How to Stop Headaches Using Science-Based Approaches
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I enter huberman, and i'm a professor of neurobiology and opposite logy at stanford school of medicine. Today we are discussing headaches. Headaches are something that everybody will suffer at some point in their lifetime.

Of course, some people suffer from headaches far more often than others, and for many people, headaches can be incredibly debilitating, limiting their ability to work, to socialize, to sleep, to exercise, essentially to live life in any kind of Normal way as well. Soon discuss, there are many different kinds of headache. We have migraine, had extension headaches, cluster or headaches today will review all the different types of headings and what the underlying biology of each and every one of those types of heads is, as well as, fortunately, the many excEllent treatments that exist for the different types of headache.

In fact, what will soon discuss is that by understanding which type of headache you have and a little bit about the underlying biology of each different type of headache, IT becomes quite straight forward to select the best treatment options for you to, for instance, provide relief from frequent and recurrent tension headaches, cluster headaches, even sinners headaches, the sorts of headings that are associated with sinus infections in cold, where the sciences get clogged up and you experience headache. So while today's episode focuses on all aspects and types of headings, IT will have tremendous relevance for everybody. So for those of you that experiences headache every once in a while, or only when your sicker have a sign as headache, or for those of you that suffer from debilitating migrants, today's conversation actually has a bit of optimism woven into IT, meaning there are excEllent treatments for each and every one of the different types of headaches.

And I was quite impressed and excited to learn when researching this episode that the treatments for headache ranged from, of course, prescription drug treatments and over the counter medications of the sort of type that most of us have heard about. I'd be proven to see the manifest and so forth so called the entire inflammatory drugs. But IT turns out there are many natural treatments for headings that when compared to those over the counter drugs and even some prescription drugs, appeared to be easily as effective, in many cases, more effective then the typical drug treatments, many of which can Carry side effects, that is, the drug treatments Carry side effects, where as the natural treatments appear to not Carry side effects.

Now, of course, anytime we have a discussion about natural treatments, there are likely to be some I roles out there. And people think you oh you know this is going to be um a bunch of woo science. Well, far from IT.

As you'll soon learn today, each and every one of the treatments for each and every one of the different kinds of headaches is grounded in solid biological understanding of why that particular treatment ought to work and does work. So for instance, you'll learn that some headache arises because of muscular pain, other headache ISIS because of excessive visual dillaway. The arteries and blood vessels get bigger and wider.

And so there's a pressure in a swelling within the kronion that people experience as a headache. And IT turns out that many of the more natural treatments out there can address either the muscular pain issue or the visibilium issue or other issues and underlying mechanisms for headache. So again, while headings are very intrusive, irritating and in some cases, debilitating, there is certainly light at the end of this tunnel, meaning by the end of today's episode, each and every one of you will have an array of excEllent treatment options that you can choose from in order to address and provide relief from any of the different types of headache.

Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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Again, that drink element element dot com slash huberman. Let's talk about headaches. And as we are soon going to learn, there are different types of headaches, and different types of headaches arise from changes in different types of tissues in the head area, and indeed in the neck area as well.

Now one of the key things to understand is, if you want relief from a headache, you need to understand which tissue is mainly involved in creating that type of a headache. So for instance, many people suffer from what to call tension headaches. Now, tension headaches a little bit a missed more.

Because any people might think, oh, tension. I'm under a lot of tension and stress. And therefore I get tension headaches. And indeed, stress can cause tension headaches, but tension headings are really the sort of headaches that you feel around the top part of the head, not the very top.

But so where you would put a head ban so above the eyes and around the head, IT doesn't have to be experienced all the way around the head. But the main underlying reason, that is the tissue system that mainly underlies tension headaches, is the muscular system. There are a lot of muscles on the skull believe that are not, of course, on the neck, and they allow you to move your neck and head.

There are lot of muscles that light parallel to the skull, and often times those muscles will undergo excessive amount of construction. Now there are, of course, muscles in the jaw that can also lead a headache and jaw ache and things of that sort, and neck eggs and headaches. So what we're really pointing out here is that the muscles are a key player in the formation of different types of headache, tension headache in particular.

But of course, muscles and muscle tension can be involved in the other types of headaches as well OK. So I just want to to highlight muscular issues as one particular source of the ache in headaches. The other tissue that can be prominently involved in generating the ache of a headache are so called mining's.

Now, the mining es, in addition of being a fun word to say, or a bunch of tissues that line the outside of the brain and decide between the brain and the skull. So you might think, okay, between the brain in the school is for just a little little bit of flew IT, and the brain is right up next to the skull. But turns out that's not the case.

The brain is actually in case in a very thick, very durable sc or casing that's wrapped around a tight, like sand rap. IT actually has a name which is dora D. U. R. A.

And so you can remember the adorable, and having done some surgeries, many surgeries before, on brains of different types, ranging from human, even though i'm not a neurosurgeon, as a clinical ranging from human to other types of species, what you find is that the is exceeded, dingy, durable. Getting through this thing really requires a very sharp razor bate. So the brain is actually sitting in a very fibrous like sc, that you simply could not open up with your fingertips under any conditions.

It's really durable. The mining gies are in that general area. And also in casing the brain and the nines provide an additional buffer between the brain and the dura and the skull. So again, you don't want to think about the brain is just sitting right next to the skull.

It's close by, but there a bunch of other thin, fibrous tissues, many of which are very thin and frail and others of which shows are the da that are very, very strong because they're very fibrous, almost like a uh, if you've ever felt, for instance, the sale of of a sale boat, you might think, oh, is just a big flapping sheet in the wind. This is anything but a sheet in the wind. IT is a very, very strong and durable material.

Now the proxim ity of the dura in the mine's to the brain, the fact that everything is wrapped very tightly together and the fact that there's a lot of vasculature, so there will be arteries, is blood vessels and capabilities are all in that area, on the top of the brain and throughout the brain. The fact that all of that is in very close proximity and wrapped really tight in this very durable sc is one of the reasons why when blood vessels or arteries, or both become dilates, they open there creates a pressure between the brain and those tissues. And because there isn't much distance between the tissues like the da and the nines and the skull, there is also pressure that allows for the brain to literally sneak up, or I say, IT, give the impression that your brain is expanding up against your school.

So the point here is that while muscular attention can give rise a headache, the other thing that can give rise a headache is so called visio dilation, the expansion or the widening of the arteries, blood vessels and capitals. And one of the reasons why that gives rise a headache is because they're simply not a lot of space for that expansion to go. IT doesn't allow anything, except for the brain, to push up against that very durable tissue and that very durable tisa to push up against the skull.

And even though the brain itself doesn't have pain recept tors. That's right. The brain itself doesn't have pain receptors. That is why a neurosurgeon can take off a piece of kull and can prove around in the brain with electrodes, the person is completely unaware.

And in order to get through the skull, of course, a little skin flap has to remove, be removed from the skull. That requires a little bit of topical anesthetic. But really, you don't need any anesthetic to go into the brain itself, because there aren't pain receptors on the brain itself.

However, the tissue surrounding the brain, such as the dorm and injure, and the vague latter that then reaches up, believe or not, into the school, the vast, which doesn't actually stop, right? We need to school. Actually, blood vessels get. Into the skull, and they're actually portals by which blood can move within the skull itself.

Well, what that means is that since all the tissues are very close by and very compact with respect to one another, any increase in the size of the portals that allow movement of blood there, and the fact that there are what are called no, sell tors, N O C I, nope, tors. These are essentially pain receptors because of the presence of pain receptors in the tissues around the brain when there is an increase in the size of those vascular portal, les, the arteries, capillaries in vessels, we experience that as intense pain and pressure. And fortunately, there are excEllent treatments for dealing with that intense pain in pressure.

But keep in mind that the intense pain in pressure, that is the consequence of VISA dillaway, that is, the widening of these different vascular portals, is very different than the type of pain that arises from muscular attention, as is the case with tension headache OK. So now we have two sources of pain, that is, the ache in headache. There are two more that we need to think about in trying to Better understand the different types of headaches that will discuss, and in terms of trying to understand which are going to be the best treatments for the different types of headaches.

And those are neural and inflaming responses. So let's talk about the neural type first. There is a type of headache that many people unfortunately suffer from will get into this in a bunch more detail in a moment. Those are called cluster headaches. Cluster headaches are headaches that are rise, not from the surface.

People don't experience them as kind of a tightening of the forehead, in the neck, in the jaw, but rather IT feels as if the headache is coming from deep within the head, in particular from behind the orbit of one or the other eyes, and sometimes both eyes. For those of you that i've ever experiences cluster headaches, they are extremely painful. Even the more where I should say, the relatively more minor cluster heads are extremely painful, the severe ones are exceedingly painful.

Cluster headaches arise from deep, or that we get the sensation that they are rising from deep within our head, as opposed from the surface inward because they are neural in origin. And there's a particular nerve pathway called the trigeminal nerve that often is the origin of these cluster headers that people experience behind the eye. The try jamal, as the name suggests, has three branches.

try. okay. So there's A A branch that essentially extends to the eye. There is also a branch that extends to the mandible right to the a, to the lip. And there's a branch that extends more or less to the to the nasal area.

And so this trigeminal nerve becomes inflamed or in other ways, as hyper activated in some cases, and that causes the deep pain below the eye, because IT is that first branch of the try geminal nerve, which is the author c branch, which tends to be activated first. So people start feeling as if there's a pain behind their eye, in particular on one side. Often times there's lack remain, which is tearing up.

There can be some nasal discharge. Another common symptom of this type of headache, that is, the cluster headache, is that the pupil sometimes will become very small, the pupils of the eyes, and they won't dilate even in darkness. So there are bunch of things that are going on on one or both sides of the face that seem to rise from deep within the head, or it's almost as if it's coming from the brain outward.

And that's because it's neural in origin. okay. So we've got muscular origins of headaches. We've got mungal origins of headaches, that is the stuff around the brain.

And as IT relates to the vast culture, and we have neural origins of headaches. And of course, there's inflation tion origins of headaches. Now inflation tion is determined, get around a lot these days.

People are time about you. This reduces inflation tion. And inflation tion is bad. And and I suppose in some cases, and when inflation tion is really widespread across the brain body is bad.

But I don't think any of us should think about inflation tion persae as that. What I mean is inflamed tion is just one form of signaling in the body, which of course, includes the brain inflates. Tion of a tissue is one way in which a set of cells.

So this could be for sin cells of the immune system. And we cover this in a detailed episode, all about the immune system. If you'd like to check that out, you go to huberman and lab outcome, just put into our search function immune system, and you can find that episode, by the way, all of our episodes searched by keyword that human about.

And i'll take you to specific episodes and time stamps for the topics you're interested in. So for the sake of this discussion about headache, information is going to be the case when one particular tissue in and around the head area is releasing molecules sidelines, which sometimes are flaming sidelines, but there are also non in flamma tory or anti in flam ory side declines, but inflammatory molecules that are signaling to the rest of the body. Hey, there's something going on here.

There's either some intrusive object and indeed, if you were to get you know A B B or a splinter into a particular uh you know skin area, there be a lot of inflation tion. So IT could be the introduction of a foreign physical object into an area that will cause inflation tion. IT can be the presence of some sort of local toxin in that area.

IT could be a more systemic, none the less inflamed. Tion in the neck and head area were, Frankly, anywhere within the science area. This include the mouth, the nose around the eyes, because the sign is, many of us think of sciences is just our nose.

But actually, if I were to show you a skull, a human score, or any other kind of score, you'd be very hopefully in tried to learn that the school is just not one big piece of solid bone or a top with a job below IT. IT actually has all these small water called finistere tions little holes and canals that run through the skull and through the depth of the skull like little tubes. You've got them down here on your medical.

You got them above your lips. You have them on either sides of your nose. Those are the sinuses. The signers allow the passage of different flow through the kull.

Because the skull, even though it's bone, it's not a dead tissue right in in a live personal animal. The skull is a very active living tissue. indeed.

All bone is active living tissue, and IT needs to be nourished with blood IT needs to be nourished with cerebral spinal fluid in the case of the skull, and needs to be nurtured with all sorts of important things. So those sinuses often times can become clock, as is in the case with sinus headache, which you'll talk about a little bit. But more generally, any time there's inflation tion of one given area of the body.

So could be a shoulder IT could be the neck IT could be the mouth IT could be the nose. When the case of the headache, e IT could be any portion of the head or neck, what happens is inflamed tion. While it's a very efficient signals, much like the siron on an ambuLance or a police car, and that IT sends out a very broad signal, that's very clear, something is wrong here and needs to be dealt with.

It's not very specific. So its very robust, but it's not very specific. So for instance, if there's a little bacterial infection or a little viral infection, the inflation tion response to that side of infection tend to be far more widespread than the actual sight of infection.

It's a little bit different when you have a foregone object. They're like a linter or some other foreign object that tends to be a bit more localized. And the immunity stem is always trying to limit the the extent of inflation tion by putting in different scar tissues.

Indeed, a lot of the things that we think of is kind of gross pussy, you know, pustules and boils and things like that. I know it's a gross topic. Are ways in which our body tries to restrict the amount of information, but the face area and the head itself are so heavily infused with blood vessels.

And there is a constant perfusion, as we say, of blood and repeal, final flood and other things through this incredibly meta icc active tissue that we call our brain and our eyes. Those are by far the most meta icc actor tissues and our entire body, even if we're running hundreds of miles and ultra marathons, your brain is still far more meta ability demanding than all the muscles of your body combined, no matter what the conditions. Because of that there tense, be a generalization, are spreading out of any inflaming response.

And that inflationary response then can trigger the pain mechanisms, or what we've experiences pain mechanisms in the other three types of tissues that we talked about. So for instance, if you have A A systemic infection or your experiencing inflation tion of any kind and IT has anything to do with her encroaches on the face or head area that can easily and almost always spills over into activation of nerve cells, can give rise to neural based headache or to the minimes, and can give rise to minimia headings, and of course, to the muscles and to muscular type petites. So we ve got muscular origins of the ache in headache.

We have mungal origins the ache headache. We have a neural origins of the ache and headache, and we have inflation tion based origins of the ache and headache. And that pertains to all the different types of headings that we're going to talk about.

And it's important to keep in mind that there are these different sources of the ache, headache, and that sometimes they exist alone and sometimes they exist in combination. However, this is an important, however, all pain where I should say, all experience of pain as a perception, is going to be neural in origin. When we experience pain, whether that's a pinprick or a cut, stop our toe, we trip, fall or a headache, IT is neural in origin.

IT is the nervous system and nerve cells that are going to Carry that signal that we perceive as pain. So as we talk about the different sources of pain in different types of headache, we will also talk about, of course, I think most people are interested in today's discussion, the different treatments for the different types of headache and why each of those different treatments work. But by understanding a little bit about how pain arises in the nervous system, and certainly by understanding the different types of headings, you know, what is attention headache? I gave you some impression that it's running around your head like a headband in many cases, versus cluster headache, which starts deep below the eye.

e. Often he feels as if it's emerging from deep in the brain versus migraine, which will get into in a moment. By understand the different types of headaches, you should be able to quickly pinpoint what type of headache you have, what types of tissues are likely involved, and therefore what types of treatments are going to most quickly and most completely relieve that type of headache.

okay. So for the next three to five minutes, and I promise no more, i'm going to explain how pain arises at the level of nerve cells. And suppose this is one of those times when if I had a highlighter pen that could go out across the the microphones and speakers leading to your ears, I would use IT here.

Because what i'm about to tell you is perhaps one of the most important things to understand about your nervous system, that is, your brain and you, which is that while you have trillions of neurons, and we hear that you have trillions and different types of neurons in your brain, and they come in different shapes and sizes and do different things. And some make dopamine, and some make their tony, and some make glue main on and on the key distinction among different types of neons. That is, the three types of neurons that I believe everybody scientists are, know everybody should understand exist, are some neurons.

Nerve cells are what we call motor neurons, in the sense that they control the contraction of muscles, sometimes for walking. Other neurons control at the movements of your fingers. Scientists call those digits.

Other ones you're toes. They also control the beating of your heart, although that's a slightly different mechanism. And slightly different type of tissue then is involved in generating motor movements of your limbs. These are neurons that we call motor neurons, because their goal or their purpose, I should say, they don't really know what their goal purposes.

But what they do is they make sure that muscles contract so that certain things happen in your body, like your heartbeat, or you move your limbs, you lift your eye lids, your eyebrows rather, and so on and so forth. Other types of irons are what we call sensory neurons. They communicate the same way that motor neuron s do.

That is they fire. What we call action potentials was just electrical signals. They released no transmitters like any other neuron, but they respond to certain events in the environment or the environment within the body.

But they are not responsible for generating muscular contractions. So we call these sensory neurons some sensory neons sense light touch. Other sensory neurons sent firm touch. Other sensory neurons sends pain. Other sensory neurons sense light brushing on the skin.

Fact you have sensory neurons believe that or not, that respond specifically to the light rushing of a hand across your skin, any region of your body, and if that particular region of your body happens to have hair on IT and you stroke the skin in the direction that the hairs lay down, we experience that is pleasurable. Whether if you stoking the direction opposite to the the way the hairs lay down, we experiences that is not pleasure. So these sensory neurons respond in some cases, for instance, within the auditories system, they respond to sound waves in your eye.

They respond to photons of light, sometimes photos of light, particular wavelength we think of as red, Green, blue and so on. Sensory neurons don't move muscles. They respond to things in the environment, and they exist within us.

So we have sensory in the, on that sense, for instance, pressure within our head or pressure within our gut, how full or empty our gut is, pain within our tissues like our liver or or any kind of other internal organ. So we've got motor neon sensory neurons. And then the last kind of neuron is what we call modulator neurons.

These are the ones that adjust the relationship between the sensory neons and the motor neurons to determine whether not we do anything in response to a sensory input, that is, whether not, if the sensory neuron fires sends the electronic potential, whether not IT will generate a motor change. Let me give you a very simple example this. So for those of you listening, i'll just explain what i'm doing.

And for those of you watching, you'll be able see, i'm holding my hand out in front of me if I were to touch the top of my hand with my finger tip, I can deliberately override. That is, I can modulate the more typical reflects, which is that when something touches us, if we're not aware of where it's coming from, we typically move away from that thing that touches this, a very natural response. But we can decide we're not going to move away.

We can decide to stay still or we can decide to move toward the thing that touches us. But typically, if you were to walk up to somebody, you were to touch, and they do either turn toward you on the side that you touch them or they're step away. It's where are they gonna step into you.

But you can decide that you are not onna, move away, or you can step into the direction of touch. And that's because you have modulator neurons that can adjust the conversation in a very context dependent way as to whether not the sensory neuron will cause motor neurons to contract or not. Okay, so we've got motor on sensory neurons and moderator neons.

And you're probably thinking by now, why are we talking about this? I thought we were going talking about headache. I thought we know about treatments for headache, but this turns out to be very important because you could imagine, and in a moment i'll explain how, let's say, you have tension heads.

You're somebody that has the classic symptoms of tension head. Let me tell you what those are. These are headaches, again, that occur more, less on on the kind of a headband like fashion, or they tend to start there and exist around the heads, are very common, can arise from a number of different sources, rise from sleeping privation.

They can rise from excessive use of Katherine take will talk about why that is. They can arrive from stress. They can arise from very low level viral infections or bacterial infections.

But we experiences as just as heading. So you've been thinking too hard or working too harder. Life has been stressful there often also associated with draw pain and draw tights and neck tightness.

So tension heads, everything you imagine musculars attention could cause. If you want to treat tension headache, you can imagine that because all headache is neural that you'd want to go after some sort of neural mechanism to treat them. But of course, we now know that they're three types of neurons, their motor neurons, sensory neurons and modulator neons. So we have choices. We can say, OK.

Do we want to turn off the muscles in the head, jaw and neck that are hyper contracted? For instance, ince, you want to take a muscle relaxer or relaxed and or would you want to try change the sense in, put itself, maybe don't change the way the muscles are behaving, but shut off the sensory part of a the year ability to sense. There are certainly ways you can do that.

Or would you want to adjust the modulator neurons? Would you want to make IT such that you have the headache, but you don't perceive the headache? That is, you cut off communication between sensor and the motor so that the muscles relax.

Turns out there are treatments and approaches for each and every one of those. Each and every one of those has h different advantages and disadvantages. But as you can quickly see, we are going to have different types of headaches and different approaches to treating headache.

But if you keep in the back of your mind that you have neurons that contract muscles to create movement or tension of muscles, remember, you can turn off those neurons and allow those muscles to relax your sensory neurons that sense input and actually sends the pain. And you module the tory neurons, which going to allow you to adjust the relationship between the sensory neurons and the motor neons. And of course, some of you are probably screaming at me by now, sing, wait, why would you ever want to deal with the motor ons or or the emotion attorneys when you wanted? Just go straight to the source and just cut off the pain.

Uh, well, the problem there is that many pain killers have other issues as well. In particular, they can be sensitive. Many of them can be habit forming or even addictive.

And for many people, not all, but many people, they don't want to take drugs, whether there over the counter prescription drugs or even more natural supplement based type treatments. And they would rather use, for instance, a behavioral approach in which they can modulate. They can deliberately turn off the communication between sensory neurons and modern neons.

And turns out those approaches exist as well. okay. So at this point, I promise you that i'm not going to give you any more of a biology lesson in terms of pain sensing and headaches as a more uh, conceptual phenomenon.

Instead, what i'd like to do next is talk about the different types of headaches. And I think this is something that's very important and not often discussed, except for those people out there that unfortunately suffer repeatedly from certain kinds of headaches like migraine or cluster attention headache. But think for most people out there who experience heading, and again, that is, everybody at some point experiences his headache.

And rather than just think of headache as one of thing, understanding the major types of headache and how they differ from and are similar to one another will really help you identify what the best source of treatments for those are. So i'd like to talk about what the different type of headache. Now the first type of headache we're going to discuss is the tension type add.

He again, tension type headaches tend to start off, not always, but tend to start off as more less a halo or a headband around the forehead. In the area above the eyes often also include the jaw, the neck muscles, and can extend even into the upper back. Again, this can be caused by some low level infection.

But more often than not, tension type pet s are going to come on because of some chronic psychological stress, usually combined with lack of sleep, usually combined with lifestyle issues. And of course, without getting into a long discussion about at any time you have like a sleep, you're gona have excessive stress. Any time you have excessive stress, you're going to have to make sure you're offsetting that by getting proper sleep.

Most people don't when you're under excessive stress. By the way, we have excEllent tools, her grounded in excEllent science, available at zero cost. If you are experienced chronic stress, even short term stress, we have a master stress episode of, even in lab pocket, again, just go to him and lab, not common, and all that time stamp for you.

Tension type pestis begin in a more less a headband pattern, but can really extend other tissues as well, not so often in the face, but really the head, and and often will start to climb up toward the top of the head. They are not always in this halo pattern. Sometimes they can be localized to one area, such as the you on the back of the head or the front of the head or one side of the head more than others.

And that's often the case because of tension within muscles of the neck that tend to bias the ache towards one side of the head. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called ag one, is a vitamin mineral probiotic c drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs.

I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve, so i'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking athletic Greens and the reason I still take athletic Greens once are usually twice a day, is that IT gets to be the probiotics that I need for god. Health, our god is very important, is populated by got microbiome that communicate with the brain, the immune system, and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long term health.

And those probiotics and athletic Greens are optimal and vital for microbiota health. In addition, athletic Greens contains a number of adaptations, vitamin minerals, that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met. And IT tastes great.

If you would like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com slash huberman and theyll give you five free travel packs that make IT really easy to mix up athletic Greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, at sea, and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin d 3k two。 Again, that's athletic Green dot com slash huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin 3k two。 The other type of headaches that unfortunately is very common is migraine headaches.

Migraine headaches are defined generally as disorders of recurrence ring attacks of headaches. So people get, migrants often get them in a recurring ing fashion. Some people get them very often, other people get them less often.

But migrants are very debilitating. The numbers, that is, the prevalence of migraine is still pretty debated. One thing that we know for sure is that female suffer migraine headaches at a rate at least three fold higher than do males.

And surprisingly, this does not seem to have any direct hormonal origin because we're also going to talk about hormonal headaches, that is, headaches that relate to a dip in estrogen and progesterone, in particular, phase of the menstrual cycle. There's the obvious tory cycle. So there's a bit of a mystery here.

And the misty is, why is that that migraine headaches occur at such greater frequency in females, even independently of the menstrual cycle? So when you control for changes in hormones, that still appears to be the case. And overall, migraine are very common.

Now, the numbers on migraine, and just how common migraine is, are extremely why this was a little bit frustrating for me. In researching this episode, you will find, for instance, that seventeen percent of women suffer from migrants. You will also hear that six percent of male suffer from migrants. You will also hear that forty three, forty three percent of females suffer from migraine, that is, recurring headaches, that qualifies migraine heads, and that seventeen percent of men suffer from migraine headaches on a recurring basis, which is began the definition of a migraine headache, one of the key definitions. So all we can say for sure is that many, many millions of people, maybe even billions of people, suffer from migraine headaches.

It's kind of a staggering thing to contemplate, but we know it's extremely common, and we know that it's more prevalent in females in any of the studies that you will find in terms of they compare the overall prevalence of headache, it's going to be higher, substantially higher in females and males does not seem to be related to the obituary metro cycle. There are some interesting facts related to that, that i'll just touch on for a moment. PregNancy, for whatever reason, seems to be protective against migrant heads.

That is, women who suffer from recurring migrants before they get pregnant. When they get pregnant in often after they give birth, they experiences fewer my grain headache. So there maybe something harmony and maybe something else. What do we know for sure? We know that headache, that is the ache and headache is neural.

So whether not the origins or hormonal, or whether not the origins are information, or got microban or some other feature of the body brain access, at this point, all we know is that neural pain, where the experience of pain at the neural level is the final common pathway, and it's more prevalent in females. So as I mentioned, migrants tend to be recurring ing, so some people get them once a week, some people get them once a month. Some people get them far more frequently that they can be extremely debilitating.

Often times people experience migraine because IT is a occurring phenomenon, will know when a migraine is coming on. They'll say, my migraine is coming on that has sense IT coming. There's this notion of ora and will talk about ora in a in a little bit.

Some people think of ora just as a visual ora or the sense of kind of a hallowing of light with a sense that there's something outside the body. The actual definition of ora is that it's the experience that something is about to happen. Is this kind of feeling of anticipation. It's not dayu daja u is different and very interesting in its own right, but different. It's a feeling that something's about to happen.

And the fact that, or is such a prominent feature of migraine headaches, or at least that people feel that the heading is coming on long before they feel the actual ache of the headache and the other dilatation symptoms, suggest that migraine has something of deep neural origin that IT arises from deep within the nervous system, spinal cord and brain. And that is not something like attention headache that is going from outside in, you know, the construction of the muscles in the jahn heads. So migrant headaches are very different than intention headaches, even in terms of how they come on or their onset.

The other feature of migrants adachi, I think, is important to note is that dilatation of the vessels, remember the visual dilation of the widening of those pipes that we call arteries vessels. And kepler is a very prominent feature of migraine. And fortunately, that allows for a very particular types of treatment and ways of dealing with the pain specific to migraine headaches.

The other feature that's common in migrant headache, es, is so called phopholiaison. You are probably familiar with photophobia. You've ever been sleep deprived simply.

If you're sleep deprived and you go outside in the morning, the light is going to seem very, very right, much brighter then were you to have had a really good nights sleep. And that's because during sleep they're all sorts of reset mechanisms in the brain. There's the washing out of meta lic debris and things in the brain is coglan hot wash out that essential?

There's also an adjustment of the neural tissue of the eyes, which many of you have heard me say before, actually two pieces of brain that have been excluded from the crony al eval. So your eyes, yes indeed, are two pieces of brain, the only two pieces of brain outside the criminal world. And within your eyes, you have neurons and mechanisms that adjust the sort of sensitivity of your eyes to light and of your brain to light.

And when you are sleep deprived, or when you have a low level viral infection or a cold or a flu of any kind you tend to experience, light is brighter than IT actually is when you arrested or you're in the healthy state. So photoshop a is something that very, very common in migraine. And often the photophobia is a prominent feature of the experience that a migraine is coming on.

People will start now. It's just too bright in here. And Normally we'd be able to tolerate that level of sunlight or of indoor lighting with no problem.

So there are two aspects of migrant that I think are particularly important to understand for sake of of the treatment, and that's the dilution of vessel. So we if we want to treat migrant, we're going to have to think about things that can constrict blood vessels in the brain area. But we also need to think about photophobia, not photos bia, just as a symptom of migraine.

But that may be by adJusting our sensitivity to light, we can actually short circuit some of the onset and subsequent pathology of the migrant. That is, if we can prevent photos bia partially, you're completely can actually offset a lot of the ache of the migraine that would otherwise occur. So that's an exciting avenue for addressing migraine headaches.

We will get into photoshop a how to deal with that. We'll also talk about or a little bit more in a few minutes. But for the time being, we've talked about tension headings.

We not talk about migraine headings. Again, keep in mind, knowing what kind of headaches you have is essential, I would say, in dispensable for selecting the best treatment. Many people out there will simply get a headache and decide, oh, i'm going to pop a couple of aspirin.

Okay, what does aspirin and aspirin in the end time? Flaming ory IT also has pronounced effects on the visual dillaway and vaio construction system. IT actually allowed more blood to flow through those arteries.

Vessels in capital is a lot of people actually use baby aspirin or small amounts of aspirin as a way to offset. Cardiff asked lar disease. That's another discussion. But what do we know? We know that in migraine, there's a hyper dilatation of the blood vessels, a hyper dilation of the very low portals that exist in the brain and around the brain, and that are going to cause the pain, we are going to activate those sensory neons, those not selectors, that will then give us the experience of extreme headache and migraine.

So taking an aspirin or something like IT for migraine, in some cases, the worst possible choice against, or knowing what kind of headache experiencing is going to be essential here. The other thing that you'll sometimes here is that drinking a cup of coffee or getting caffeine through tea is a great way to deal a headache. Why would that be? Well, IT turns out that coffee can cause either visual construction or visual dilation, depending on when you take IT.

And we will get into the use of caffeine as a treatment for heading, because indeed, IT can be a very potent treatment for headache. But you absolutely need to know what kind of headache you are experiencing, because in some cases, drinking caffeine, whether it's in tear coffee, can absolutely alleviate the pain of a headache, especially if you catch that onset of a migraine or attention typic early on. But in some cases, that can make IT far, far worse, again, knowing which type of headache are experiencing and how the different treatments work is key.

Okay, so we have tension typedef es migraine type tics. Think you're trying to get the picture. They're different underlying biologies. The next type of headache is cluster headaches. Cluster heads are the ones I mentioned earlier that arrive from deep within the head. They feel as if they're coming from the inside out, and they tend to be on one side or the other. What scientists and clinicians call you atal intends to originate behind the eye and sometimes the nose region, sometimes in the mouth region as well, feels kind of patchy but as if it's coming from the inside out.

And again, that's because that try geral nor for those of you um listening and not watching this on youtube, i've got three fingers as if i'm putting up three fingers and I i've got one pointed towards my eye, one point to towards my nose region and one I towards my upper lip. The try germinal nerve is an easy one to remember, and IT will completely explain cluster heads and what to do about cluster heads in the morning. If you remember that the herpes one virus, and not erie, do not genital herpes, but herpes one virus is the one that gives cold source on the mouth.

Herpes one virus, by the way, is succeedin ly common up to ninety percent of people. Many children, in fact, have these again, this is not a sexually transmitted her peers, although I can be, of course, transmitted through kissing and sexual contact, but that's not the only origin of IT. Okay, can be passed by skin contact and mu coal act um so mocoso mocoso so that would be kissing mocoso line or even skin to mico lining tings.

That's why it's so common. And the reason why cold source develop on the mouth for people that have herpes won is because the virus actually lives on the trigeminal nerve. And yes, IT is true sometimes that the virus will inflame the nerve and the inflation tion will occur the level of the eye.

So you will do, unfortunately, sometimes to get her piece of the eye, and actually can be quite dangerous if you have an infection of the I hepe's infection, the eye you should seen up to, or the nose region, they can experience pain, the mucosal tissue of the nose. More often than not, the most inflation tion is occurring on the the branch that innovates the lip where the region close to the lip. And that's why the cold sore develops there.

An immune response there signal that there's inflation tion due to the herbie st. Virus, which lives on that neuron for a very long time. Neurons don't turn over in the lifespan, so we can live on there for the extent of the person's life.

However, most people hopefully treat their H S. V. One, but if they don't, at the the sort of frequency and the severity of infections tends to taper off with time.

We have an entire discussion about viruses and herpes in particular in a future episode. But the thing to keep in mind here is that this very nerve is the one that gets inflamed in these cluster type headaches. Now, cluster type headaches are associated with a bunch of very uncomfortable symptoms.

Again, they tend to be unilaterally, tend to, to begin very deep, and they tend to be excitingly painful, excitingly painful. They can last anywhere from thirty minutes to three hours. Some people experiences these sleep.

In fact, this is one of the cases where men experiences headache more than females. Men experiences cluster type headaches that have a sudden non set during sleep at five times the frequency. Then do females, the origins of that aren't exactly clear. They do seem to have something to do with the biological clock mechanisms, that so called cracking mechanisms.

So if you are a man or woman for that matter and you're waking up in the midnight with a unilateral headache and IT seems like it's deep within your um within your head, it's starting there and its on one side and localized to the eye. And maybe these other regions the trigonal is involved in, you may be suffering from cluster type pec, and you should talk your physician. The other symptom is quite common in cluster type pet c is a grupo island, which sense, because the try germinal innovates the eye region, and there are other nerves that control the island, but there in that general region, and they can be impacted.

The other thing is something called me osi, which is that you can't dilate the people I mention this before this, your pupils might really, really small, and they won't dilate. And the only thing is lacrimation tearing and the nasal discharge, all because of a neural inflation tion problem. Why do I tell you with such detail about cluster headaches? Well, if you are somebody that experiencing the kind of pain that is consistent with cluster headache, taking a standard anti in flam ory, or doing something that is going to adjust the while the, excuse me, the dilation or construction of blood vessels may have an indirect impact on cluster headache, but is unlikely to relieve cluster headache, either acute, meaning right away, or in preventing cluster heads.

You have to deal with this as a neural issue. And we will talk about some of the main causes of inflation tion and activation of these cluster type dcs at the level of the trigonal nerve in a little bit, because fortunately, there are some excEllent treatments. The next type of headaches that is quite common are hormonal headaches.

Now, the phrase formal headache should already cue you to the fact that it's far too general a term, because there are so many different hormones just astern us and thread and growth home on and on and on and on. And they all have many different functions in the brain and body, every single hormones, and in particularly that so called steroid hormones. Steroids, again, not just limited to things that people take for sports.

In fact, the steroid hormones refers to estrogen testoon of the sort that we all make, men and women make naturally. And the theory, hormones can impact gene expression, and they can are, of course, what turns on the growth of the of the breast tissue, of the particular tissue of hair growth, and and on and on. And that's all because of gene expression.

If you're really gna change the identity and function of a cell long term, right, you're going literally change the breast tissue, or change the piano tissue, or change the ovarian tissue in some sort of consistent way across the light spin. You can bet that their changes in gene expression and those changes in gene expression occur because the steroid hormones have this incredible ability, sort like the x mount of hormones, to pass through the outer membrane of a cell to all the extra cellular membrane and into the nuclear. They can go into the area where genes are made and turn on and off different genes however they multitask in their life.

That is, the steroid hormones like estrogen in particular, and testosterone in particular, can also buying to the surface of cells, an impact, all sorts of things, that the level of the cells that have nothing to a changes in gene expression, and that second mechanism of binding to the surface of cells is one of the ways in which estrogen can control different aspects of headache. Now that doesn't nearly in the extradition gives you heads. In fact, it's just the opposite.

IT turns out that low estrogen and another hormone low process your own, combine to give rise to headache because of the ways that low estrogen and low protesters on impact vio dillaway and visual construction. And the inflammatory response will talk about how to deal with hormone based heads, particular hormones, headaches that OCR because of low estrogen and progesterone in a moment. But the key thing to know is something that we covered in the fertility episode.

I did a very long, very detailed epo de on fertility. I'm not going going to go into this in significant detail. Now you can refer to that episode of for probably more detail than you ever wanted, but also a lot of tools as IT relied a fertility in both males and females.

But right now, i'm just going to give you a course overview of that, about sixty, two hundred and twenty seconds, so that you'll understand when hormonal headings are most likely to take place. Keep in mind that hormonal heads are most likely to take place when estrogen and progesterone are lowest. So if you understand that during the fleur stage of the obligatory slashed torcy cle, okay, so meta cycles about twenty days on average, everyone about twenty.

And the first half of that estrogen starts creeping up, up, up, up. And as we learn in the chrome logy x rogen prime project, so estrogen will then peak and then start to fall pretty quickly, right about the time that the egg obviates and egg is released, and will essentially be ready for fertilization. If the eggs fertilized, a whole bunch of other things happen as IT released to pregNancy.

If not, what ends up happening is that during the studio phase, which is the second half of the metro cycle, there's been a build up of the lining of the uterus because of an increase in progesterone. So exertion goes up in the fully cure of pace, then IT goes down and then progesterone goes up up, which important for generating that thick lining of the uses to allow the fertilize egg, if it's ferlie ed to implant and if it's not for lize, all of them gets released from the body in this bleeding process that we call monsters tion. If my strain occurs, and day one of the mental cycles sider the first in which bleeding occurs, then what that means is that estrogen is already low.

Because, remember, x rogen was low at the start of the fully cured phrasing win up aba. Then IT comes down right at the time of violation. And progesterone goes up, up, up, up, up during the studio phase. In fact, it's more than a thousand fold increase in progesterone. But if there is no feriz ation of the egg, protesters on starts coming down, down, down, down, down.

What does that mean? That means that on the first to about the forth or fifty day of the mental cycle, first being the first day of bleeding about the forth or fifty of the menstrual cycle, both estrogen and progesterone are very, very low. And IT is, at that time, at the very beginning of the metro cycle.

So about the first week of the metro cycle, that many women are very prone to hormonal headaches, hormonal headers, not because estrogen hide as a common mist conception, rather because estrogen and progesterone are both low. And now that you understand the control or the underlying reasons for hormonal headache, and you can start to ask, well, what happens when estrogen is low? Well, as rogen has a strong impact on the VISA dillaway VISA construction system as does project one will talk about that a little bit later.

But now that you know what hormonal headache is, at least this one particular type of hormonal headache, which is very, very common, given the number of women that are monstrous and the fact that low estate and low protesters one is the cause of the hormonal headache and the fact that, of course, there are women who are no longer monstrat. So they're either in parameter pause adminstrations becoming more infrequent, or their menopause and the cease entirely. Well, now you understand what the origin of the ormont headache is.

And so all we need to know is, what do exergaming gest Normally, dude, in order to prevent headache? And thereby you'll know exactly how to offset that is prevent or treat hormonal headache in the first week of the menstrual period. The last type of headache i'd like to discuss is headache associated with head hits.

That is traumatic brain injury. Although I definitely want to underscore the fact even people who do not have traumatic brain injury can experience headaches as the consequence of hitting their head, so the lying between traumatic brain injury and lower level brain injury is one that still seeks definition. In fact, this is one of the major goals of the clinical field as IT relates to concussion. You know it's also what comes up up during the discussion about football these days. You'll see players hit really hard and depending on whether not there laying there for five seconds, thirty seconds or three minutes, know the crowd in the the people watching on television and everywhere else are all speculating as to whether not the person should be allowed to play.

And to be quite direct, there really is no way to assess the extent of brain damage after the consequence of hitting one's head or having one's head hit, because, first of all, almost all of the best ways to detective matic brain injury, except the most severe ones, tend to require a lot of very large equipment like MRI and functional mi and city scans, none of which are available on the side of the field or in the locker room. But also because many, many, if not most, of the effects of traumatic brain injury are going to occur not in the immediate minutes or even hours after the injury, but several hours, days or even weeks after that injury. This is a discussion that we should hold off for a longer, full episode on traumatic brain injury, keeping in mind, of course that football is this a very silent example, a traumatic brain juran concussion as as boxing, as as even soccer with heading of the ball believe are not repeated low level impact to the forehead and other part of the head um can give rise to overtime traumatic brain try without the need for any kind of full blown concussion or being knocked out.

But sports related concussion actually occupies just a tiny fraction of the majority of traumatic brain injury and concussion, most traumatic brain injury in concussion and low level brain injury that can accumulate over time to become traumatic for sake of daily living. That is, lowered cognition, disruption in mood, sleep at sea is actually the consequence of things other than sports sovereigns, bicycle accidents, playground accidents, construction accidents. And this is often forgotten for some reason, all the sports, in particular football, and to grab all the attention as IT relates to concussion, keep in mind that well at, for certain people, is a path to a living.

For most people, traumatic brain injury is going to occur in a car accident, construction worker or other types of the work, for which people generally don't have many options in terms of the type of work that they're doing. So they are prone to concussions and head injuries to simply by virtue of their work without any of millions of dollars, contracts or the opportunity, necessarily, some cases they do, but necessarily to do other things, and certainly car accent inns, or by bicycle accidents or not, voluntary events. So the point being, traumatic brain injury and headache related traumatic brain injure extends far beyond the realm of sports.

And in fact, if you to look at the numbers, what you find is that more than ninety percent of traumatic brain injury, so people coming into the hospital or clinic or people claiming that they ve got consistent headaches, they're not sleeping well, that their mood is off, they're feeling more irdp after having hit their head even once, is not the consequence of sports, is going to be the consequence of accidents at the workplace, or in terms of a bicycle or other sorts of transportation based on accident, like a car accident. With that in mind, any kind of head hit, certainly if IT involves a concussion or traumatic brain injury, often leads to headaches, either infrequent but severe headaches, or chronic low level heads, or feeling this kind of stuffiness or a fullness to the head. There can be a lot of different origins to that.

A common origin is going to be actual swelling of the nasty of the brain tissue directly. But if you recall, our discussion about the mining es, which include the da and the other tissues that surround the brain, are SHE three layers that we call the min es. The dirt is being one of them.

And there is a very little space between those, the brain, the lines that surrounded in the skull is called the sub reconnect space. Very cool, right? Iraq, I like spider. Well, if there's even a slight bit of swelling in the brain or even distant brain issues, so for instance, even if the there's whip lash, so they're swelling of the tissue, muscular tissue and neural tissue in the neck area that can constrict the flow of things like the libro, spinal fluid, blood flow and indeed mucus and other other things that essential.

We all him hear mucus and we think illness, but mucus is a vital, vital uh, substance within the body for a lot of important reasons in health as well as in sickness. Well, if there's less of that liquid and other fluids and mucus being delivered to that space, well, then I can clog up. So so of the plumbing is clogged up or that it's caught at the level of the site of hit or injury because they're some local swelling and inflation tion there.

So there are many different mechanisms that underlie headed associated with head hits or traumatic brain injury. Now fortunately, they're some recent data pointing to some what I would call non obvious treatments for headache and traumatic brain injury. Keeping in mind that any time we're talking about injury or disease or health for that matter, mental health and physical health, we have to highlight a fact that's going to come up again and again in every single episode of this podcast. And I think it's not being overly redundant to do so, which is that regular, sufficient amounts of deep sleep each night are going to be important for all aspects of mental health, YSL health and performance and have been shown over and over again to reduce the frequency of headache and to reduce the time to repair after traumatic brain injury, and can improve cognition and on and on and on. So sleep is essential for all the Normal things that encourage healthy activity of the different tissues that are involved in brain and body to occur to sleep deprivation, of course, is going to limit those.

But I do want to point out that sleep sunlight, and i've talked about this almost a nose um on this podcast, but regular sarti an cycles getting sunlight in your eyes early in the day and in the evening as well and as much as possible throughout the day without burning your skin and limiting your exposure to artificial lights at night and on and on all of which is covered in the light for health episode of the huberman lab pocket, the masters sleeve episode, the huberman la podcast, and in the perfect year sleep episode the huberman lab podcast, you can find all that and huberman lab out com. Getting light and avoiding light at the proper times of the twenty four hour cycle is also going to favor all the pathways ranging from gott brain access to the inflaming anti inflammatory ory pathways, neural pathways that set vet. Of course, if you do that, you're going to improve and offset any kind of detriment caused by traumatic brain injury.

Is IT treating traumatic brain injury directly? No, but is not getting sufficient sleep, not getting sunlight at the right times of day, and getting too much official night night going to make any impact of traumatic brain injury, including headache? E far worse.

Yes, there are certainly a ton of data to support that statement as well. And then, of course, nutrition and exercise are also important, so we can list out sleep, sun, proper nutrition, exercise, I would put, uh, proper social connection, whatever that means to you. Healthy social connections include romantic, friendship, familiar and relationship itself. Those five things, sleep, exercise and nutrition and social connection are all critical for maintaining base lines of health and raising your base lines of health.

And I mention that I can segment this out now, because I think that anytime we are about to start discussing pointed treatments, that is, things that you can take or do to reduce headache, or things that you can take or do to improve anything within mental health, YSL health and performance, we have to remember that the foundation of mental health, YSL health and performance is only set at the tightest level by tending to those other things. And that nothing really surpasses any of those things. Or put differently, there's no replacement for any of those things in the form of a pill, a powder, even a behavioral places.

There are things you can do to offset getting less than ideal sleep. The things that you can use like bright artificial lights during the day to try and partially offset lack of sunlight, but really, there is no exercise pill, there is no sunlight device. Although some bright lights are very bright, there's no no replacement for actual sunlight.

There's no replacement for actual sleep. There's no replace on for actual nutrition. And I do feel it's an important conversation to have as we had into the next section, which is what can you take or due to reduce headache. And in order to addresses, we're going to start first with the headaches associated with head hits and traumatic brain injury because turns out there is a surprising in a very useful approach to doing that.

But this same approach also can help offset and treat headache in other conditions as well, meaning not just for headaches caused by traumatic brain injury, but also headaches caused by sudden onset tension headache or migraine headache, or even perhaps, again, again, perhaps, cluster type heads. So the first substance that i'd like to highlight, that has been shown to significantly reduce the intensity and or frequency of headaches, is creating. now.

Creating, as many of you know, is something that people supplement and take. Most often, creating is discussed in the context of muscle performance, not just for people who wait lift, but for people who do in during exercise. And it's often been said that five to ten grams per day of creating mono hydrate, depending on how much you away, five to ten grams per day of creating mono hydrate can increase, creating fast state stores in muscles, can bring more water into muscles, can make you stronger to increase power output.

And that is all true. There is all completely true. We discussed in the huberman lab podcast with doctor andy galpin when he was a guest on the h huberman lab podcast or standard series, and we discuss this extensively in an upcoming episode from water and he galen in his special six part guess series where he is a guess on the huberman la pocket, but where really he's the one doing the majority of the teaching.

That series covers everything from strength, Operate, fy endurance, and there's an episode on supplementation. Where will we go deep into the about creating now in that discussion. And again, now we highlight the fact that creating, well, most often discussed online and in the media as a supplement for sports performance, for the reasons I just mentioned, actually has far more data behind IT, that is, laboratory studies expLoring the role of creating in the clinical setting.

So I like to highlight a paper from that literary now that will make very clear as to why creating is interesting and in fact, very effective for treating headache, particular headache caused by head hits or traumatic brain injury. The title of the paper is prevention traumatic headache, disney and fatigue with creative administration. Now keep in mind this is a pilot study.

IT was performed in humans. So when you hear the words preclinical, that is, if you hear there was a preclinical study on blank, that means almost always that the study was performed on animal models. My rats, primates, eta, a clinical trial is something that Carried out on humans.

And a pilot study means that the study was Carried out on humans, but on a fairly small code, the first fairly small group h or limited number of subjects. Nonetheless, if the data robust, as IT is in this case of this paper, I think it's worth paying attention to. So in this study, what they looked at was creatine administration.

So what they did, they had people, and just a certain amount of creating, i'll tell you in a moment, in fluid, so you could be taken in water, milk, with or without food, doesn't really matter what time of day they had people take creating. Why would they have people take creatine after a traumatic brain injury? And in particularly for people, they're suffering from headache.

Didn't ss fatigue? Etta, the reason is that neurons, nerve cells, rely very heavily on the regulation of calcium in order to generate those action potentials to communicate with one another. That doesn't matter with a motor neuron, a centry neuron, mory neuron, they all generate action potentials, something similar to.

And calcium m is important for that process. Calcium becomes deregulated after traumatic brain injury in a number of different ways, in particular in ways that impact the energy production systems of cells that are related to atp identic. Try fast state for those factors.

The one to look at up, you can simply look up calcium, atp and neurons. And you can learn about that cycle. Creating can be stored in muscles as we talk about before, but creating, and in particular the first forted form of cretins, which is the readily available fuel source form of creative, can also be stored in brain tissue.

And that is actually quite prominently stored in the forebrain, the area where the real estate of of your brain just behind the forehead, which is involved planning and action and understanding context. That is very important for cognition. It's important for personality too, but it's important for a number different aspects of life. They have to do with making plans, being able to focus very intensely on your work at sea, or on anything for that matter. All functions that become heavily disrupted in people without traumatic brain injury and concussion.

Creatinine ability to communicate with the calcium in the atp system was the motivation behind the study, that is, the authors hypothesize on the basis preclinical data in animals that by increasing creative ine stores within the brain, not just in the muscle, but in particular within the brain, that the availability of creating would allow for Better cognitive function in general. Now they didn't look at cognition specifically in this paper, but they did look at the other aspects, that is that the bad stuff associated tbi, and they had people supplement with creating at a level that is much higher than the typical level that people supplement with creating simply for sports performance. So as I mentioned before, most people, if they supplement with creating for sports performance, they take creating mono hydrate, typically five grams per day, sometimes ten grams per day, if they're about one hundred kilograms or or greater in body weight, other kilograms is two hundred and approximately two hundred and twenty pound.

So the dosage that was used for implementing creative in this study to address the potential impact of creating on headache diseases and fatigue was quite a bit high. Then the dosages used simply for muscle performance in this study, they had people take a dose of zero point four grams of creating mono hydrate per kilogram of body weight. So for somebody that ways one hundred kilograms or two hundred and twenty pounds, there will be forty grams of creating per day.

I have someone ways half that much, they would take twenty grams of creating per day. And they did that over a period of six months. And we know that when you take creating over and over day to day, that there's a build up of creatinine stores, both in the muscles in within the brain tissue and what they found as a consequences.

This creating administration was really striking, and I think quite exciting. They found a very significant decrease in the frequency of headache in people that were supplementing with creating as opposed to the controls. Now keep in mind that this is a pilot study, but the effects are very dramatic.

They found a very statistically significant decrease in the frequency of headache in people that we're taking creative. In fact, if you look at the controls and you see that there basically getting headache at a frequency of ninety percent or more after tbi, the reduction in headache frequency is down to about ten or twelve percent in the people taking creating. So that's quite, quite a dramatic effect.

And if you look at the other measures they took, keep in mind, again, this is a pilot study, so a limited number of subjects. But again, the results are very impressive. What they found is that the number of people experiencing dizen ss was significantly reduced in people supplementing with creating, as was the number of people experiencing fatigue and of acute fatigue and chronic fatigue.

Again, nat chronic fatigue syndrome persue, but chronic fatigue, which was in this study, defined as a general sense of bodily weakness and even mental weakness. Mental weakness is a little bit hard to quantify but um they were very careful to distinguish between cognitive and mental fatigue versus physical and thematic fatigue. They acknowledge that both of those occur in tbi or post tbi.

The headache is quite frequent. Basically the takeover of this study is that for people experiencing headache, dizzy and fatigue due to tbi and perhaps and I won't underline perhaps because he hasn't really been explored IT, but perhaps headache using this and fatigue due to other conditions, symptoms or causes of headache creating more hydrate supplementation might be, again, might be an excEllent candidate for people to try. Why do we say that? Well, first of all, creating mono hydrate, relatively inexpensive.

It's considered safe at the dosages using this study and certainly for sports performance as well. And there are very few other compounds that have been shown to have a significant impact on headache over the long term, as has creating mono hydrate, these studies of people with tbi. It's also important to highlight the fact that many, many people suffer from tbs I mentioned earlier.

And as now there are very few treatments for tbi, you tend to get the basic advice coming back. And I then I think it's excEllent advice. You get proper amount of of sleep, get exercise, but don't get another traumatic brain injuries.

obvious. But you would be surprised how many people go right back to work because they have to, and you know, we have to be sympathetic to the fact that many people just can't stop working or go on disability. So many people have to go back to work that could be sported, could be other kind of work where they are then subject to perhaps getting more tbi.

Maybe they are getting less rest as a consequence. And stress obvious. Ly stress is confounding issue for tbi. But sleep, exercise, sun, nutrition, all of those things, proper social connection are what people are encouraged to do when they have tbi. But there have been very few compounds, in particular very few over the counter compounds that are known to be safe that have shown efficacy in dealing with T B. I.

So I think that while this is a pilot study and we can consider IT preliminary, I think um it's important enough and the effects were dramatic enough that people with headache and in particularly people with T, B, I, ought to consider supplementing with in order to deal with their headaches. And of course, I eagerly await other studies expLoring the role of this hydas ge of creative is a relatively hydas ge creon for offsetting headache meanwhile, I think there are a number people out there suffering from headache um who might consider using the mono hydrate in an explorer ory fashion in seeing whether IT helps offset their headaches. Keep a minor course anytime you're gone to add or remove anything, a supplement or otherwise from your, from your treatment, you're nutrition.

And that I do suggest that you consult with your physician, in particular if you have on a tex. I don't say that to protect me. I say that, of course, to protect you. What i'd like to discuss next, I find extremely exciting.

why? Well, what i'm about to describe as a compound that I should say, a set of compounds that are available over the counter that have been shown to be very effective in reducing the frequency and intensity of headaches and not just one kind of headaches, but multiple types of heads. So what i'll described has been shown to have significant effects in reducing the intensity or frequency of tension type pecs, migraine type pecs, as well as hormonal type medics that are related to the menstrual cycles that described earlier.

Now there are a lot of data centers around this general topic, but i'm going to focus on three main papers. But I haven't told you yet, of course, is what is the compound that i'm referring to? What is this over the counter compound? But IT turns out this over the counter compound is not just available over the counter, is also available in food.

So IT turns out that nutrition can have a very strong impact on the frequency and intensity of headache, although supplementation with this particular compound can accomplish the same thing as well. But i'm referring to hear are omega three fatty acid. Many of you are probably familiar with a eg.

Fatty acids. These are fati assets that come in the form of so called E, P A and D H A. And omega three fatty acid are commonly distinguished from the so called omega 3 acts。 OMG a 的 assets come in a bunch of different foods， and they, of course, can be supplement as well. Omega three family asses come in a unch of different foods and can be supplement as well.

Common forms of omega fat acids, or should take common sources of mega fatty acids in foods, include fatty ocean fish, including salmon, salmon skins or dines ancho vie, things of that sort. Common sources in supplement form are so called fiscal capsules or liquid fishel. Again, omega three family.

And almost always when we're talking about omega fatty assets, we're talking about a combination of E P A N D H A. But really, IT is the quantity of epa omega three fati assets that seems to be the most impacted for the sorts of health metrics that we're going to talk about in a few minutes. Now with respective omega six fatty acids, the most typical food sources of omega six fatty acids are seed oils.

I know now IT is seed oils have become quite controversial. I given my stance on this in a prior podcast, but i'll just repeat IT. For those of you that haven't heard IT, I am not of the belief that all seed oils are bad, that they're all in flaming, that they are killing us, are making a sick at, that they are the major causes.

And a bolic is function that said, however, I think IT is very clear and I learned this from dr. Orley norton when he was a guest on this podcast and taught us all about nutrition um in great deaths that highly recommend that episode if you're interested in nutrition that people are consuming a lot more oil generally. And a lot of those oils that people are consuming more of nowadays include a lot of the so called omega's fat assets.

And a lot of those oils are seed oils. The particular omega fatty acid that's going to be relevant for today's discussion is lining acid, and that is common in a lot of c oils. So again, i'm not going to tell you that sea oil are bad. However, IT does seem to be the case that many people are consuming far too many c oils and in doing so, are consuming far too many calories and perhaps are consuming too much of the omega six fatty acids relative to the omega three fat assets.

Now with that said, I think there is general agreement among nutritious ist and health professionals that we could all stand to get more omega three fatty acids, perhaps for cardiff, asked lar health, although that's a little bit debated, but certainly for immune system function, for mood and for functioning the brain, and for the pod anti and flaming effects of omega ory. So again, megastars can be sourced from food, both animal base and plant base. You can simply go online and look up the various food by sources.

But in thinking about headache and different treatments for headache, there are some recent studies expLoring how supplementing with a mega fatty acids, and in one case, how supplementing with omega fat acid and deliberately reducing the amount of linoleic acid, the omega six thirty assets, how that can impact headache. So the first study i'd like to describe, in reference to the role of omega fat assets and headache, was publishing two thousand and eighteen, and the title of the paper is long chain omega three fatty acids and headache in the U. S.

population. The number of things I really like about this study, uh, a few of those include the fact that they looked at an enormous number of people, uh, that is, they included twelve thousand, three hundred and seventeen men and women, like the fact that they included men and women in the study age twenty or older, and that they broke down the population into categories that included age. They certainly looked at race and ethnicity.

They looked at educational background. They looked at body mass, total energy intake, which is really important. If you think about IT, people are going to be eating. And within the things that they eat, they are going to be consuming some mega three, hopefully as well some omega six is.

And if they're eating far more than they're going to get far more of likely going to get far more of both of those things than they would or nearly if they were eating a smaller amount. So they control for total color intake in a way that I find particularly useful for looking this kind of data. So the reason that explored omega's ries is worth mentioning.

Omega three fatty assets are known to have IT in an anti in flam mat ory effect. That anti inflaming effect is immediate through a couple of different pathways. We won't go into these in too much detail now, but the omega three fatty assets, keep in mind, actually makeup various parts of cells in the brain and body.

That's right, the membrane that membra talk before about how storage hormones can go through the different membrane es of the cells, the outer membrane in the inner membrane, a lot of those actual membranes, the structural constituents of neons and other cells, are actually made up of or include certain fats. ID launching fat asses and the omega three fat assets are important for the actual construction of those tissues, as well as having anti flam matory effects through things like limiting prostate lands and other things that can cause inflation tion. So there are a bunch of different ways that mega three fat assets can be useful.

They refer in this study to an earlier study that looked to the so called analgesic effect, the pain relieving effect. Analgesic means pain relieving effect, omega three fatty assets in what had been randomized control trial. And in that previous paper, what they found was that diet, high omega trees and low in omega sexes. Okay, so high three, low six. And as compared to dies that were just reduced omega sexes, they found a greater energy ic effect of increasing omega trees, while also reducing omega six body acid.

So in the context of the sea oil discussion, although kept in mind that no mechanics come from other sources as well, if omega's is were just reduced on their own, there wasn't as great and effect in terms of reducing pain and inflation tion as there was when omega fatty assets were deliberately increased and omega six fatty assets were reduced again in all of these studies. Because these are the ones in which they are controlled things. Well, as we as we say, they are holding constant the choric index.

So it's not just that you're removing fat, eating less fat. There's actually removal of certain fat and fat assets and a replacement of those with omega three fatty assets in one case, in the other case is just a reduction in omega sixes. And you're using other food types and macro nutrient to offset that reduction in calories caused by reducing omega's xs.

The basic take away that they were relying on marching into the study is that increasing omega tries and reducing omega sexes seems to be beneficial for reducing pain. And indeed, in this study they find something quite similar, which is that when you hold clerk can take constant. And when you look at omega's, whether not you decrease or maggoty assets or not, you find is that increasing omega fatty assets in the diet, so either consumed through food sources or by supplementation, was associated with a lower prevalence of severe headache or migraine.

So severe tension type headache or migraine. So this is promising and points to the fact that long chain omega three fatty assets are likely to have either a pain reducing, and there's evidence for that and or an inflation tion reducing effect that can significantly reduce the severity of headache e in both tension typhoeus and in migraine. So that's the first study.

The second study is a more recent study. He is publishing twenty twenty one that use that. I would say a more, less similar type of overall design is the one I referred to earlier.

The title of this paper is dietary alteration of what they call in three, but those are omega three and n six. Omega six, sorry for the shift in Normal leasure. I didn't write the paper.

Battery alteration of omega three and omega fatty assets for headache reductions in adults with migrant and this was a randomized control trial. And ized control trials involve having people be in one condition where they do one thing, and then they get swapped randomly into another condition, so they serve as their own internal control. And that controls for all sorts of things, like differences in sex, differences in age, differences in health background, in any number of other variables, as best as one can.

In this study, they had people either in just a diet that had increased omega's es, so increased E P A, N D H A, or increased E P A and D H A and reduced amount of leopard acid. Okay, so that's going to reduce omega sexes. Or a control diet in which they had people taking what essentially the average intake of omega three and omega success.

And you can probably already guess what the general results of the study are going to be. The general results were that the war reductions in headaches. Okay, the really cool thing is that was a massive reduction in heading. This was they refer to IT as a robust reduction in headache, in particular for the subjects that increase their own megathrust, reduce the amount in oic acid that they took.

The other thing I really like about this study is that what they don't know, the exact underlying that for the effect they did spend some time deliniates IT, is that the omega three and omega 8 assets are likely doing to either offset or exacerbate headache。 Now I didn't say that omega asis exacerbate headache, but IT does seem that people who in just more than olaga in or megah, are experiencing more inflation tion. And that is evident in a bunch of different conditions.

One, for instance, is are increases in things like C G R P. C G R P is a molecule associated with the calcium singing pathway, is involved in via dilation, the expansion of the blood vessels in couples. And that's known, as I mentioned earlier, to exacerbate certain forms of headache.

There are also forms of headache that we caused by visual construction. Will talk about one very dramatic example, perhaps as we get towards end. Um it's a very uncommon example but um it's it's called thunder clap headache and trust me you do not want thunder clap headache um and so we will talk about thunder clap headache and later. That involves construction of the blood vessels.

In any case, in this paper they they didn't study mechanism directly, but they're resting on this known analgesic anti pain as well as known anti in flam ory paths related to increasing omega three intake and simultaneously resting on the idea where I think that we now can say conclusion that omega six fat assets, in particular linoleic acid, can increase information by way of increasing things like C G R P, visio, dillaway and some other pathways related to the so called inflaming python pathways. And there's a whole discussion now is what's called the inflammatory e. So the basic takeaway is that if you are interested in reducing headache, IT may be beneficial, at least according to these two studies.

And another one i'll talk about in a moment to increase amounts of a mega fatty acids. And that can be done again through the injection of foods, although based on the dosages that will talk about in a moment, increasing omega fat assets by taking liquid form fishel, which is perhaps the most cost effective way to supplement omega trees, or capture, which is perhaps the most efficient way to supplement omega thees. Really to a level of one gram or more of E P A per day. Again, that's the E P A form in particular.

So if you're for instance, taking supplement official or you're getting your omega ies from food and you're getting um what you determined to be two thousand milligrams or two grams per day of omega series, keep in mind that's going to include E P A N D H A and IT does seem the getting above one gram per day of E P A omega fdic is either through food or supplements or both is going to be the critical threshold for reductions in the frequency intensity of headaches that include both tension headaches and migraine headaches. Now some people will find actually that ingesting far more omega fatty assets generally through supplementation, but again can be accomplish through food as well, can also be beneficial for other things such as mood. And indeed, there's a whole literature related to effects of ingesting one to three grams, again, three grams per day of E, P.

I. That's going to require quite a high intake omega three. And whatever former supplement you decide to take those into your body, but that that can improve mood and so forth, the basic range that I was able to find in the meta analysis. So metal analysis are where researchers will um look at the results of a bunch of different studies focused on the same thing, look at um the different strength of those studies.

They'll do all sorts of cool statistical gymnastics like remove the most potent study, the one that had the greatest effect and see whether not they're still in effect of some treatment or for instance, they will swap in and out, uh, different studies and different combinations to see whether not any one study is really leading to the conclusion that a given treatment does something. In any case, in the metal analysis of omega three fatty assets for the treatment of headache. And that includes all the different kinds of headache they found in expLoring a huge range of omega supplementation, ranging from two hundred milligrams all the way up to two thousand milligrams per day.

IT really was at the one gram or higher dosage per day where the significant impact on reducing headache frequency and intensity was found. And just very briefly earlier, I mention that not only as omega three fat acid supplementation been shown to be effective in reducing the frequency and intensity of headache in tension type and migraine typed dic, but it's also been shown to improve outcomes for premenstrual syndrome related headaches. These are what we refer to earlier as hormone based heads.

Again, the low estrogen, low progesterone associated with certain phases of the mettre cycle, as well as other phase s of the mentor cycle are often associated with headache. In study entitled effective mega three fati assets on preventable syndrome, a systematic review and gain meter analysis, what they found in here on periphrases, the conclusion was that omega fatty assets could yes, effectively reduce the severity of pms symptoms. And one of the symptoms in particular that they found that was reduced was the pain related symptoms associated with headache and they actually had some very nice hypothesis as to why that likely would be um and in fact point out that in earlier studies, omega three fatty assets have actually been considered as non steroid al anti and flaming drugs in some cases and indeed there are prescription forms of the omega three fati assets.

And I have like that not because I think people need to run out and get the prescription form of omega three family assets that actually quite hard to obtain and quite expensive, but because I think often times when we're talking about something like a mega three fatty acids, the fact that they are available over the counter in a supplement or by liquid or available in food for that matter, leads many people to conclude that, oh, you know, this is supplementation. This is something that, you know, it's going to have relatively weak or minor impact on things like headache or other health metrics. S but um let's just say that the fact that IT exists a prescription drug in its highest potency form, at least in my opinion, points to the potency of omega fatty acids in dealing with analgesic effect that is reducing pain and anti information as well as some of the unknown cardio accused improvements are associated with increasing omega three fatty acid intake.

Put simply, omega trees are not just something comes from food or supplements. They are also being marketed as prescription drugs. So I do think they need to be considered as quite potent.

And at least as far as these papers that again include many analysis of many other papers in data sets indicate that supplementing with a mega re fatty acids to a point where you are getting above one grand per day of epa is not just going to be beneficial for treating and reducing the frequency and intensity of one particularly type of headaches, but many types of headaches. And when you combine the hormonal headaches, tension headaches and migraine headaches, you account for more than seventy percent of the total type of headaches that are out there. Ah the effects of all mega trees on cluster heads and some of the other types of headaches, least to my knowledge, have not been evaluated.

There's no reason to think that omega trees would not be beneficial for those types of headaches. But at least as far as the data sets we talk about here are concerned, IT is clear. Omega three fatty assets are going to be a very potent way to reduce pain and to reduce information in ways that can reduce the frequency and the intensity of different kinds of headache.

Before we continue our discussion about many not commonly known and yet very potent treatments for different forms of headache, I want to touch on the topic we mentioned a little bit earlier and also provide a treatment that is in a way to alleviate something, and that's a photocopier and ora. Now keep in mind that earlier I refer to ora as this sense that something is about to happen, that is true, and that meaning, that is an accurate description of ora. But often times, people also come to understand ora as feeling that something surrounds are given object visually, or even that people have a sense that something around them.

So I this can be a little bit vague, but this idea that ora is a sense of something about to happen, or that visually, or in an auditory way, or maybe even in kind of a sense that something is about to happen in a certain environment. And the reason i'm making kind of arch shapes with my hands, for those of you are just listening, making art shape, is that or as often described as kind of a halo or a eminent out from from one's body or from something that they're looking at. Again, nothing spiritual about this in the context of the discussion about migraine and headache.

But rather, many people experience photoshop a, sometimes with ora, sometimes no. And I just want to touch on a couple of the mechanisms by which orm photoshop a occur, and mentioned just briefly, a pretty well establish way that people can start to offset photos bia. And again, I mention that because many people experiences photoshop a in headache, but there are also a number of people that experiences photos bia, even if they don't have intense headaches.

So photoshop a is pretty common, pretty debilitating IT. Actually, on the reasons why people feel not well and need to leave work, or not go to school, or or leave school, these kinds of things were lying in bed all day or dim the lights, not go outside again. Some like being so um congruent with health.

Um you can imagine how photoshop a can lead to all sorts negative downstream consequences. Okay, so what is ora and what is photophobia? The exact origins of ora aren't exactly clear, but IT is generally thought that what or represents is what's called spreading depression.

And this is not depression of one's mood, although can be associated with that. This is depression of neuro onal activity. Again, neons communicate with one another by generating electrical impulses that travel down the length of the of their so called actions, which are like a little wires.

And then they dump the neurotransmitter out to the so called synapse and impact the electrical activity of other neurons. Depression is a electrical, or I should say, I cannot go electrical. Chemo electrical is the proper term phenomenon in which the excitability of neurons is reduced.

So again, doesn't have anything to do with depression as a mood state persue rather IT is a reduced excitability of neurons. And it's been shown in some imaging studies that ora is associated with a back to front. So from the back of the brain to front, spreading depression like a wave of lowering levels of electrical excitability.

And because this originated in the visual cortex, which is in the back, so that's the part of your brain that is making sense of visual images coming in through the eyes and released through other stations in the brain, that people will start to see a kind of halo of light, or that theyll start to feel that the light around them is literally surrounding their body, or some other object, your body, that they're looking at. And then IT spreads forward in the brain. And that's when IT tends to stretch over into other called sensory modalities.

Sensory modalities being things like touch or hearing. So people will get the sense that kind of seen something in their periphery of their vision, then we'll start feeling something around them. There's a sense that something is about to happen.

So is the spreading wave of depression goes from back to front. People experience a number of these different semi abstract sensory phenomena that we call ora OK. So that's how ora originates. Now, photoshop a is a little bit different photos bia.

We now understand because of some beautiful work that was done at Cliff sappers lab at harvard medical school and some other laboratories, showing that photoshop a originates from a specific set of norms in the eye. We call these the intrinsically photosensitive millon ops in gang len cells, which is really just a mouth full of nerd, speak for neurons in the eye that connect to the brain. These so called gangling cells that respond most robustly to bright blue light or other short wavelengths.

Light, you got short wavelength. Light, that is, blue and Greens are short and then long with the light, which is red, or, you know, can even be out past. Where will be infrared? We don't detect infrared consciously.

Other species do like vipers can see in the infrared. They can even heat sense. So short wavelan flight is going to be light that's that's bright, a blue Green.

It's what's very common in flux ent bulbs that are commonly used in um household lighting and workplace lighting in other forms of artificial lighting. It's also of course, present in sunlight. Sunlight includes a huge range of wavelength, including long wavy light.

Of course, you've seen that is the reds and oranges in the sunset and so on. Those intrinsically photosensitive retinal gangling cells in the eye respond best to bright Green or blue light. and. They send connections to a bunch of different places in the brain, including the so called central circling clock, super isi nucleus that sets your day nigh sleep wake orthes.

This is why I encourage people to view sunlight in the morning, to set this system in motion, to avoid bright light exposure at night from our official sources, in order to not send wake up signals from the eye to the brain and then onto the rest of the body. But these external ally photosensitive retina gangland cells are also known to connect with other areas of the brain, many other areas of the brain, in fact. And one of the important areas of the brain they connect to as IT relates to photoshop.

A is in the area of a structure called the famous. The fillers is an egg structure that sits in the center of the brain, and IT serves as a kind of a switchboard and like a sensory relay, by which information coming from the eyes, from the ears, from the touch system, and that are are fund into different compartments in the farmers and then send to different other areas of the brain. So think of IT an old fashion switchboard or um you could think of IT a sort of like in an airport, you go to a particular wing of the airport, then you go to particular gate.

And so when you're getting funneled progressively through narrow and narrow channels until you arrive at you a particular playing much in the same way the hell is has a bunch of different entry points. So it's sensory information coming in from a bunch of different sources, and those sources get routed into progressively narrow and narrower funds to eventually arrive at the accurate place for their function. So these intrinsically photosensitive gangling cells send connections to a small but important of the families called l pez denoted l letter and p with latter post film's.

Or that, I should say, it's the lateral, posterior nucleus of the families for you, if not s out there. And then the neurons in that location are going to respond that is there going to be activated by bright blue light, Green light, or any kind of bright light originating from artificial sources or from sunlight? And the neurons there that respond to that have a very interesting pattern, connections.

They send connections up to the so called sensory cortex. So a bunch of different layers throughout the cortex that are not associated with visual perception, that is, they're not associated with understanding that there are shapes and controls in the environment, but rather to neurons that are involved in the detection of pressure, pain and other forms of sensor information at the level of what the nines. And we talk about the maines earlier.

So again, while the brain itself does not a sensory, a system to detect pain, the tissues around IT do, and the tissues around those tissues, that is, the stuff around the ages themselves, can respond to pain. And intracranial pressure is also released through the engines to our conscious awareness that there's pain. So what does this mean for photoshop?

A IT means that bright blue light and Green light, and of course, light from sunlight, will activate these neurons in the eye, this intrinsically for sensitive gan win cells, which then activate the latter posture neurons, L P neurons. And those L P. Neurons communicate with areas the brain that are specifically tuned to different sensory phenomenon, and in particular, pain at the level of the mine's and entrer ronie pressure.

What this means is that when we have headache, or if we simply have photos bia on its own, that bright light is actually the trigger for pain sensing and even the creation of pain at the level of the ines and entertaining al pressure. What does this mean in terms of dealing with or treating photoshop? A well, most people deal with fotos bia by deciding to turn off, dim all the lights and simply getting under the covers or wearing a very low brim hat and putting on sunglasses.

Want to lie down and sometimes because, uh, migrant can be associated with not sure, even vomiting in its A A uh instances rather. But one very simple way to avoid activation of these retina gangling cells that would trigger photoshop a is that if you are starting to feel like you have a migraine coming on, or you have photos bia coming on to shift to using patterns of light that are in the longer domain, what that means practically is shifting to using very orange, ideally dim, but very orange and red light. Now this is not a call for people to go out and invest in expensive red light therapies.

admittedly. Ly, there are some excEllent case uses for red light therapy, particularly for agony wounds healing, even for improving vision, especially people beyond age of forty. For some hormonal augmentation.

We talked all about that in the episode that I did on light and healthy. And you can find that IT huberman lab out com everything time stamped. What i'm talking about here would be simply having some red light bulbs on hand for any time that you need to remain awake.

But you're starting to experience photoshop a these red light bulbs can be purchased very inexpensively, uh, you know, as party lights, you can buy these online. So there is no specific need to get any A, I would say, red light that's designed specifically for photoshop a or anything that sort. You can find the cheapest red light available out there and those will simply work.

Um the idea being that for many people who are experiencing photoshop a, they want to reduce that feeling of pain and pressure in their head experience through photoshop a they also might want to stay awake, get some work done and do things. So Operating under red light, where I should say living, working and that are under red light would allow you to stay awake, not have to hide under the covers if you're experiencing photoshop a in addition, and I mentioned this is the beginning of the episode, but many people find photophobia to be an entry point or a trigger to headache. So what happens if they start to experience some or some onset photoshop a and then the photoshop a itself leads to this feeling of malays that then converts into headache.

And so while there are not a lot of clinical data on this just yet, an emerging idea in the rome of headache treatment is the idea that if you can offset some of the early signs, you can offset some of that photoshop, a and ora craps is the use of dim red lights, or red lights, as i've describe a moment ago, then you might be able to reduce the probability that you're going to have a migraine or other type of headache entirely. So again, no need for expensive red lights, but you can find red lights very easily online and simply have them on and and replace the the current lights that you have on your night standard or whatever room you happen to be in with these red lights. These red lets are also, I should mention, very useful in limiting the amount of cortisol, a stress hormone that is very healthy for us to release at high levels early in the day.

In fact, viewing sunlight will increase cost. All levels is another reason why what i'm about, say, is relevant to photophobia. But if you want to keep quarter as all levels low in the evening and at night and initial do and improve the transition to sleep and initiate or sleep overall, reducing quarters all at evening time and the nights is extremely beneficial, and red lights will help you accomplish that.

I talk about that in the episode on light and health. So the point here is that if you suffer from photophobia with or without ora, using red lights and not simply dimming ordinary artificial lights or feeling that you have to turn off all lights entirely, is going to be one relatively inexpensive, or I should say, very inexpensive in some cases, because these red lights can be found very inexpensively online. Way to be able to continue with your daily activities, at least in an indoor environment, if you are suffering from photos.

Bia, so shifting back to ways to reduce the intensity and frequency of different kinds of headaches. We haven't talked so much about tension headaches specifically, so that's what i'd like to do. Now as you recall, tension heads are going to be muscular in origin again, keeping in mind that everything's neural when IT comes to pain, everything is nil when IT comes to everything, Frankly, because every organ and tissue system in our bodies ultimately control by a nervous system.

But tension headaches are often associated with tension of the muscles that are on the skull of the jaw of the neck and can be quite painful for many people and debilitating. And the most common treatment for this that most people rely on, that is, is to take non steroid anti flaming. So things like a see to manifest, i've you prove, in sometimes ask and things of that sort, and often times those can be helpful.

There are couple of things. Keep in mind, however, the and sad, non stern into inflammatory drugs, often times we will work very well at first. But people quickly develop a tolerance to them, meaning they're going to have to take more and more in order to get the same effect.

And often times, they can take more and more because some of them are very hard on the liver. And in addition to that, some of them can offset some other things that you really want. So for instance, it's now known that non steric into inflammatory drugs can offset some of the benefits of exercise and then make sense because a lot of the adapt of benefits of exercise actually come from experiencing a lot of inflation tion acutely.

That means you actually want inflation tion during your resistance training workout or even your enduring workout. But then that inflation tion trigger an adaptation event, or series of adaptation events, that leads to greater strength, greater speed, more muscle, more endurance, whatever is that you happen to be training for. So reducing pain can be good, of course, but not if you have to take more and more of a given drug that IT has side effects on the liver and can offset the effects of exercise and so forth.

The other reissue with non zero anti epomeo drugs is that many of them simply do not work for many people, or again, they're work the first time in the second time, but then they stop working. They also tend to lower body temperature. I think most people are aware of this because many of these same drugs are used in order to reduce fever.

But if you are taking non state into inflammatory drugs, simply to reduce your headache and your loan core body temperature that can have all sorts of downstream issues related to sleep wake cycles, to metabolic, to immune system function more generally, and on and on, for that reason, has been quite a lot of exploration of alternatives to non sterile anti and film ETC drugs for the treatment of headache and indeed pain generally. But today we're talking about headache. Now, as IT relates to tension headache, one of the more advanced, a kind of modern treatments that you sometimes hear about is botox.

right? Botox, I think most people are familiar with. As the thing that people get injected into their face, around the eyes, around the lips or elsewhere in order to reduce wrinkles.

IT was discovered some years ago when botox treatments were being done for cosmetic reasons that IT could often be very effective for relieving headache if injected into the muscles. And the way that IT works is that, of course, tension headache involves attention of the muscles all IT clinching or switching up with the muscles. But we're really talking about is contraction of the muscles.

And that controlled by neons neurons, which are neuromuscular. So neuromuscular neurons don't form synapses with or connections with other neurons. They form synapses with muscle. They released a seto calling onto the muscle that makes the muscle contract.

This is the way you move the limbs of your body also a the muscles of your uh, head contract and can give you tension type heads. Boat talks arises from, or is rather butcha neurotoxin butcha neurotoxin is a toxin that's found in can goods, not all can goods, of course. And what he does is IT prevents a certain step in the release of so called neurotransmitter in the little packets that they live in, which are called vesicles.

Little, little spheres of no transmit to live at the end of neuron nerve terminals and are released under the muscle, make the muscle contract botching m neurotoxin leaves a particular protein there for you, if you not just want to look this up, it's a really cool mechanism. cleves. Something called snaps twenty five, snapped twenty five is involved in the fusion of those little fears with the memories of the neuron and releasing of the neurotransmitter.

So when bush is presented the nerve muscle interface, those nerves cannot communicate with the muscle. As a consequence, the muscles undergo kind of flash tone. They just kind of relax their underneath the skin. Sure, wrinkles are relieved, but if botoxia is injected into the muscles themselves, IT can provide a long lasting relief of certain types of headaches, in particular tension type headaches. So well, that seems like a bit of an extreme trip.

And people who suffer very badly from tension type pedicure due to hyper contraction of the muscles of the forehead or around the temples, around the jaws or the or certain parts of the the neck, and the muscles of the neck encroach on the, on the back of the school, or that actually connected the back of the school, can achieve tremendous long lasting relief from these botox injection, sometimes four weeks or months or even longer. People go in for period no reuss of botox. IT actually is quite safe despite the fact that bush neurotoxin is quite dangerous.

It's given in very low doses and given locally. So those are the only muscles affected. So that's how boat tox is used to treat headaches is a very effective treatment at that.

Of course, many people, I imagine, are interested in not as drug based treatments and not botox type treatments for treating headache e, but other types of treatments for headache that are of the more. So let's call them a natural or non drug treatments. And here we're starting to get into the realm of the urban and oil based treatments for headache.

Now I confessed when I first started researching this area of headache and treatment for heads that is um I found myself approaching IT with a bit of trepidation because when I started to hear about essential oils and about urban medications and um things that sort okay, well, they're probably be some effects. I mean that immediately we've talked before on this podcast about things like epigenome pigeon is one of the core components of camel and camie is known to make people feel little bit sleepy and can enhance sleep. Well appointed and high concentration can indeed augment sleep.

We talk about this in our sleep tool kit. By the way, we don't just have episodes about sleep master, sleep perfect or sleep at at a. But if you go to the huberman lab doc m website and you go to the menu and you click on newsletter, you can scrawl down, you'll see that we have a tool kit for sleep.

There's completely zero cost to access. You don't even have to sign up, although if you like to sign up for future news letters, you can get those. One of the key components of the tool kept for sleep, in addition to behavioral tools and things that are not supplement based, is epic, on which is this component from camel mile. So the idea that certain urban derivatives were urbs or oil could be very useful for improving symptoms of whatever. In this case, improving sleep without is not unheard of in.

In fact, the data continued to be released all the time that many of the things that we think of as urb IT set a can actually have quite pot into facts and so um while I myself IT was approaching the discussion about essential oils and russian oil, right who's to say if the essential or not oils and urbs in the treatment of headache E I finished out my research on this literature feeling um quite, I should say uh surprised and um and as if I need to really check myself a bit because what I found is that they're certain urbs and oils, for instance, that far outperform non state in anti inflaming drugs for the treatment of headache that's right there are certain oils that are available over the counter that when looked at in many studies, meta analysis. And i'll tell you about one particular study and a met analysis in a moment, they show that they can reduce the frequency and intensity of headache in a manner that far outpaces what you observed with non steroid anti flam matory drugs with apparently none of the same issues associated with non sterile anti flaming ory drugs. So um I think it's really worth paying attention to.

The first of those studies i'd like to describe you is one that is now become kind of a classic in the literature, I should say, at least for those that are interested in the eight typical treatments for headache. And the title of this paper is effect of pepper man and egyptians oil preparations on neurophysiology ical and experimental all geometric headache parameters. Okay, what does that mean? Well, this is an interesting study.

Because rather than look at the effectiveness of pepper in an eclipse to oil and other oils on headache, what they did is because they want to look at the mechanisms underlying headache, which I confess. I love the fact that they want to understand the neurophysiology and not just get subjective ratings of headache, although they did that too. But they really want understand how these oils can impact things like muscular tension or perception of pain.

What they did is they recreated headache in human subjects by using tightening coughs of the of the head. They cut off blood supply to certain areas of the head. They basically induced headed. And then they measure things like the emg, the muscle response at the level of electro physiology in the muscle, and, of course, subjective measures of how much people perceived to be in pain or not in pain.

Um i'll give you the broad control of the study because I want to make sure that it's the conclusions that come through most clearly, and we will provide a link to the study in our show note captions. So what they did is they had people use one of four different preparations, preparation, one, which includes some poverty in oil and some you collapse oil, and all the details about the amount and the relative percenters are in the paper free to prove online through the link I mentioned before. So they had four different groups.

They had one group apply peerman oil, but that peppermint oil also contained ecliptic oil. They had another group use just peppering oil. They had another group use just tiny traces of pepper man oil and smaller doses of ecliptic oil.

And then they had a fourth group, which was just using placement, and I said using what they were doing as they were sponsored, ying the oil to the temples and forehead of people. And then what they did is they use these different approaches to measure the activation of muscles, to measure pain. And they then induced head pain, they induced headaches.

So, and they looked at the temporal muscles on the side. They look at the forehead muscles, things that sort. So they use three different types of pain. They looked at people's sensitivity to experimentally induced pain by either providing pressure. So this was kind of a cough around the forehead or thermal pain.

So they actually had them a basic he heat IT up at the level to skin um and actually uh they brought the heat up pretty high to the point where people were rating the pain almost to the to the point of um excessive pain and pain limit. So they obviously couldn't take them to the point of extreme pain. And they had a construction type condition in which they cut off blood circulation to the Perry kronion muscles using an inflated ble collar around the cranium and they inflated that to pretty high pressure.

So kind of a brutal um experiment to be involved. But look, they're trying to miss my headache. And I think um by using these different approaches, they are able to mimic the different aspects of headache and make sure and here's the key point that every person in the study is not just getting the same treatment for headache but is getting the same headache.

And that's something that I think gives this study power. It's not the only way to do a study like this, but IT gives you a lot of power in trying to understand which types of interventions are going to assist in headache and maybe even specific dimensions of the pain and headache. And basically, what they found in the study is that of all the treatments, they used the essential plant oil preparations that contained peppery.

And i'll just mention as an aside and another study's menthol. So this mini type uh essential mini type um what we think of flavors, but are really a romas as well. And as i'll point out the mechanism in a moment, they had the effect of significantly reducing the intensity of the pain, that is, subjects could tolerate the pain far Better and experienced less pain subjectively.

And the magnitude of the effects were really pretty impressive. Again, I went in to all of this thinking, essential oils. Okay, that's like some really cool stuff. I don't know about that, but IT turns out that these essential oil als, at least the ones that contain pepper man oil, with or without ecliptic oil, performed very well in reducing pain.

The key take away from the study is, and here i'm paraphrasing from the study, that the combination of peppermint oil, ecliptic oil and these are basically in a Ethanol suspension. Again, people are not drinking these essential, as I want to be very clear, they are applying these to to the skin around the area that in pain, in particularly a temple in the foreheads, increased cognitive performance. I didn't talk about that, but this is the ability to maintain cogniac functioning wall in pain.

You know, here, my headache up until now, just is kind of pain. But that pain can be very billing itself for your ability to work and perform and do other things. So this combination of preparing oil, nuclear pi s oil applied to the skin allow people to increase their cognitive performance well under pain and had a very muscle relaxing and mentally relaxing effect. Mental relaxation was, of course, measured subjectively. But remember, one of the things that let me to feature this study in this episode in particular, is that they didn't just say, oh, my muscles feel more relax.

They actually saw that the muscles of the forehead and temples and some surrounding muscles were more relaxed when people had these oils on applied to their forehead and the temples, not perhaps to the same degree that one would observe with botox, or for the same extended duration as one would experience with botox, but much in the same way, which then raises the question of what's going on here. I mean, this placement effect will know because they compared to placebo, and they controlled for the older, of course, of the oil that was applied, so that everyone thought that they were getting essentially the same thing punk intended. But in this case, what they found is that if they applied the essential oil to the forehead and temples, that people experience a more less a cooling sensation, or they could feel as if something was happening in the underlying muscle.

Well, what was happening? We now know that menthol, peppermint and other things that smell that way and taste that way actually have an impact on the sensory neurons at the level of the skin, and can actually inhibit certain sensory neurons and can activate other sensory neurons. okay.

So in order to understand this, we have to go back to what I said at the beginning of the episode, which is that you have motor neurons. These are neurons that constrict muscles, are, excuse me, that cause contraction of muscles. They don't constrict them, the cause contraction of muscles.

You have sensory neurons, which sends different things, light, sound or touch. And you have modulator neurons. Mental and egyptus are actually known to activate certain channels in the sensory neurons that respond not just a touch, but also the sensation of cooling OK.

So when we think of menthol and pepper men, we think of kind of cool sense and flavors. Cool, meaning cold. And when we think of things like hot peppers, cap, say, in, we think of anything that has a hot temperature, we tend to think of spicy.

So spicy and hot go together, and pepper, man and men fall and cool, go together, much in the way that the gun commercials of the commercials would lead you believe in. In fact, they're right. So what's happening here is that the application of these oils is very likely activating channels and the sensory neons, including the trip channels, but others as well, that are leading to the energies is effect by shutting down the heat and pain pathways.

Because heat and pain, while they're not exactly the same in our nervous system, they are funded through common pathways, where has cooling and pain relief are funded through alternate, what we call parallel pathways. So the study on pepper man in egyptian oil preparations in reducing pain of headache and different aspects of pain due to headache. I think you're really important because they don't just illustrates the fact that yes indeed go on record saying because that's what the data say.

There are other papers to support this statement as well. Essential oils apply to the skin can reduce the symptoms of tension headache in a significant way, and actually can lead to some offset of some of the cognitive defect cine with headaches. So that's itself very impressive, I must say, was surprising for me going to put me in my place as somebody thought, a essential oil als going like, okay, but is actually seem to um really holds some merit.

And when you compare the magnitude of the effect, even though this was an enormous a number of subjects, you compare the making into the effect in a paper like this or similar papers on these essentials, to the impact of nonstate entire planetary drugs. And they really hold their own, and in some cases, exceed the positive impact of anti flaming drugs. So for that reason, I think we can look at pepper man oils and peerman ucl plus containing oils, menthol containing oils applied to the skin for the treatment of tension type tic as a among the more potent treatments available out there.

Now another way to approach treatment of tension headache is something that many of you have probably heard about before. And then i've talked a little bit about on this podcast in previous episodes, and that's active puncture. We will do an entire episode all about acupuncture, but much in the same way that essential loyals, I think for many people, not all, but for many people, are considered kind of wu biology.

Or people think of IT as very alternative medicine. Keep in mind that as the underlying mechanisms of things like these peppery oils are starting to be discovered or mega trees are starting to be discovered mechanistically, they hold up very well. There's a logic there.

There's an underlying understanding of not just why they should work, but in many cases, how they work in the same way. Active puncture, which of course, has existed for thousands of years, has been used very successfully to treat headache and other forms of pain, so much so that many insurance companies will now pay for architecture as an insured practice. Not all, but many will.

And in addition to that, the scientific community is starting to understand mechanistically how archives uncle work. So I don't want to make this the major focus for now. But very briefly, there is a laboratory at harvard medical school run by chef u.

Mo chu is well known in the neuroscience community for doing excEllent work in parsing the mechanisms of touch, sensation and pain in particular, so not just touch at the level of skin, but pain and pain pathways. And in recent years, his laboratory has started to do studies on how architecture works, because indeed, ocp unctuous has been known to work to alleviate pain for a long time, but the underlying mechanisms haven't been clear. What truths lab is publish now in excEllent journals like nature, science and other journals, is that the precise insertion sites of different needles lead to activation of sensory neurons.

And there are downstream pathways in ways that can potently reduce inflation tion, and that can be used to potently reduce the activity of certain muscles. For instance, muscles in the forehead in temple. So when you hear archibong cure can reduce pain, I think some people think, oh, there is needles sticking out of your face first, that was urt.

And actually the needles are very fine needles. And skilled archibong crores can insert them without any pain. Or actually the person receiving IT does not even usually recognized that the needles are in. That's how quickly and um efficiently they can put them in and people don't detect any pain, but that has been shown to greatly reduce pain, in particular headache related pain and back related pain, some other forms of pain. Tuff's lab has shown that the specific needle insertion sites can activate the sensory pathways and can deactivate the sensory motor pathways.

And now you're familiar sensory neons motor ons and module tories neons and can modulate the activity of the pain pathways by way of impacting the activity of all sorts of different organs, including organs that give rise to some of the inflaming side to so basic. What I saying here is that thanks to thousands of years of acupuncture and the maps of different insertion sites, we now know, or I should say, people have long known, and people in the west are starting to adopt the understanding that archive uncle, yes, indeed. IT really does work for relieving pain.

And laboratories, both in united states, just two hoods and elsewhere, are starting to find the underlying mechanisms. And those mechanisms include deactivation of the pain pathways, activation of some of the parole pathways that assist in shutting down pain or in relaxing the muscles that are causing tension type tic, as well as activation of neural pathways that in pinch on organs that then cause or reduced the release of molecules into the body that give us the experience of paint a reduced inflation tion, and in many cases, increasing anti in flam ory pathways. So I just want to be sure to mention archived uncle and a little bit of mechanistic understanding of why archibong cal works, because indeed archibong care shown to be quite effective for the treatment of tension typedef and to some extend migraine headache as well.

So we talked about omega three fatty acids. We talked about essential oils. We talk about active punch.

So this episode is starting to sound like alternative treatments to headache, including migraine. But I want to be very clear, this is not about alternative treatments. Everything that i'm talking about here has a mechanistic basis. And what we're talking about today are approaches to dealing with headache that, yes, are typically over the counter compounds or are grounded in nutrition or in the case of architecture, behavioral practices, but that are not necessarily meant as replacements for things like non sterile and inflammatory ory drugs or prescription drugs. Of course, those things can still be taken.

Many people drive benefit from them, but the goal is always, I believe I should hope for people to find ways that they can control their health outcomes and reduce things like headache, using a minimum number of things that have other side effects. And that, of course, can also include the use of essential oils in conjunction with things like non steric entine flamm tory drugs, or the use of red light to offset photoshop a in conjunction with any number of different treatments, either prescription or others SE. So I do want to make that clear.

And I especially want to make that clear as as I transition to the next segment where i'm going to tell you about urban treatments for migraine. And this is based on what I consider a very comprehensive review of many random ze control studies. Indeed, the title of the paper is urban treatments for migraine, a systematic review of renommist controlled studies.

And this was polishing twenty twenty. And this contains an immense amount of information. So we will provide a link to IT for those who that really wanted dive deep on this. In this paper, they focus on a number of different reviews and analysis of data focused on compounds for the treatment of migraine, ranging from and including things like a mental all in pepper men oil. So we all recovered that, so I won't cover that again in detail.

But in this review, they highlight the results are referred to before, plus other results that show that menthol and performing oil can be quite effective in the treatment of tension type headache and in this case, of migraine headache as well. So that's interesting, that mental and paper and oiles can be used not just a treat tension type peaches, but migraine heads as well. And they look at an enormous number of other types of urban and essential loyal type tribes, everything from coroner to siron to domestic SE, chem eleven or a bunch of things.

So i'm not going to go through each and every one of these in a lot of detail. What i've tended to do today and i'm going to do now, is to highlight the most potent. Of these different treatments, again, mental poverty oil being among the most pots.

In addition to that, there's a particular pathway that's associated with headache. And when I say that, I mean the different types of headache e, which includes the activation of the thing that we call C G R P. C G R P, again, is involved in this calcium regulation pathway and leads to via dillaway of the vessels and arteries and capitalists in a way that can create pain in this feeling of pressure inside the head, which can be very uncomfortable, of course.

Now, earlier in the episode, I mentioned that I was going to touch on cafe, and so i'm going to do that now. Now the reason I mentioned caffeine is that there's A A sort of lower out there that if you have a headache, drinking a cup of coffee can eliminate that headache. A few things about that point.

First of all, if you are somebody who in just caffeine everyday and you do not in just caffeine, you will indeed get a headache. And drinking caffeine will relieve that particular headache. So it's absolutely true that caffeine can relieve the lack of caffeine induce teacher that sort of a duck.

But um that leads actually to a very important question, which is why would that be the case? Well, IT turns out that caffeine is both a visio die latter and a visual constructor. How does he do that? Well, one of the main ways in which caffeine makes us more alert is that IT occupies the recept tors for something called a deny.

A density is a molecule that builds up in the brain and body more and more the longer we've been awake. It's one of the things that makes us feel sleepy. So when we drink caffeine, that caffeine occupies the identity receptor and the identity cannot have its Normal effective making a sleepy.

When that caffeine wears off the density combined and we feel sleepy, a denotation ine is a visio die latter. So when we drink caffeine, because IT blocks the effects of a dense cine, there is a visual construction association with drinking caffeine. So if you have a headache that is associated with excessive vio dilatation and pressure and head, indeed, drinking some caffeine can cause some visual construction by preventing that a density pathway that would Normally lead to visual construction.

And you can get some relief from that headache. However, caffeine is also a vio dilatory. Caffeine has the ability to in pinch on the so called N O pathway and nitrogen xi de pathway, which is a nerve to blood pathway that involves a few different enzymes that we won't get into right now, but maybe in a future episode that causes dilation of the blood vessels.

And as a consequence, drinking caffeine can also increase facial dilatation. So it's all of a two pronged effect. Now one of the ways in which you might think about this and perhaps utilize this is that if you are well rested or if it's early in the day and you've had some sleep previous night, a denot's ine levels are very likely to be low, especially if you slept very well the night before.

Under those conditions, when you and just caffeine, you are not going to experience the visual construction effects of caffeine that would ordinarily be there by inhibiting a dency. why? Because a dency is not present at all. And under those conditions, drinking coffee ought to lead to some vasodilators. Not a lot, but nonetheless VISA ation.

If, however, you have a sleep well or at late in the day and you've been up for a long time, drinking caffeine is likely to have more of a vasishtha 也 effect。 And this is important because some of the treatments that you hear about that involve using caffeine to treat headache are as extreme as okay. If you have a headache at night, drink a cup of coffee and then go to sleep.

As he saw that in the literature, which I couldn't quite believe, because yes, indeed, some people can fall a sleep after drinking cafe, but we know very well, thanks to the beautiful work in science communications of people like dr. Matthew Walker from unique california, berkeley, and who's been against on this and other podcast, that even if you can fall a sleep after drinking caffeine, interesting cafe within the ten to twelve hours prior to bad time is simply not a good idea because of the ways IT disrupts the architecture of sleep. So what's the takeaway about Kathy? And headache and visual dilation? You need to be very clear on whether not caffeine intends to remove your headache or exacerbate IT.

Now this is going to depend on time a day in the amount of a dense iar system, as I mentioned before. But also, there seems to be a kind of bimodal distribution whereby some people, when they drink caffeine IT really improves their headache, in some case of very significant effects, where as other people when they drink caffeine IT really exacerbates their headache. And as least as far as I could tell from the literal, it's not easy to predict who those people are going to be.

What is reassuring, however, is that does not seem to be the case that if you're somebody who experiences relief from headaches by drinking caffeine that suddenly one day to the next, you're going to experience a worsening of your headache. And vice verses also true. So if you're somebody that drinks ks, caffeine in your headaches get worse.

I don't think there's any reason to think that caffeine one day or from one day to the next rather is going to somehow alleviate your heads. So you have to determine for yourself with not headaches, a relieved you're exacerbated by drinking caffeine. And if you're wondering why it's so confusing, it's because caffeine hits both the visible dilatation on in the basic construction pathways and there's nothing you are, I or anyone else can do about IT.

Now the last thing i'd like to talk about in terms of relief for headings is something that i'm guessing ying about. Probably twenty five percent of you are familiar within. Seventy five percent of you are not, which is kirkman.

Cucumis often also referred to as tumeric. And tumeric is a root, and curcumin is one of the key components of that root. Kirkman is known to have very potent anti inflammatory properties. I don't think that's debated at all. In fact, it's so potent anti flaming that some people have cautioned against taking high levels of cucumber prior to, for instance, resistance training, workouts or even cardiovascular workout because so prevents inflation tion that IT also can prevent the adaptation response because, remember, the inflammation occurs during exercise, both resistance and cardigan cute exercise is at least in part, the trigger for the adaptation that is going to lead to enhanced and strain type trafic eta. Nonetheless, curcumin has been explored in the context of treatment of migraine, and it's one of the compounds that was analyzed.

An extensive detail in this wonderful review that I mentioned a little bit earlier, but I like about this study, is that they were able to explore the effects of cochin as explored in previous research studies, and compare those across a large range of different dosages and a large range of combinations with other things like kenza q tn, which we have talked about on this podcast before. But I think for sake of this discussion, just really focusing on what curcumin does alone or in conjunction with the omega three fatty assets is what turns out to be the most interesting. First of all, curcumin has been shown to be generally safe for most people at dosages as high as eight thousand milligrams per day or eight grams per day.

Now, I want to be very clear, I do not recommend that anyone take dosages of cucumber OK tumeric that are that high. why? Well, curcumin tumeric not only our anti flaming, but they also can in pinch on other pathways, in particular hormonal pathways.

And in fact, curcumin k tumi c can alter the synthesis of something called die hydro testosterone dehydrated stock. Rone is involved in enormous range of different bodily functions. It's involved in label.

It's loved in men, in beard growth and in the regulation of a number of different issues, both in the reproductive access and outside the reproductive access. And current man is a pot inhibited of D. H.

T. So I do want to caution that people who take hydas of curcumin and some people who are a very sensitive to curcumin, well, even at low doses, experiences reductions in the ht. That lead to things that they would not like such a sufficient reductions in libido.

However, current man has been shown to be effective as an anti I flaming and has been shown to be very effective in treating different types of headache and particular migraine headache. One of the ways in which current does that is to inhibit the thing that talked about a few minutes ago, which is network oxide or N O, which causes VISA dilation. And in doing that can reduce the feeling that one has a lot of international dial pressure.

And so kirkman dosages come in enormous range. I mentioned before dosages that ranged anywhere from eighty milligrams taken eighty million grimms per day. That is taken for eight week's time that's been examined. It's been explore to eighty milligram dosages taken alongside two and a half grams of omega three fatty acids or omega three fat acids alone and against plus ebo.

And the general conclusion of these studies is that current in, when taken IT at dosages of bet, eighty milligrams, although for those of you very sensitive to current in probably as low as twenty five, even fifty milligrams per day in conjunction with, although not necessarily at the same time, but taken daily along side omega three fat assets at two and a half grams, LED to significant improvements in migraine and other forms of headache, meaning both the frequency and the intensity of the headaches that occurred was greatly reduced. One important, important about curcumin, to keep in mind, is that curcumin is known to inhibit something called catchum p four five zero that's associated with an enza tic pathway and some other things that relate to blood coagulation. So for people that are taking medications that are anti coagulants to prevent, you do need to be very cautious about using current in and of course, with current in or any other supplement, you should always talk to your doctor prior to including IT, removing IT from your supplement regiment.

So as you can see, there are a number of different things that in addition to prescription drugs and over the counter pain medications, things like non steric entine film matory drugs can really impact the different aspects of headache. And different types of headache in some cases is differentially. Now today, we talk mainly about tension type and migraine type adages because those are the most common forms of headache.

There are, of course, the cluster type headaches that are of neural origin to about ordinal headaches, and indeed some treatment, such as the mega trees, which have been shown to be beneficial for offsetting the menstrual related headaches. Now in the context of the discussion, bat mega trees, keep in mind that omega ies can be obtained from supplementation or from nutrition, so you don't necessarily have to take omega three. Capsules or liquid form of mega trees if you want to use a mega trees to target different symptoms of headache.

But that probably is going to be the most efficient way to do IT, given that many foods do contain mega trees, but it's hard to get above that one gram dosage. And in fact, most of the studies that we talked about today involved getting two or even two and a half or in some cases, on this podcast with previous guests such as doctor on a patch IT, he talked about the advantages of getting as highest three grams of oh ega threes per day, which almost with certainty, is going to require some external form of supplementation, even for those of you that are making a point to eat a fati ocean fish with the skin on. So I just want to make sure that I highlight that before we wrap up by can help myself.

But to talk about something that I heard about on the news several years ago and IT sounds IT too outrages to be true, but then was confirmed as accurate by one of my neurologist colleagues. And that's the fact that eating certain very spicy peppers can induce headache, and in some cases, can induce brain damage. And a bear with me here, i'm not talking about your traditional how opinion, and i'm acknowledged the fact that certain people can tolerate far more spicy taste than do others.

Some people are very sensitive to spicy, some people can tolerate very spicy food. And that one can build up a tolerance of spicy food by ingesting progressively spicers use me, spicy er and spicy er food over time none's. There are these pepper eating contests out there that um well not very common do exist and people chAllenge each other to eat peppers of um extreme spiciness.

And there's one in particular that's referred to as the Caroline a ripper, by the way, that's not a person as far as I know that's a pepper the Caroline, a report which is known to have the most potent spice of any pepper. And here's why you would not want to eat the CarOlina riper. A few years ago, at one of these pet eating contest, man ate a CarOlina riper is part of the competition and suddenly experience what's called thunder clap headache.

Thunder clap headache is a unique type of headache, very different from all the other types of headache and is not from the surface in. So it's not tension headache. It's not even the the cluster type ache of the nerve activation of the trigeminal. It's actually a hyper constriction of the vasculature in the brain caused by the injection of the pepper and inflaming response.

And remember that heat and spicy go together in these neural pathways and a bunch of different heat related and spice related paths get activated simultaneously when one in just something of extreme, and the blood vessels, and indeed some of the smaller arteries feeding neural tissue, shut down. And he experiences the thunder clapped headache, which is a brutal headache, and sadness, in his case, permanent brain damage, a loss of neural tissue. Because neural issue is very metal, ably active, you cut off the blood supply to that tissue, not only would you feel miserable um maybe have been pass out, but um lose vision and certain brain air as well actually die off in the absence of a blood flow to those areas.

Um we d know this um more commonly as stroke so I don't want to strike uh fear in anybody about eating a you know halophytes uh or even a very spicy meal from time to time. But if you're not somebody who's familiar with eating very spicy foods um you certainly don't want to enter one of these competitions and just realized that the pathways from method and cool or spicy and hot, those aren't ous subjective pathways. These are actually neural pathways that again originate in our so all nerds call IT the sensory epithelium or our skin or our hearing our eyes um and that feed that information into the body to make use of that information, some case motor movements of sense remote in other cases um the information can be fed through nerve pathways that goes to the vascular or and caused the vascular or to either dilate or construct these very spicy peppers causing, as I just mentioned, extreme ebro of of the head visual construction and brain damage again, that's not going to be a common thing out there but none there's um I encourage people to be very cautious about the CarOlina reader.

So today, we talked about headaches, and first, we highlighted the different types of headache, making IT clear. The understanding which headache you might be experiencing can be very beneficial for understanding which sorts of treatments ought to be best and perhaps also best avoided in trying to alleviate those headaches or prevent them from happening at all. We talk attention headaches, migraine headaches, warm days, cluster headaches and traumatic brain injury related heads.

We talked about different types of treatments, ranging from creating to mega three fatty acid supplementation, some urban and indeed some essential oil treatment, as well as archibong cure, all of which have been shown to have significant impact in reducing the frequency and intensity of headings and in many cases, reductions in the frequency and intensity of headaches that are least as great as the results they are seen with non steroid anti inflammatory ory drugs. Again, I want to highlight that none of these approaches are necessarily designed to be done on their own or in replacement of prescription drugs from your physician. There are excEllent prescription drugs out there that your physician can prescribe for you for the treatment of headache none's.

I think many people who are listening to this podcast are interested in the things that they can do in order to inoculate themselves, or at least reduced the likelihood of experiencing headache, especially for people who are experiencing chronic, recurrent headaches, such as migraine or the other forms of headache, which can be so debilitating. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our youtube channel.

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