I can only assume it would have been even worse without my furry early warning system, but within an hour my headache was yowling more than the cat, who was by then fed and settled in the “cat sauna.” Late in her life, she became fond of sleeping in the bathroom with the heat lamp on - presumably it was therapeutic for her cranky ol’ body. It was already spreading across the back of my skull like a toxic spill. Normally I would have been irritated, but on that day she was doing me a favour, because my neck was in a crazy position and I was cooking up a violent headache. My cat once woke me up with a particularly insistent feed-me-now yowl. For example … A simple success story: treating a tension headache with suboccipital massage If I could have only one group of muscles to get massaged regularly, this is the one I’d choose. Both of these muscle groups routinely harbour trigger points that are linked to headaches and migraines, 1 2 3 and I personally believe they cause a great many headaches - maybe more than any other cause. They function together and dysfunction together. Nevertheless, they do: muscle studies have shown that the jaw muscles behave much like they would in a more normal push-pull relationship with the suboccipitals. But the jaw muscles do not affect the spinal joints, and cannot directly work against/with the suboccipitals to balance the head.

Generally speaking you’ve got one muscle or group of muscles that pulls one way, and then muscles on the other side of the joint that pull the other way. The suboccipitals are also partly “antagonized” (balanced) by the jaw muscles.

Back of eyeballs ache