A Little Brain Teaser – Or Should I say Freezer!

We’ve all been there; sitting back and relaxing, enjoying an ice cream, slushy or ice pop when all of the sudden – BAM! You are stricken with an intense stabbing headache!  What you are suffering from is medically known as “headache attributed to ingestion of a cold stimulus”, otherwise known to us all as BRAIN FREEZE!

But what really is brain freeze?  Why does it happen and where does it come from? 

In case you have been lucky enough to avoid the pain of getting brain freeze, here’s what you could expect.

Brain freeze symptoms include:

• Sharp, stabbing pain in the forehead
• Pain that peaks about 30 to 60 seconds after it begins
• Pain that rarely last longer than five minutes

Brain freeze or ice cream headaches are caused when cold materials move across the roof of your mouth and the back of your throat. This tends to happen when you eat cold substance, like ice cream, quickly – hence the nickname ice cream headache. 

While scientists are still unsure about the exact mechanism that causes this pain, one theory suggests that the cold food or drink may temporarily alter blood flow in your brain, causing a brief headache. Some researchers suspect that the pain is referred from your mouth to your head via the trigeminal nerve, which delivers sensory information from the face and mouth to the brain.

Luckily, brain freeze is pretty harmless and rarely needs any sort of real treatment. But when one does strike, boy do they hurt! A little trick that can sometimes help relieve the pain faster is to warm the back of your mouth with your tongue or a warm drink.

While the only true prevention technique is to just avoid cold food and drink all together, simply slowing down when consuming cold substances will most likely prevent brain freeze from coming on.