Struggling with tension headaches and neck pain

[Freedom]

I found TMS literature almost 10 years ago when I turned 30. Started with Dr Sarnos Healing Back Pain, and have read many others(SteveO,Gordon,etc). It's been a while since I've had pain that has been consuming. Perhaps around 6 weeks ago I started getting tension headaches and neck pain. I had removed my memory foam topper and thought maybe it was because of that. So I bought a different one, and bought 6 new pillows and tried them all but it didn't seem to make the pain go away. My blood pressure is not high. I'm not sure if it's something else medical, but I keep wanting to go back to trying different pillows as the tension headaches are always after waking up with neck pain.

On days when it's really bad, I have to just lay in bed. Of course I feel kind of guilty about this because I have so much to do. I turned 40 a couple months ago. Definitely feel very behind in life - in fact I feel like I'm about 10 years behind in life. It's almost as if I believe I started working hard later in life, and now I must now make simultaneous progress at two or three times the normal speed. to catch up. The past couple years I've been working very hard to try to "catch up." I'm constantly burnt out, but I feel like I have no other option but to do this to try to reach my goals. I feel like I'm weak if I don't. I also get pressure constantly from parents.

Also, family members, including my parents, have had their own health issues and I've had to do some caretaking, and since they are not mentally "there" I feel in some sense like I've already lost them.

I'm afraid of the future, financially with the job markets, with AI, inflation etc. I generally feel a continuous sense of being "unsafe" as far as my future goes. Writing this all out, wow it's a lot.

Other symptoms I've had over the past 6 months are a lot of skin issues, burning sensations different parts of body/skin including ass, redness and flaking on different parts of face, etc. It's like my brain learned that lower back pain with no injury is probably TMS, but it can't fully believe it with some of these other symptoms.

 

[Adam Coloretti (coach)]

Other symptoms I've had over the past 6 months are a lot of skin issues, burning sensations different parts of body/skin including ass, redness and flaking on different parts of face, etc. It's like my brain learned that lower back pain with no injury is probably TMS, but it can't fully believe it with some of these other symptoms.

This isn't a knock and I understand where you're coming from, but when you say that your brain can't fully believe it - you did go straight to the physical explanation and the trying of the pillows - so your brain didn't really have a choice but to interpret that as there must be something physically wrong. That's not blame, but rather to reinforce that you have the power here and your brain will follow you, rather than it being its own foreign force that you have no control over (if that were true, then healing feels unlikely and that it's up to chance, which it isn't).

Based on what you said (it is a lot as you said), it sounds highly likely that all the symptoms are TMS (assuming they've been checked by a doctor), so you're in the right place

 

[Freedom]

Question: After seeing multiple doctors, how do you distinguish a true physical cause vs TMS?

One of the tricky things with checking with a Doctor, is they can say for instance that something on an MRI is causing the backpain, but we know from literature many of these show up as we age and there are many people with them who do not have pain.

So it's hard to distinguish sometimes what causes issues.

For the skin stuff, dermatologists never seem to have a good explanation, they just prescribe one thing after another and none of them seem to do anything even after 4-8 weeks.

With the tension headaches and neck tightness, I know they will do the same. I've been to Doctors so many times for so many different symptoms and they either falsely assume its because of something, or they have no idea and just keep prescribing stuff. Then they tell me to do PT and I do that for 3-6 months with no improvement. In my personal experience, probably 85-90% of issues I've had in the past decade (outside of something like a flu, or a cut/infection), have been mindbody.