The most common headache there is, and the one most likely to be something else wearing its clothes.
How it presents
Pressing or tightening rather than throbbing, on both sides, mild to moderate, and — importantly — not made worse by walking up stairs. There is no nausea. There may be sensitivity to light or to sound, but not both. People describe a band around the head or a weight on top of it, and most carry on working through it.
When the label is wrong
A great many headaches called tension-type are actually mild migraine. The tell is whether routine activity makes it worse, whether there is any nausea, and whether it ever escalates to the point of stopping you. If a “tension headache” occasionally forces you into a dark room, it was never a tension headache.
The distinction is not academic. Migraine responds to migraine-specific treatment and tension-type headache largely does not, so the wrong label leads to years of the wrong drug.
The other frequent impostor is cervicogenic headache, where the pain is referred from the neck. If your headache tracks with neck position, desk posture or a previous neck injury, that is the thread to pull.
The rebound trap
Because tension-type headache is mild enough to treat with whatever is in the cupboard, it is the headache most likely to end in medication-overuse. Simple analgesics taken on more than about fifteen days a month, or combination products on more than ten, can drive a daily headache that looks like worsening tension-type headache and is in fact the treatment. If you are taking something most days, that is the first thing to address, and it is addressable.
What we do for it
Frequent or chronic tension-type headache is not usually an infusion problem. It is a diagnosis problem, a rebound problem, or a neck problem, and it is treated by working out which. Where there is genuine occipital or cervical involvement, an occipital nerve block is both a treatment and a diagnostic test.