Dealing With Headaches

We’re currently going through a heat wave here in the Philadelphia area. Last night I treated myself to some ice cream straight from the freezer. Within a few minutes, I wish I hadn’t. I’d totally forgoten what an ice cream headache is like.

Ice cream headache, freezer head, or “brain freeze”, is a temporary but overpowering headache when you consume cold foods and drinks too fast. This is a stabbing pain in the forehead that nearly knocks you over and often makes you gasp. For most people, it lasts for less than two minutes. For me, it lasted nearly ten minutes.

The good news is that ice cream headache goes away. It is also completely preventable (don’t anything super cold), but what about when you are dying for a cold drink or popsicle on a sweltering day? Aren’t you saving yurself from dehydration by quickly downing a few slurps of Slushie or a huge bite of ice cream?

Not really. The cold is too much of a shock to the system. You have to somehow sip or nibble and then really dig in once your body has adjusted. The ice cream headache is actually a good headache — it keeps you from doing yourself a worse injury from internal cold burns. It is the body’s way of saying, “Knock it off, already!”

For a more technical explanation, it is thought that the extreme cold that hits the palate, upper teeth and tonguetriggers the trigeminal nerve which triggers the temporary but crippling headache in order to get the body temperature back into balance.

You usually do not have to see a doctor about ice cream headaches.

For The Migrane Prone

If you have been diagnosed with migraines or chronic headaches, you need to know that you are more suseptable to ice cream headache than other ice cream chompers. This doesn’t mean that you have to exile ice cream from your life. Just slow down even though you want to dive right in. If you can, hold the drink or ice cream at the bottom of your mouth and partly open your mouth, exhaling out the initial cold blast. Cover your mouth if you have to. You might look a little funny, but that’s a small price to pay for having your ice cream and not the headache, too. Bottoms up.

Hope this helps.