The Facts on Brain Freeze
You ever eat something cold and despite everything going just awesome, you suddenly get a pretty intense dull pain in your head? Someone then shouts “you got brain freeze!” but they don’t elaborate further and you’re left wondering if you caught some disease from the cold treat, or if this is a new version of freeze tag.
“Have I been ‘it’ this whole time?”
If that’s happened to you or if you're just curious as to what brain freeze is, this is the article for you!
Brain freeze AKA Ice-cream headache or cold-stimulus headache if you’re nasty, is simply a headache you get from eating something cold really fast but the science of it is a bit more interesting.
Eating or drinking cold items unsurprisingly has the side effect of lowering the temperature of your mouth, and your mouth has some pretty important blood vessels or capillaries running through it. When your blood vessels get cold they start to shrink in order to decrease blood flow to that area. You might be asking, “Why would my blood vessels want to decrease blood flow when I need blood to live?”
Yes, you do need blood to live but you don’t technically need all the parts of your body to live. Your body is willing to give up the pieces it doesn’t need to live in order to save the important piece… the heart. It’s why your hands and feet tend to feel the cold first, your blood vessels are shrinking in order to keep blood in the center and maintain heat there.
“Waste of blood.” - Your heart, probably
So is the decrease in blood flow causing the brain freeze? Not entirely, it’s what your body does after that really creates the headache.
Once the blood vessels have constricted and the cause of it is removed (you stop eating ice cream) your body sends blood back to heat up the area, these rapid changes are what causes the cold-stimulus headaches.
Knowing all of this means we also know how to get rid of brain freezes and it’s not medicine. All you have to do is warm up your mouth by covering your mouth and breathing in and out, pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth, or just stop eating so much ice cream so quickly.
“Don’t tell me how to live my life.”
Why did some scientists bother to even figure out why this happens? Besides just random curiosity, it turns out migraine sufferers get brain freezes at a much higher rate, and solving cold-stimulus headaches may help figure out migraines. Since brain freezes are easy to induce and leave no long-term problems, they’re the best and easiest to study.
Quick Facts
The constriction of blood vessels in your body is called vasoconstriction while the expansion of the blood vessels is called vasodilation.
Brain freezes are one of the types of “referred pain” that is well understood. Referred pain describes feeling pain in a different location than where the injury is sustained. Other examples of referred pain are less understood but usually, nerve compression is a common theory.
