Everybody enjoys eating something or the other but almost all people like eating ice-cold ice cream on a hot day.What happens when the ice cream is too cold and hits you right in the head immediately after eating? This can result in one of the most painful headaches, a brain freeze!Brain freeze is known as a referred pain where tiny muscles around blood vessels constrict and relax suddenly. On a hot summer day, what hits the most is an appetizing frozen drink or an ice cream instead. If you eat that icy delicacy too fast, you could feel terrible ice cream headaches. The biological name of brain freeze is sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia, popularly known as ice cream headache is a cold stimulus pain in your head or forehead.What causes brain freeze? The reason for such terrible pain can be a sudden rush of blood in your nerves. The intensity of the pain in the head generally begins within seconds and can rapidly reach an extreme point of intolerance, mostly within fractions of seconds. If you are interested in more such fun facts, you must check out why do people pass out on rides? And why do people breathe into paper bags?What is a brain freeze?‘Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia!’, have you ever heard someone yelling out this name after sipping a cold drink or gulping a cold beverage or an ice cream? We guess not, but you must have heard someone screaming ‘brain freeze!’. So, what is a brain freeze? What are these headaches caused when you eat ice cream of all things? A brain freeze is a sudden pain or sensation in the brain that gets to its peak within seconds and becomes intolerable.A brain freeze happens when a frozen beverage comes in contact with the roof of your mouth. Thus, as a result, an unexpected temperature change happens within the mouth, in the tissues stimulating the nerves, resulting in fast dilation causing swelling in the capillaries. This reaction tries to direct blood to the affected area and warm it back again. The headache that follows up begins from the receptors present in your mouth, which signals your brain with the help of the nerves in your face. This ends in causing an immediate, very sharp pain with a typical exclamation that remains similar to this incident. So this is what causes a brain freeze to occur.A brain freeze, also known as an ice cream headache, can last anywhere between a fraction of seconds to a few minutes. No matter whether it’s summer, rainy, autumn, or winter, brain freeze can happen to you very frequently because it occurs in response to the food consumed and not to the temperature outside.While having something cold or frozen, it is advisable to gulp it slowly, since the reaction picks up quickly by the sudden change of temperature in the mouth. You should try to press your tongue against the roof of your mouth so that the blood vessels get warm-up. In some cases, it is advisable to breathe in through your mouth and breathe out through your nose so that warmer air passes through your nasal passage.What things cause brain freeze?The most obvious question that can always hit your mind while having a brain freeze is why do we get brain freeze and why does ice cream cause brain freeze?The tissues present in your mouth are very thin, some of the tissues are so thin that they allow the sensation to pass directly to your bloodstream. These thin tissues spontaneously start to receive responses and send them to the brain through nerves. When a sharp fright of cold blows the roof of your mouth, the signals are rapidly transmitted to the nerves. Cold contracts blood capillaries and the blood in these shrunken capillaries advances very fast.This, in turn, causes a rapid flow of blood and restricts the blood flow at the same time, interrupting your brain’s ability to modulate the blood flow to its needed level. As a consequence, the brain ends up reacting in the form of a headache, which continues until the blood capillaries start to operate normally. Human beings with a background of migraine problems are more prone to ice cream headaches. In some cases, brain freeze might cause irregular heartbeat in some people, and in such cases, they should entirely avoid cold beverages as much as possible.How do you stop a brain freeze?Even though you might get a brain freeze, you still aren’t completely helpless regarding this problem. You can still have your favorite ice cream or cold drink or frozen beverages by using some precautionary information.Start with recognizing the symptoms of brain freeze. If you keep getting a bad headache only when you swallow a cold beverage, then it will get normal within a few minutes. However, if you keep getting brain freeze, a kind of pain in your head or forehead without consuming any cold food item or drink, then you should seek medical treatment as there is a high chance that it is not a brain freeze. You should stop consuming cold drinks or ice cream or frozen beverages to control brain freeze.Immediately after gulping something cold, warm the roof of your mouth with your tongue. This lets your blood vessels get normal naturally and the blood flow gets normal. Drinking lukewarm water can also help in getting away with your brain freeze. You need to sip the warm water and roll it around your mouth for a while, this way your palate gets the much-needed warmth to normalize your brain freeze.You can also mask your mouth and nose with your hands and start breathing fast. This mask traps your warm breath and helps in raising the temperature inside your mouth and nose. Sometimes, you can also get away with your brain freeze by pressing a warm and clean thumb against your palate. Very rarely the traumatic brain freeze seems to be worse, but if you know how it comes and goes and when you can expect it, it doesn’t have a dreadful experience on you.How harmful are brain freezes and why are they so painful?Whenever you might get a brain freeze, you might think about how harmful brain freeze can be. The reality is that a brain freeze can turn out to be painful, but it’s not harmful and it goes away on its own in a few minutes. It can happen that a brain freeze might make you feel very uneasy, but fortunately, it’s harmless.The ice cream headache is very much painful because the pain is sharper than the pain of migraine. People could also pass out from a brain freeze. However, in most cases, a brain freeze lasts for not more than ten minutes.If you do not stop eating or drinking whatever has triggered brain freeze, the blood vessels with cold blood present will become constricted, resulting in a blockage in the circulation, leading to you passing out as a result of brain freeze.Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly facts for everyone to enjoy! If you like our suggestions for Why do we get brain freeze? then why not take a look at why do atoms bond? or why do my joints crack?
Everybody enjoys eating something or the other but almost all people like eating ice-cold ice cream on a hot day.
