Stacy Boit,
If you’re having ice cream headaches often, it might be worth seeing if it runs in your family and taking a second look at your non-brain-freeze headaches too.
It’s a sweltering summer day and you’re tucking into your favourite frozen treat when suddenly it feels like you’ve taken an icepick to the forehead. A sharp, stabbing pain appears to come from deep within your brain. All you can do is sit there, feeling foolish as your ice cream drips, until the pain wears off.
“Ice cream headache is very, very common,” says Amaal Starling, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, in the US, who prefers chocolate ice cream. “It’s harmless, it comes and it goes.”
So why are we punished this way for eating cold things too quickly? It turns out that, in addition to afflicting generations of unassuming dessert lovers, brain freeze has a decades-long history of aiding scientific progress – and it can tell you a lot more about your health than you think.
What most of us learn as children to call a brain freeze or ice cream headache is referred to by scientists as a cold-stimulus headache, Starling says.
Researchers believe they happen due to “rapid cooling at the roof of the mouth, or even in the very back of the throat”, Starling says. This cooling makes the blood vessels shrink very quickly, after which they’re forced to swell back up again to restore blood flow.
Pain fibres on the walls of these blood vessels feed into the trigeminal nerve, the nerve responsible for processing pain signals from your forehead and face, she explains. That’s why an ice cream headache feels like pressure and pain in your brain or forehead, not inside the mouth.
(More seriously, data suggests that cold foods or drinks can also cause heart palpitations – dubbed ‘Cold Drink Heart’ – and heart arrhythmia, especially in middle-aged males.)
To avoid getting cold-stimulus headaches, pace yourself when it comes to chilly food and beverages, Starling says. It is rapid cooling that seems to cause brain freeze, so giving the roof of your mouth time to warm up a little between sips, licks, or bites should ward them off.
But if you got overeager (who hasn’t!) and already have an ice cream headache, there are a couple of proven hacks to make it shorter and less painful, Starling says. She suggests using the underside of your tongue to re-warm the roof of your mouth. Or if both sides of your tongue are cold, use your thumb or a warm drink instead.
