Numbness in the face or head, along with neck and shoulder pain is one of the classic anxiety symptoms
All the blood vessels and nerves that supply the face and head originate in the neck and shoulders. They travel up over the top of the head in the tissue encasing the skull.
Many of these nerves and blood vessels originate in the back of the neck, and when the body is under stress, these areas are usually the first to become tense. So tension in the neck can be transferred over the top of the skull into the face, where it is experienced as facial numbness. This can be very disturbing, but it is not usually anything worry about.
The muscles that we use to tip the head back and forth – in a nodding fashion – are situated at the back of the neck at the junction in the soft tissue of the neck and base of the skull. It is usually in these muscles that tension is carried.
Find the point at the back of the head where the skull stops and the soft neck muscles begin. This you can do by running your fingers along the underside of the skull bone. Then, when you have found the muscles that seem tense, use your thumbs to massage firmly around the area. The muscles may be a little tender where the tension is worst, but doing this regularly or when you feel tense will help to release the tension in the head. This in turn will help to release pressure around the blood vessels and nerves that feed your face and head.
It is worth knowing that many headaches that are thought of as migraines, actually originate in the neck imply as a result of tension and can in fact be greatly reduced via massage. A cold compress on the back of the neck is also a good way of reducing head and neck symptoms.
But, to eliminate this and related anxiety symptoms, you need really to get to the amygdala – the anxiety control center of the brain.
The amygdala only really responds to stimulus from the sensory organs – the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin. The senses pass back data to amygdala to enable it to assess whether you are faced with danger.
In anxiety disorders, the amygdala malfunctions and is inclined to trigger a reaction even when real danger doesn’t exist. The sufferer then begins to experience a range of unpleasant symptoms, which the amygdala begins to interpret as further risk, thus exacerbating the anxiety response.
Getting rid of these symptoms can be done by addressing the underlying cause using a structured program such as The Linden Method
