Dealing With Headaches

My experiences with a cricket this week left me with a killer sleep deprivation headache, which got me to thinking about sleep depreivation headaches in general. This is one of the most common type of headache you can get — you just have to go a one or two days with barely any sleep. The headache seems to be the way the body tries to convince you to go lie down.

What It Feels Like

Sleep deprivation headaches are not as piercingly painful as migraines and sometimes will not even make your stomach feel queasy. It’s more of a dull, heavy ache that makes your head feel a lot heavier than it is. You can wake up with it, or it can develop a couple of hours into your day. Although not usually crippling like a migraine or cluster headache, it can really make you miserable. And when you are achy and miserable, you cannot perform your best. You make more mistakes and have trouble concentrating because you are so tired.

This Should Come As No Surprise

You need your sleep. You need between 7 and eight hours sleep per night (or day, or whenever you get to sleep). You need more when you are still growing or when you are sick or recovering from illness. You’ve probably ben hearing this most of your life, starting with your parents rigorously enforcing a bedtime. Turns out, they had good reason to. Doesn’t it suck when somebody else is right?

Here are other reasons you need your sleep, besides prevention of sleep depreivation headache:

• You are a walking health hazard: When you are sleepy, you make mistakes, your reactions are slower and you have trouble making the split-seconde decisions needed in everyday skills such as driving.
• You are too darn cranky: Of course you’re cranky — you have a headache. Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn’t and isn’t very sympathetic.
• Your body’s defenses are down:Sleep helps the body fight off illnesses, even cancer, in ways we aren’t entirely sure about. Reducing your sleep is incresing your chances of getting sick, which can keep you from sleeping, which incresaes your chance of getting even sicker….and so on

What To Do

This might seem obvious, but hey, some people need practical advice. You need to get more sleep. You need to determine why you aren’t sleeping as well as you should and change it. Unfortunately, this bit of free advice is a lot harder to follow than it is to type in a blog. You need to see a doctor if any behavior modification doesn’t help.

A lot of sleep deprivation headaches could be prevented by using your head. If you are out all night and go immediately to work or class with only one hour of sleep, you’re just begging for a sleep deprivation headache. You need your room as dark as you can get it and as coll as you can get it. If you can, leave the bed only for sleep (or sleep inducing activities). If you read in bed, stop and read in a chair. This conditions your body to expect only to sleep whenever it touches a bed, in the same way that the sound of a faucet running can trigger a sudden urge to go to the bathroom.

What You Shouldn’t Do

You should never rely on alcohol or sleeping pills to get you to sleep. Not only does this set you up for a rebound headache, but they are darn expensive.

For example, I’ve had insomnia since the womb. I tried everything, except getting my depression treated. Guess what caused my insomnia? Bingo. Now I’m the Prozac Poster Child, primarily because I finally get regular sleep. It might not sound like much, but it made a huge difference in enjoying my life.

Hope this helps. And sweet dreams.