Question: why do we get headaches?

Charlotte Flavell answered on 15 Jun 2014:

Hi there 2ronnies 🙂

Good question!

You might think that when you get a headache it is because your brain is hurting, but in reality the brain itself cannot feel pain at all. In fact, you could poke and prod your brain all day and it wouldn’t hurt a bit! But the skin, muscles and tissue that surround it would hurt a lot and these are usually the source of headaches.

There are some very common reasons why you might get a headache:

If you bang your head you might bruise it, causing a headache. If you hit it really hard you might make your brain hit the inside of the skull causing something called a “concussion”.

Another reason could be if the muscles around your head and neck are very tight (imagine if you were to bite your teeth together really hard for a long time – you would get a headache very quickly!). This is called a tension headache.

If you do not drink enough water you can get a headache. Scientists don’t know the exact reason for this but it could be because of a change in the amount of blood that gets to certain parts of your brain. Fortunately this type of headache is easy to fix and if you drink more water you should feel better very soon!

A good example of headaches caused by a change in blood flow is “brain freeze” – when you get a headache from eating an ice cream too quickly. This is because the ice cream, which is very cold, cools down the roof of your mouth. To stop this change, the body sends more blood to the area to try and warm it up again and this irritates the nerves, causing a headache. If you put your tongue on the roof of your mouth, it should warm it up again and cure the headache 🙂

Hope that helps!