Head Pressure That Won't Go Away: What Mine Turned Out To Be

If you are reading this because you have been typing "pressure feeling in head" into Google, let me describe mine so you can hold yours up next to it. Mine lives mostly across the right jaw, top of my head and around the temples, a heaviness that makes me want to let my head fall sideways onto a desk and stay there.

Some days this tension is more behind my eyes and eyebrows, sometimes more in my jaw. It doesnt' move around too much and it never leaves.

On top of the pressure there is fog. "Foggy head" is an ugly little phrase for a real thing and the ugly phrase is all I have. When the pressure is bad I cannot hold a thought for more than a few seconds. The other way this happens is I hold 1500 thoughts at the same time and overthink. Neither is helping the pressure.

Tight head, heavy head, full head, the phrases people search with because nobody gives us a proper word for it.

I sometimes also call this a shithead because that's the feeling underneath. Shitty.

I used to think nobody else had this, partly because nobody ever said it the same way twice.

And it is constant. I cannot remember the last time relaxed my head, because there has not been one. It's always there, but the wolves are not around to feed this one to, unfortunately.

Constant, chronic head pressure is a completely different thing from a run of bad headaches.

It rearranges who you are while you are watching it happen. Every single day. It describes you in many other ways inside you than others might ever describe you from the outside.

Every doctor said roughly the same thing. Sometimes in Finnish, sometimes in English, always the same content: it is likely stress, we do not see anything on the scan, try this medication and come back to tell if it worked.

Some said the other obvious thing: you have bad posture when you use computer. Right...thanks for telling something I've only tried to correct about million times without any relief.

I tried the medication, the pressure was still there. One neurologist suggested magnetic treatment, which was new at the time, and I said yes because by then I was saying yes to anything. The process looked like a scene from a total recall and it did exactly nothing, if you don't count a wallet that was a lot lighter. It did not work either.

If you are searching "how to get rid of head pressure" or "what causes constant head pressure" right now, I understand exactly why. I am also one of those people. The search results push you at sinusitis and intracranial pressure and tumors, which you absolutely need to rule out, but almost nobody will mention the things I talk in this article. The difference is this: I actually live inside this every day. Someone who does not has no idea what people like us go through.

It's sort of funny to find people who say: "Stop thinking about your headache for a while...and maybe it will help"

I try to explain to them in my slightly sarcastic way: "Hey, if I stop thinking about my left hand, will it go away too?"

And then I'm usually relieved by silence...it won't is too obvious. Why would it be different with tension headaches or pressure in your head either?

This is the sentence it took me thirty years to be able to say: my head pressure and my anxiety are the same organism wearing two costumes. They are not cause and effect in any clean medical sense. They are two ends of the same rope getting pulled in opposite directions every time life puts weight on me that I do not know how to name.

"Head pressure and anxiety" is one of the questions I must have typed in some search engines way too many times, and it is the version the clinical sites handle worst.

They tell you to practice relaxation, which is useless advice if you cannot feel the difference between tension and rest inside your own body.

It's as useful to tell depressed person to stop being depressed. It's the worst advice to be honest and once again coming from someone who is uneasy to handle the person in front of them. If you've been depressed it's as good as flipping a bird. Same goes to tension headaches so don't dare to push your luck saying these sentences that are supposed to help anyone.

What nobody tells you is that if you grew up in a house where feelings were something you had quietly and got over, head pressure is often what the swallowing feels like from the inside.

The inner Freud in me just stopped me and said: "in this case that the pressure is a message about your mental state and it says you are and will always be screwed."

The self-help industry, which I lived inside for three decades and wrote a book for at one point, sold me the opposite message. They said, just say your affirmations and visualize what you want and raise your vibes. I believed all of that.

I tried to live by it for years. It did not fix anything, because you cannot affirmation your way out of a body that has been holding something for decades.

Telling a man who has been pushing harder his whole life to push harder with his mindset is not an answer.

The clinical name for what I have is dysthymia, also called persistent depressive disorder or high-functioning depression.

The head pressure is not a brain tumor even it feels something is growing inside my head.

It is the thirty-year bill for keeping quiet about what was happening inside me.

Or is it after all? Maybe all of this is the CAUSE, not the symptom. More about this very soon.

I am going to tell you the honest version of this because the whole post has been honest and I am not going to flinch at the end. The one thing that has taken the edge off the head pressure, reliably, for years, is beer. A lot of beer. One night a week, usually Friday, somewhere between fifteen and twenty-four bottles or until I pass out.

The rest of the week I am in the gym five times, sometimes six and hat is the real shape of it. Most days of training, one night of escape from the hell of living with the tension in my head. That one night is the only stretch of the week where the band around my skull goes quiet long enough to forget it exists. I know it sounds crazy but if you live with this condition for couple decades you do the thing that works.

I am not recommending this. Let me say that again so nobody can accuse me of pushing alcohol on anyone with chronic pain. I am not recommending this and it is a bad answer. It has its own long list of consequences and I am not going to pretend those are not real.

But I am also not going pretend it does not work, because that would be a lie and the whole point of this post is that I am beyond polite and beyond lies. One night a week of beer is the only thing I have found in thirty years that quiets the band around my head enough that I can sleep through it.

Nothing the doctors gave me came close. Not the painkillers, not the muscle relaxants, not the antidepressants, not the magnetic treatment, not the acupuncture or PT, not the massages. Beer did.

And I understand, without any judgment at all, people who end up addicted to things society does not find socially acceptable. I understand them because my one night a week works on the same mechanism theirs does, just with a drug that comes in a brown glass bottle and gets advertised on television.

The only real difference between me and a guy who cannot stop using something harder is that my substance is legal and sold in every shop, and I have so far been able to keep it to Friday. The mechanism underneath is the same. You find the one thing that turns the volume down on something nobody else can fix, and then you hold onto it, because the alternative is lying awake with a pressure that has no exit.

Both are killing me inside; the beer and the tension headache. I just try to joggle in the middle and not go completely 'cuckoo' in the process. And anyone judging me I can say I get your point, but if you don't have my symptoms you don't get mine.

Here is the math that ended up convincing me of something. If I had taken every dollar I have spent over thirty years on doctors, scans, medications, PT, massages, neurologists, psychiatrists, and magnetic treatments, and instead spent it all on beer, I could drink for two full lifetimes.

That is not a joke it's the real ratio and it makes me sad. The medical system took more money off me than my bad coping mechanism ever has, and my bad coping mechanism does a better job, one night a week, than any of them ever did.

There must be something wrong somewhere if things get like this.

To drive my point home even better, I'll tell you an example. And I need to ask you a question first. Have you ever seen the movie "The People vs Larry Flynt?" It's based on a true story of Larry Flynt and it has a LOT to do with pain and addiction.

There is a scene in that movie where Flynt, paralyzed from the waist down after being shot, is there with his drugs and everyone around him is calling him a junkie, and he says he is not a junkie, he is in pain.

He did drugs for 4-5 years and then he got operation that ended his pain. He stopped using drugs right away. He was in pain, the pain was gone, he didn't need the drugs. I found one clip from the movie after he wakes up from the operation and...well, see for yourself. It might open your eyes:

I remember that scene every time somebody wants to have a conversation about why a man who is in the gym five or six mornings a week is also the man who drinks twenty cans on Friday.

Well, I am not a junkie. I am in pain.

A head full of pressure that has been there since I was fifteen is pain, even if nobody else can see it, and even if the word most people use for it is "stress."

I could drink every day.

I could keep the volume down on the pressure every night of the week if I wanted to. I do not want to, and I have not, because I know exactly what that road looks like and I do not want to be on it. But I understand, without a shred of moralizing, the people who are.

They are not weak. They are in pain that somebody refused to treat and they found the one thing that works.

If I had the option right now of an operation that would end the head pressure, I am quite sure I would not need beer in those volumes any more. I would probably stop or not drink that much every week. There would be no reason.

That is the part nobody who has not lived inside chronic pain understands: the substance is not the problem. The pain is the problem. The substance is the patch. The same thing happened to Flynt in the movie. When the pain was finally managed, the drug lost most of its grip on him, because the thing it was answering was gone.

And by the way, today is Friday. Here is my stash.

There is one stretch in my whole life when the pressure went quiet for about twelve hours. It was 2001, the year my daughter was born.

Something softened the pressure eased, almost all the way, and then it came back. That is it. Twelve hours of free skull in thirty years. I bring it up because it is the only piece of evidence I have that the pressure can move at all. It told me there is a door somewhere. It told me the door is not in my brain. Then the door closed and I have not been able to find it again.

I know this might sound grim to some people who have chronic condition like me.

I can guarantee it's a living hell to wake up with the tension and go to sleep with the same tension. All I can say is I won't be giving up on my search for the solution.

For a long time my best guess was that the pressure is the body holding what the mind is not allowed to put down.

I grew up where feelings were something you dealt with by yourself and did not talk about.

I am divorced and now remarried. In my earlier marriage being sick was treated like something I was doing at my wife instead of something happening to me. It was abuse and left it's own flavor to my ever-flavorful list of things that add to the tension in my head...

I spent thirty years inside a self-help industry that kept telling me the problem was my mindset, which is a very convenient diagnosis because it means the fix is a book they are selling.

The problem was not my mindset. The problem, I thought, was that nobody had ever named what I was carrying, and my body had been carrying it anyway.

Doctors sometimes call this psychosomatic. People use that word to wave you off, like it means you are making it up. It does not mean that.

It just means the body is doing something because the mind is holding something it cannot put down.

Head pressure is one of the few ways a body can scream without sounding dramatic about it.

That theory explains a lot. It does not explain everything.

And after thirty years of explanations that explained a lot but did not move the pressure even a little, I have started looking in a different direction.

Nobody ever suggested this one to me either. I found it the same way I found dysthymia. By living with my symptoms and doing the research the doctors should have done.

Vascular Eagle syndrome is a real, physical, boring-mechanical condition. There is a thin piece of bone behind your ear called the styloid process. In most people it is about two and a half centimeters long. In some people it grows longer. When it gets long enough, it can press on the artery or vein, right there in the neck.

Compression vein can cause increased intracranial pressure. You know what this causes? You guessed that right: head pressure. The thing I have been typing about for two thousand words.

The symptoms line up with mine with a precision that is hard to ignore. Constant head pressure, one sided, Neck involvement. Symptoms that change with head position. Tinnitus. Pain that radiates into the jaw and the top of the skull.

An MRI without contrast will not see it. You need CT, usually with the head in rotation, to catch it properly.

That is why nobody found it. Nobody looked because it's extremely rare and most GP's or even specialists don't know much about it.

How rare is "rare"

This is where the math gets interesting, and where I stop feeling like a lunatic for self-diagnosing. There are about 8.3 billion people on this planet in 2026. About four percent of them have an elongated styloid process, which is the bone I described above.

Four percent of 8.3 billion is roughly 330 million people. That is the population of the United States walking around with the anatomy for this.

Of those 330 million, only about four percent develop the symptoms that qualify as Eagle syndrome.

Four percent of 330 million is around 13 million people. Thirteen million people worldwide with a condition most doctors have never diagnosed once in their career.

The vascular variant, the version I am looking at, is a smaller slice again. In the medical literature it represents somewhere between one in four and one in three of all Eagle cases.

So somewhere between three and four million people on Earth have the version that compresses an artery or a vein in the neck. Three to four million is roughly the population of Uruguay. That is a country's worth of humans walking around with head pressure nobody can explain, and a standard x-ray, MRI, or CT will never catch.

Nobody knows how many of those millions ever get diagnosed. The medical reviews I read kept using the same word: underdiagnosed. Most doctors have never seen a case. Most of them are not going to be the one who finds it in you.

The test that catches it reliably is CT angiography with the head rotated, and you do not get that test unless somebody in the room has already heard of the condition and thought of it.

I have spent three decades being told my pressure is stress, anxiety, depression, mindset, or nothing. Not one of those people sent me for a CT angiogram with cervical rotation. Not one of them said the words "styloid process" to me. There are millions of us and the system is set up to miss every single one.

The point is the one that keeps repeating in my life. The thing that was making me ill had a name and explanation the whole time. The doctors did not know it and definitely the self-help people did not know it. I had to find it myself, sitting at a computer at night, typing my own symptoms into a search bar and reading and researching until I found the condition that fits.

And I've become a research-machine at this point and I can proudly say I can quite easily organize studies and information in their own baskets of probability.

I am also a nightmare for physicians who treat me as I've many times needed to point them out to more updated information. (One example was when I told my physician that grip strenght measured with dynamometer is more important than blood pressure to mortality and longevity. This is a fact that my doctor needed to check to believe, but this is whole another story.)

By the way, I don't do the 'social media type of research' where half of the cases are cancer that can be cured with vinegar or baking soda.

I read the actual research papers and try to translate them from researcher to human language. It's not easy or fast but I don't have a choice.

I am not telling you I have vascular Eagle syndrome. I am telling you it is the first explanation I have come across where the symptom list does not have to be translated or softened to match mine.

The next step is getting the right scan, in the right position, by someone who knows what they are looking for. If it is that, there is a surgery that actually works. If it is not, at least I will have ruled out the most promising physical cause before I go back to the emotional one.

If you have been walking around with head pressure that will not go away, and your scans are clean, and your doctor has moved on, three things.

One, you are not making it up. The pressure is real even if no machine has seen it yet. No finding on a basic MRI is not the same thing as no problem.

Two, ask what is happening in your chest, your throat, your gut. If the emotional angle is where your history points, the pressure is often a symptom of something further down. Anxiety lives in the chest. Grief that never came out lives in the throat. Long slow depression lives in the gut. Head pressure is often where all that traffic ends up because the rest of the body has run out of room.

Three, do not stop at the emotional answer. Look up vascular Eagle syndrome, stylocarotid syndrome, jugular compression from an elongated styloid process, and any other physical condition that standard brain scans miss. The fact that your doctor never mentioned something does not mean it is not the thing. Sometimes the doctor just has not heard of it, and the standard MRI they ordered was the wrong tool for the job.

I am not going to tell you I cured mine, because I have not. The pressure is there right now while I am typing this. It was there when I woke up. It will be there when I go to sleep.

Medication helps a little, exercise helps a little. Writing about this stuff helps a little. My wife, who understands my moods and is the kindest person alive, helps a lot.

Now I have two real directions to look in, and some days that is enough to sleep.

If someone ever told you that you are not depressed because you are still getting things done, they might be wrong.

If someone ever told you that your head pressure is just stress, they might be wrong too. You might just be doing the hardest version of it, the one that hides inside the people who keep pushing, and the one that hides behind the scans that were not designed to see it.

Why does my head feel like it has pressure on it all the time?

Constant head pressure has a lot of causes and you need your scans to rule out the obvious physical ones first. Mine lines up with two possibilities. One is the cost of suppressing emotion for thirty years alongside chronic anxiety and a slow version of depression that nobody flagged because I was still functioning. The other is vascular Eagle syndrome, a physical condition where an elongated bone in the neck compresses the jugular vein or carotid artery and standard MRIs miss it. I still have the pressure. I am still looking.

Can anxiety cause head pressure?

Yes, and in my experience they can be the same thing in two different costumes. A nervous system that cannot relax keeps the muscles at the base of the skull and jaw contracted for hours at a time. That contraction is what you feel as pressure. But not every case of constant head pressure is anxiety, and assuming it is can keep you from finding a physical cause that a basic scan will not see.

What is vascular Eagle syndrome?

Vascular Eagle syndrome is a condition where the styloid process, a thin bone behind the ear, grows longer than normal or has a calcified ligament attached to it, and that extra bone presses on the internal carotid artery or the internal jugular vein in the neck. Jugular compression can cause increased pressure inside the skull. Symptoms often include constant head pressure, neck pain, tinnitus, a feeling of something stuck in the throat, and symptoms that change when you turn your head. A standard MRI usually does not catch it. CT angiography, often with the head in rotation, is the test that does. It is considered rare partly because most doctors are not looking for it.

What is the difference between a tension headache and head pressure?

Tension-type headache often feels like a band around the head. If your pressure is tight, dull, and constant instead of throbbing, it may match the description of a chronic tension-type headache. That is still a diagnosis that describes the symptom, not what is underneath it. The underneath can be emotional, vascular, mechanical, or a combination, and you will not know which one until you look for each one specifically.

Will head pressure go away on its own?

Mine has not. It has been here for thirty years. It eased once for about twelve hours and then it came back. Naming the mood disorder underneath helped me live with it but did not take it away. I am now looking into a physical cause that might be fixable with surgery. The more useful question is often "why will this not go away" instead of "how do I get rid of this."

Should I see a doctor about constant head pressure?

Yes. Rule out the physical causes first, and do not stop at the first scan that comes back clean. If the standard MRI shows nothing and the doctor shrugs, ask specifically about vascular conditions, styloid process length, and CT angiography. This post is about what you can ask after the first round of answers has run out, because that is where the real work usually starts.