Head Pressure, Fullness, Tension and Anxiety
Head pressure, such as unusual fullness, heaviness, tension, and pressures in the head, are common anxiety symptoms, including anxiety and panic attack symptoms.
Many anxious people experience head pressure, fullness, heaviness, and tension due to their anxiety.
This article explains the relationship between anxiety and head pressure symptoms.
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Head Pressure, Fullness, Tension, Heaviness Common Anxiety Symptom Descriptions
- Unusual pressure on or in your head.
- Unusual tightness or headachy pressure in the head.
- Your head feels unusually heavy inside, as if your brain has gotten thicker and heavier.
- There is an unusual “fullness” in your head.
- It feels like there is a tight band around your head.
- This pressure can be felt in the head, brain, temples, or there is tension or pressure on the forehead, in the back of the head, or on top of the shoulders.
- Feel as if there is an inflated balloon in your head.
Head pressure can affect one area of the head or brain, shift and affect another area or areas, migrate and affect many areas, and seem like it repeatedly affects the entire head or brain.
Head pressure can:
- Occur occasionally, frequently, or persistently.
- Precede, accompany, or follow an escalation of other anxiety symptoms or occur by itself.
- Precede, accompany, or follow a period of nervousness, anxiety, fear, and stress, or occur "out of the blue" for no reason.
- Range in intensity from mild, to moderate, to severe.
- Come in waves where it’s strong one moment and eases off the next.
- Occur for a while, subside, and then return for no reason.
- Change from day to day, moment to moment, or remain as a constant background during your struggle with anxiety disorder.
This symptom can seem more noticeable when undistracted, resting, trying to sleep, or waking up.
All the above combinations and variations are common.
To see if anxiety might be playing a role in your symptoms, rate your level of anxiety using our free one-minute instant results Anxiety Test, Anxiety Disorder Test, or Hyperstimulation Test.
The higher the rating, the more likely anxiety could be contributing to or causing your anxiety symptoms, including feeling like impending doom symptoms.
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Causes
Medical Advisory
Talk to your doctor about all new, changing, persistent, and returning symptoms as some medical conditions and medications can cause anxiety-like symptoms.
When head pressure is solely attributed to anxiety, there can be many causes. For instance:
1. The Stress Response
Anxious behavior, such as worry, activates the stress response. The stress response secretes stress hormones into the bloodstream, where they travel to targeted locations to bring about specific physiological, psychological, and emotional changes that quickly prepare the body for immediate emergency action–to fight or flee. This survival reaction is often referred to as the fight or flight response [1][2].
Visit our “Stress Response” article for more information about its many changes.
Some of the stress response changes include:
- Quickly converts the body’s energy reserves into “fuel” (blood sugar) to instantly boost energy.
- Increases heart rate, respiration, and metabolism due to the boost in energy, increasing blood pressure.
- Stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, increasing nervous system activity to be more sensitive and reactive to danger.
- Heightens most of the body’s senses to be more aware of danger.
- Increases activity in the amygdala (the brain’s fear center) and decreases activity in the prefrontal cortex (the rationalization area of the brain) so that our attention is focused on the threat and away from thoughts that could be distracting.
- Shunts blood to parts of the body vital to survival, such as the brain, arms, legs, muscles, and vital organs, and away from parts less essential for survival, such as the stomach, digestive system, and skin. It accomplishes this by constricting blood vessels in certain parts of the body and dilating them in others.
- Tightens muscles to make the body more resilient to injury.
- Increases respiration to accommodate the increase in heart rate.
To name a few.
Many of these changes can cause head pressure, such as:
- Increased blood pressure due to increased heart rate, respiration, and metabolism.
- Tight muscles, including in the head, neck, and shoulders, can cause pressure in the head.
- Blood shunting to the brain can cause a pressure-like feeling in the head.
- Increased nervous system activity can make it feel like there is pressure in the head.
- A sudden boost of energy can also create a “head pressure” feeling.
Any combination of these changes can cause a “head pressure” feeling.
Acute anxiety and the accompanying stress response are common causes of acute head pressure symptoms.
2. Hyperstimulation
When stress responses occur infrequently, the body recovers relatively quickly from the physiological, psychological, and emotional changes.
However, when stress responses occur too frequently, such as from overly anxious behavior, the body doesn’t completely recover. Incomplete recovery can cause the body to remain in a state of semi-stress response readiness, which we call “stress-response hyperstimulation” since stress hormones are powerful stimulants.
Hyperstimulation is also often referred to as “hyperarousal,” “HPA axis dysfunction,” or “nervous system dysregulation” [3][4][5][6][7]
Visit our “Hyperstimulation” article for more information about the many ways hyperstimulation can affect the body and how we feel.
Hyperstimulation can cause the changes of an active stress response even though a stress response hasn’t been activated. Odd pressures and fullness in the head are common indications of hyperstimulation (chronic stress).
But that’s not all. Hyperstimulation can cause head pressure symptoms in other ways. For instance, hyperstimulation can cause:
- Nervous System Excitation and Dysregulation: A chronically stimulated nervous system can act erratically and cause all kinds of nervous, sensory, somatic, muscular, and skeletal system problems, such as pressure feelings inside the head.
- Homeostatic Dysregulation: Homeostasis is the body’s ability to automatically maintain a stable internal environment despite changes in the external environment. Hyperstimulation can cause homeostatic dysregulation, leading to internal regulation problems, affecting the nervous, sensory, circulatory, skeletal, muscular, somatic, and vestibular systems, causing problems with head pressure symptoms.
- Hormone changes: Hormones play a crucial role in homeostasis and many bodily functions, which can affect the nervous, sensory, circulatory, skeletal, muscular, somatic, and vestibular systems. Since stress hormones affect other hormones, hyperstimulation can affect all these symptoms, causing a wide range of symptoms, including head pressure and tension.
- Sleep disruption and fatigue: Hyperstimulation can interfere with sleep and tax the body’s energy resources harder and faster than normal. Sleep disruption and fatigue can affect all the bodily systems, causing head pressure, fullness, and tension symptoms.
As long as the body is hyperstimulated, it can exhibit chronic head pressure, fullness, and tension symptoms.
Hyperstimulation is a common cause of chronic head pressure, fullness, and tension symptoms.
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3. Other Factors
Other factors can create stress and cause anxiety-like symptoms, as well as aggravate existing anxiety symptoms, including:
- Medication
- Recreational drugs
- Stimulants
- Sleep deprivation
- Fatigue
- Hyper and hypoventilation
- Low blood sugar
- Nutritional deficiencies
- Dehydration
- Hormone changes
- Pain
Select the relevant link for more information.
4. High blood pressure
High blood pressure can also cause a feeling of pressure in the head. When blood pressure rises, it puts more pressure on the arteries, including those in the brain, which can be felt as pressures, tingling, or pain in the head.
If you are experiencing this symptom, it’s best to discuss it with your doctor to ensure it isn’t being caused by high blood pressure.
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Treatment
Other factors
When head pressure, fullness, and tension are caused or aggravated by other factors, addressing those factors can reduce and eliminate these symptoms.
Active Stress Response
When head pressure, fullness, and tension are caused by anxious behavior and active stress response, calming yourself will end the stress response and its changes. As your body recovers from the active stress response, this anxiety symptom will subside.
Keep in mind it can take up to 20 minutes or more for the body to recover from a major stress response. But this is normal and needn’t be a cause for concern.
Hyperstimulation
When this symptom is caused by hyperstimulation, eliminating hyperstimulation will cause head pressure symptoms to subside.
You can reduce and eliminate hyperstimulation by:
- Containing anxious behavior.
- Reducing stress.
- Regular deep relaxation.
- Relaxed diaphragmatic breathing.
- Regular light to moderate exercise.
- Getting regular good sleep.
- Eating a healthy diet of whole and natural foods.
- Avoiding stimulants.
- Passively-accepting your symptoms until they subside.
- Being patient as your body recovers.
Visit our “60 Natural Ways To Reduce Stress” article for more ways to reduce stress.
Recovery Support members can read chapters 5,6, 7, and 14 for more ways to reduce stress.
As the body recovers from hyperstimulation, it stops sending symptoms of hyperstimulation, including head pressure, fullness, heaviness, and tension.
However, eliminating hyperstimulation can take much longer than most people think, causing symptoms to linger longer than expected.
As long as the body is hyperstimulated, even slightly, it can present symptoms, including this one.
Since worrying and becoming upset about anxiety symptoms stress the body, these behaviors can interfere with and stall recovery.
Passively accepting your symptoms – allowing them to persist without reacting to, resisting, worrying about, or fighting them – while doing your recovery work will cause their cessation in time.
Acceptance, practice, and patience are key to recovery.
Since the body can take a long time to recover from hyperstimulation, it's best to faithfully work at your recovery despite the lack of apparent progress. If you persevere with your recovery work, you will succeed.
You also have to do your recovery work FIRST before your body can recover. The cumulative effects of your recovery work will produce results down the road. And hyperstimulation has to diminish before symptoms can subside.
Eliminating hyperstimulation will bring results in time!
Recovery Support
The Recovery Support area of our website contains thousands of pages of important self-help information to help individuals overcome anxiety disorder, hyperstimulation, and symptoms.
Due to the vast amount of information, including a private Discussion Forum, many of our Recovery Support members consider it their online recovery support group.
Therapy
Unidentified and unaddressed underlying factors cause issues with anxiety. As such, they are the primary reason why anxiety symptoms persist.
Addressing your underlying factors (Level Two recovery) is most important if you want lasting success.
Addressing Level Two recovery can help you:
- Contain anxious behavior.
- Become unafraid of anxiety symptoms and the strong feelings of anxiety.
- End anxiety symptoms.
- Successfully address the underlying factors that so often cause issues with anxiety.
- End what can feel like out-of-control worry.
All our recommended anxiety therapists have had anxiety disorder and overcame it. Their personal experience with anxiety disorder and their Master's Degree and above professional training give them insight other therapists don't have.
If you want to achieve lasting success over anxiety disorder, any one of our recommended therapists would be a good choice.
Working with an experienced anxiety disorder therapist is the most effective way to treat anxiety disorder, especially if you have persistent symptoms and difficulty containing anxious behavior, such as worry.[7][8][9]
In many cases, working with an experienced therapist is the only way to overcome stubborn anxiety.
Research has shown that therapy is the most effective treatment for anxiety disorder, and distance therapy (via phone or the Internet) is equally, if not more effective, than face-to-face in-person therapy.[10][11][12]
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Common Anxiety Symptoms
Additional Resources
- For a comprehensive list of Anxiety Disorders Symptoms Signs, Types, Causes, Diagnosis, and Treatment.
- Anxiety and panic attacks symptoms can be powerful experiences. Find out what they are and how to stop them.
- How to stop an anxiety attack and panic.
- Free online anxiety tests to screen for anxiety. Two minute tests with instant results. Such as:
- Anxiety 101 is a summarized description of anxiety, anxiety disorder, and how to overcome it.
Return to our anxiety disorders signs and symptoms page.
anxietycentre.com: Information, support, and therapy for anxiety disorder and its symptoms, including head pressure, fullness, tension, and heaviness anxiety symptoms.
References
1. Chu, Brianna, et al. “Physiology, Stress Reaction.” StatPearls, 7 May 2024.
2. Godoy, Livea, et al. "A Comprehensive Overview on Stress Neurobiology: Basic Concepts and Clinical Implications." Frontiers In Behavioral Neuroscience, 3, July 2018.
3. Elbers, Jorina, et al. "Wired for Threat: Clinical Features of Nervous System Dysregulation in 80 Children." Pediatric Neurology, Dec 2018.
4. Yaribeygi, Habib, et al. “The Impact of Stress on Body Function: A Review.” EXCLI Journal, Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors, 2017.
5. Z, Fatahi, et al. "Effect of acute and subchronic stress on electrical activity of basolateral amygdala neurons in conditioned place preference paradigm: An electrophysiological study." Behavioral Brain Research, 29 Sept. 2017.
6. Teixeira, Renata Roland, et al. “Chronic Stress Induces a Hyporeactivity of the Autonomic Nervous System in Response to Acute Mental Stressor and Impairs Cognitive Performance in Business Executives.” Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports., U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2015.
7. Hofmann, Stefan G., et al. “The Efficacy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Review of Meta-Analyses.” Cognitive Therapy and Research, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 1 Oct. 2012.
8. Leichsenring, Falk. “Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy the Gold Standard for Psychotherapy?” JAMA, American Medical Association, 10 Oct. 2017.
9. DISCLAIMER: Because each body is somewhat chemically unique, and because each person will have a unique mix of symptoms and underlying factors, recovery results may vary. Variances can occur for many reasons, including due to the severity of the condition, the ability of the person to apply the recovery concepts, and the commitment to making behavioral change.
10. Kingston, Dawn.“Advantages of E-Therapy Over Conventional Therapy.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 11 Dec. 2017.
11. Markowitz, John, et al. “Psychotherapy at a Distance.” Psychiatry Online, March 2021.
12. Thompson, Ryan Baird, "Psychology at a Distance: Examining the Efficacy of Online Therapy" (2016). University Honors Theses. Paper 285.