My body is a mishmash of pains predominately caused by the bad posture I inherited from my gene pool. I have had TMJ (an intermittent or chronic musculoskeletal disorder of your jaw motion) since my twenties and last year (generalised pain and muscle stiffness).
My feet flattened during the pregnancy of my first and only child making exercise and walking on my feet often painful, then last year I developed chronic tension headaches, impairing my ability to work and concentrate.
chronic headaches are the most widespread headache disorder, with recent international studies showing an average prevalence of 36 per cent for men and 42 per cent for women.
In exploring remedies, I’ve found professionals like physiotherapists or osteopaths can help.
Exercise provides blood flow to your muscles and is good for your health but if your mind is stressed on all you have to do tomorrow and you’re not focusing on the movement of your muscles, you might pull up worse than you started.
Reaching for painkillers is easy, but often comes with its drawbacks such as developing a reliance on them. A found people struggling with chronic back pain and headaches are consuming up to five times the recommended daily dose of over-the-counter codeine painkillers.
I can see how that can happen. I rarely use painkillers because my stomach can be sensitive to them, but if I do take paracetamol and it masks my pain, I tend to overdo things and then it returns like a tonne of bricks.
I have also tried stronger relaxants but they impair my state of mind.
Afterwards, as I lay there, exhausted and pleased, I noticed that not only was my entire body completely relaxed and free from joint pain, but that my headache had vanished.
Not long ago I was in day three of a terrible tension headache when my boyfriend and I happened to get busy under the sheets.
Afterwards, as I lay there, exhausted and pleased, I noticed that not only was my entire body completely relaxed and free from joint pain, but that my headache had vanished.
Had I just found the key to my pain relief? Could sex actually be good for me as opposed to a sin or wrong unless married as it so taught by my Greek Orthodox culture?
Rather than avoiding sex when I was in pain, I started making moves on my boyfriend to see if there was in fact a correlation.
I found that most of the time, it relieved me completely.
When I dug around a little further, I came across which found that a tumble in the sheets can provide partial or full relief of head pain.
When you orgasm, chemicals are released into your body, one of those being endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers.
Because they are released through the central nervous system, it was thought that they can possibly reduce or even eliminate a headache.
In the , more than a third of migraine patients had a sexual experience during an attack and out of these patients, almost two in three reported an improvement.
Now, rather than avoiding sex if I have a headache, I go for it, shedding all my inhibitions; and all the tension in my head, my neck, and shoulders reduces or is completely gone.
But this only happens if I am being mindful and in the moment when I am having sex. If I’m annoyed at my boyfriend or stressed out then I may just further inflict myself.
It’s important to go into the sex with the aim of relaxing your body and freeing it of its tension.
Sex is great, it is good for you, and it is nothing to be ashamed of.
is a writer and performer and the author of Love and F**k Poems. She will be giving talks on cultural and religious sexual repression at SEXPO Sydney 2018.
