14 DAY TRIAL // A normal day of our modern life implies loud sounds, lots of images passing in front of our eyes and the omnipresent stress. Unless we find a daily moment when our ears and eyes are closed and our mind is free to think of nothing, we tend to have headaches. Merle Diamond, a physician at the Diamond Headache Clinic in Chicago and Gretchen Tietjen, a neurologist at the University of Toledo College of Medicine tried to find out what are the causes of the more and more frequent headaches among people.
Even if headaches appeared basically at the same time as people did, modern life might just favor them. There are several types of headaches, from the minor hangover to the more serious thunderclap headache that can imply severe bleeding around the brain.
Migraines are the most common type, accompanied by nausea and vomiting and an alteration of the sensors, called “aura”. 70 to 80 percent of migraines are genetic, as patients usually have a family history of the illness. Even more frequent than migraines are the tension-type headaches. They usually give the impression of having your head squeezed in a vise. 90 percent of people experience this type of headache.
Our current society is hyperactive. Everybody is very busy and even children are sometimes overbooked. This extremely agitated, “non-stop life”, as Diamond qualified it, might be one of the majors factors triggering headaches. When the ears and the eye get tired of being oversolicitated, headache is the body's way of saying Stop. According to Diamond, video games, television and computer are very harmful for the eyes especially for young people who tend to spend more than 8 hours a day in front of a screen. Loud noises or loud music can also be very fatiguing for the brain and trigger the same reaction – headache.
But maybe the biggest factor is stress. Along with anxiety, they cause headaches rapidly and also determine behaviors that lead to aching head like meal-skipping and bad sleeping. Gretchen Tietjen says that “what happens, based on some interesting basic science work in animals, is when people have had a lot of stress early in life, it basically changes the brain. And it changes it in ways that probably aren't reversible and, in some cases, become more pronounced as the person ages.” The neurologist also says that most of these changes happen in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal, or HPA, axis, that regulates emotions, memory and stress. A link between very high levels of stress and headaches has been established by specialists.
When having a bad headache people basically have three solutions. Either they take preventative drugs or they can use painkillers if the headaches is already there, or they can keep a headache diary to note the symptoms and the triggers and simply avoid doing the same thing in the future.
Either you choose one of these methods or you choose none of them, the important thing is to try to relax and slow down. “Making time for just not doing anything is really important,” Diamond added.