Headaches

Tension headaches that won't go away

A dull, band-like ache across the forehead or the back of the head that shows up most days and never fully lifts is one of the most common reasons people search for headache relief. It's usually filed under "tension headache" and treated as a stress or posture problem.

The standard advice is reasonable as a starting point: drink enough water, take regular breaks from screens, try an OTC pain reliever, manage stress. For a lot of people that's enough. For others, none of it moves the needle, and the headache just keeps coming back.

The Hypermobility Link Behind Chronic Tension Headaches

We're not doctors, and this isn't medical advice. It's a summary of what the published research says about a piece of the picture that often gets skipped: the neck.

In hypermobility studies, headache and neck pain show up together constantly. One survey found 66% of hypermobility patients reported headache or neck pain, and 53% reported both at once (Frontiers, PMC11581963). A separate study focused on hEDS specifically found headache in 86% of patients (Malhotra et al., 2020).

There's a mechanical explanation for why neck problems produce headaches, and it's been studied on its own terms, outside of hypermobility. Jull et al. (Cephalalgia, 2007) found that people with tension-type headache and other headache types showed measurably reduced neck movement and weaker control of the deep neck flexor muscles compared to people without headaches. A separate validation study found that testing for dysfunction in the upper neck joints could reliably distinguish cervicogenic headache from migraine and tension-type headache. Put together, these point to the same mechanism: joints and muscles in the upper neck that don't stabilize the way they should can refer pain upward as a headache that looks and feels like ordinary tension.

Here's the honest gap: no study has yet measured tension-type headache specifically within hEDS or HSD populations. The hEDS-specific number that does exist is for migraine, at 42.5%, which is a different headache type. So the neck-to-headache chain is well established in general headache research, but nobody has yet quantified how often it plays out in hypermobile joints specifically. That's a real hole in the evidence, not a reason to dismiss the connection.

What to bring to a doctor

If a headache has resisted the usual fixes, it's worth describing the neck alongside it: stiffness, a sense of instability, or pain that worsens with certain head positions. A doctor or physical therapist can assess cervical joint and muscle function directly, which isn't something that shows up on a standard headache workup. Our Neck Instability and Cervical Pain page and our Chronic Migraines page go into more depth on what that assessment can look like and what the hypermobility research says about each.

Sources referenced on this page

01Frontiers, headache and neck pain prevalence in hypermobility patients
02Malhotra et al. 2020, headache prevalence in hEDS
03Jull et al., Cephalalgia 2007, cervical dysfunction across headache types (link not yet sourced)
04Validation study, upper cervical joint dysfunction differentiating cervicogenic headache (link not yet sourced)