UHAM036

WHO HAS HEADACHES AND M IG RAI N ES? * 19

what is wrong with the vehicle. So when you see your doctor, produce the facts he or she needs to help you.

HELPFULTIPS! HELPFULTIPS! HELPFUL

HELPFULTIPS

You might have had an injury to your neck or spine as a child. Although it may have healed many years ago, it could be the cause of headaches.

Box 3.

Research in brief: self-efficacy.

Psych o log i sts have spent considerable time researching a concept called self-efficacy. Basically, it concerns the faith that people have in themselves to be able to do things. If people have high self-efficacy they have confidence in themselves. Those with lower self-efficacy generally do not feel as if they can do much about their situation because they feel they lack the necessary abilities or skilis. People vary widely in their self-efficacy, and this might have consequences for many aspects of their lives, including health and illness.

Marlowe (1998) investigated the idea that self-efficacy might affect how people cope with stress, and how this might, in turn, affect how they experience headaches. He interviewed 120 headache sufferers, aged from 17 to 65 years. In addition, these volunteers also kept track of their headaches and stressful events in their lives over a period of 28 days. In 114 of these people (95 per cent), there was a elear relationship between stressful events and headaches. The morę stressful events that occurred, the morę headaches were experienced. What is interesting is how this interacted with self-efficacy. In people with high self-efficacy, the relationship between stressful events and headaches was weakest, but for those individuals with Iow self-efficacy there was a strong relationship between headaches and stress. This tells us that when people have faith in themselves they can fight off headaches when stress occurs. When people lack this confidence, stress is given free reign to lead to headaches. This is important because self-efficacy is something that can be changed. If a psychologist can work with people to inerease their confidence in themselves to defeat stress and cope with it, then it is possible that they can be helped to break the link between stressful