-critically.

A simple guide made by the American Psychological Association can make learning psychological resilience easier. It comprises three pillars:

• People should take good care of themselves
• They should not question their own competence and abilities
• They should look after their social contacts, to cultivate a positive and supportive environment. Good relationships with friends are helpful.

Doomed to be stressed?

Once we are equipped with our own personal resilience, we will now encounter different potential stress factors in our daily life, this means circumstances which could put us into a state of stress. Depending on our resilience and on the amount and intensity of the current stress factors, we will react either more or less stressed. Now, one might say that many potential daily stress factors cannot simply be thought away, because we encounter them every day in a very real sense. As a result, one could conclude that we are therefore doomed to keep experiencing “our” stress in the same way. However, research shows that, in addition to sustained work on your personal resilience factors (which is no doubt productive, but can sometimes be laborious), your own stress levels can be markedly lowered, especially through a particular regulatory device: regular islands of rest from the daily hustle and bustle, otherwise known as “breaks”.

A consistent break culture is helpful

We frequently talk about a 24/7 world in connection with our “modern” times. Even though this term is a rhetorical exaggeration – clearly, no one can be active for 24 hours a day over 7 days – it documents a kind of wishful or demanding thinking in our everyday life. This is as unrealistic as it is dangerous and is therefore undesirable. Just as in music, pauses are part of the work, they are essential in daily life. And yet, we have forgotten how to take this to heart consistently and to implement this for ourselves. The importance of breaks and time off from daily life is widely underestimated.

South Korean researchers provide an example of how not to structure your breaks. They investigated the behaviour of employees at a big company during their lunch break. The group who had spent this time with activities on their mobile phones stated that this was a good distraction from work and that they were rested. However, it became clear that these employees were significantly more exhausted at the end of the working day than colleagues who had spent their break talking to each other or had simply gone out for fresh air without electronic devices.

These and other, similar reports seem to suggest that we sometimes need a real plan for our breaks and some kind of “instructions” on how we might organise these. Indeed, we can identify several dos and don’ts, through which we can make breaks into real time off which provides us with rest and relaxation.

The most important rule: switching off means switching off

As banal as it sounds: we will not relax if, for example, we are using our smartphone during our break from working on our computer. This is because both activities use the same areas of the brain, meaning we are effectively continuing to work, just with different devices. (You can find more on the phenomenon of digital stress here.) Even small breaks, referred to by experts as “micro breaks”, can be helpful for refreshing yourself for work. The one condition however is that you cannot be concentrating on other things during your break – this will drain your energy further.

The British psychologist Sandi Mann has even derived the theory from her study results that boredom truly makes people creative. In one study, she asked participants to copy out numbers from a phone book and, for a second run through, even just to read them. By this point, the participants’ brains were so underutilised that in the following exercise they came up with far more ideas than usual, due to a pent-up surplus of creativity. Following this paper, there were further studies with comparable results.

Take a break before it’s too late

Plan for regular and realistic breaks even at the beginning of an activity. You should allow yourself the first time-out relatively soon after beginning to work. This way, you are giving yourself the chance to remain energetic and receptive over a longer period of time. According to expert advice, only taking breaks when you feel tired is not a good idea. Specialists recommend taking 20 to 30-minute breaks after around 90 to 120 minutes of work. Because not all people are the same when it comes to this, it also helps to try out which intervals work particularly well for recuperation with which activity.

A further scientific study observed the behaviour of 95 employees from a business during their breaks, over a period of five days. This showed that the employees felt better mentally as well as physically if they already took their first breaks in the morning. A further result of the study: even a few minutes of time off, the aforementioned “microbreaks”, frequently had a noticeable recuperative effect.

A good tip emerging from numerous studies is to go outside for a few minutes. Depending on the location of your workplace, it can already be very useful to walk around the block or to go for a walk in a nearby park or green area. Even five to ten minutes of this kind of “outing” is enough to literally clear your head and get a mental refresher.

A new, old conclusion: breaks help to fight headaches

For years, researchers have been pointing towards the huge role that regular breaks – and not least moments of complete stillness – play for our head’s wellbeing, for good reason, and the findings of resilience research support these theories from a new perspective. Stress is and remains a key factor in the development of migraine and headaches, and a healthy break culture is one of the trump cards in stress management. However, practical experience in headache prevention also shows that taking breaks needs to be learned. Taking regular time-outs from the many tasks you wish to accomplish in daily life, during which you can immediately switch off, is much easier said than done. Particularly at the beginning, it can be difficult to truly clear your head during the times you have allotted for this. However, experience also shows that it is worth persevering. If you regularly leave your workplace to go on a short walk and also put your phone aside, you can gradually get your brain accustomed to leaving the day behind for several minutes – and also do a lot for headache prevention.