Some of them start in your neck. Many of them do not.
It starts at the base of your skull. A tightness that creeps up the back of your head, and by late afternoon it has settled somewhere behind one eye.
It is usually the same side. It is usually worse on the days you sat the longest. You have noticed that turning your head feels stiff when it is bad, though you would not have connected the two.
You have probably stopped counting them. Most people who come in with this have had headaches for years and have arrived at a routine: take something, push through, hope the next day is better.
Worth being straight about
Headache is a symptom, not a diagnosis, and there are a lot of things behind it. Migraine is its own condition with its own biology. Tension-type headache is different again. Some headaches come from medication use, some from hormonal patterns, some from dehydration or sleep, and a small number come from something that needs medical attention quickly.
There is also a group of headaches where the upper neck is involved. They have their own pattern.
We are not going to give you a way to tell which one you have from a website. That is genuinely not something you can work out from where you are sitting, and the confident version of that advice is how people spend years treating the wrong thing.
What this page covers is the neck connection, because it is the part most people have never had explained.
What is actually in there
Sensory nerves from the upper neck and sensory nerves from the face and head arrive at the same place in the brainstem. That region is called the trigeminocervical nucleus, and it is where information from two different territories converges onto shared pathways.
The practical consequence is that the brain does not always keep the two separate. Input arriving from the upper neck can be experienced as pain in the head, behind the eye, or across the temple, even though the neck is where it originated. This convergence is well described in the neuroanatomy and it is the basis for why headache and neck are discussed together at all.
That is a mechanism, not a diagnosis. It explains how a neck can produce head pain. It does not tell you that yours does.
The load it carries
The further your head sits forward of your shoulders, the more the muscles at the base of your skull work to keep your eyes where they need to be. On a long desk day that is hours of low-level contraction in a small area, with no variation and very little recovery.
Then add the things that stack on top. A jaw that clenches through a stressful week. A phone held low. Screens at the wrong height. A night of poor sleep in an awkward position.
None of it is dramatic. That is the point. The load that produces this is boring, and boring load is the kind nobody counts.
Why the threshold got crossed this week
Wine, weather, a stressful Tuesday, a skipped meal. Triggers are real, and they are also the last straw rather than the cause. The more useful question is why the same glass of wine was fine in March and is not fine now.
A heavy stretch at work. More screen time. A period of clenching. Long drives. A new desk.
A run of poor sleep. Skipped meals. Dehydration. A month where the pressure has been constant and recovery has been the first thing dropped.
Usually both. The trigger gets the blame because it is visible. The stack underneath it is what changed.
If you would rather skip ahead and have someone look at it, that is a reasonable place to start.
Book an assessmentWhy your capacity was thin
Load arrives, tissue responds, you recover, you carry on.
We describe what happens when recovery falls behind in three stages: adapting, borrowing and overloaded. The line between them is not how much you carry. It is how much you clear before the next lot arrives.
Headaches are often an early signal that the borrowing has been going on for a while, because the upper neck is where posture, tension and sleep all meet.
Read how your body carries loadWhat we check
Where it starts, where it travels, what makes it worse, what time of day it arrives, and what your neck is doing while it happens. A severe headache is not necessarily a mechanical one, and a mild recurring one is not necessarily harmless.
That pattern is not something you can assess from the inside, partly because you have been living with it long enough that it has stopped being unusual to you.
What you do, how you sleep, what your body has already been through, and what has changed recently.
How far the region moves, how it moves, and what the surrounding structures are doing to compensate.
Reflexes, sensation and strength, to understand how well the system is communicating.
Where we need to understand structure before making a decision, we say so and explain why.
We tell you what we found, what it means in plain English, and what we think is worth doing about it. You decide from there.
Go to an emergency department immediately if you have a headache that comes on suddenly and severely, reaching full intensity within seconds or a minute, or a headache with fever and a stiff neck, or a headache alongside confusion, weakness, difficulty speaking, or changes to your vision.
See your GP promptly for a headache that follows a head injury, a headache that is clearly different from your usual pattern, a new headache if you are over fifty, a headache that is worse when lying down or wakes you from sleep, or a headache that is becoming steadily more frequent or severe.
If you are not sure, ask us. We would rather send you to the right person than be the wrong one.
Sensory information from the upper neck and from the head converge on shared pathways in the brainstem, which is why neck input can be experienced as head pain. Whether that is what is happening for you is a separate question, and it is one worth having assessed rather than assumed.
Migraine is its own condition and it is not what this page describes. Some people have both, which is part of why headaches are worth assessing properly rather than sorted into one category.
Load that accumulates through a day tends to produce symptoms that arrive later in it. That is a pattern, not a diagnosis, and it is the sort of detail worth bringing to an appointment.
Not a decision to make from a website, and not one to make alone. Frequent use of headache medication can itself contribute to headache patterns, which is worth discussing with your GP or pharmacist.
An assessment at Wild Chiropractic in Shenton Park starts with a history, a look at how you move, and a conversation about what we found.
Book an assessmentWhat happens first
