There you are, eagerly anticipating the first of many spoonfuls of that scrumptious sugar and the dairy concoction called ice cream.
You lift the mound to your lips, capture the dreamy treat with your tongue, and press it across the roof of your mouth to melt into a deliriously delicious rush of dairy joy when suddenly, KUHBAYUM!
Shooting pain strings itself between the temples like a wind-blown hammock, imposing an intrusive pause in your pleasure with cranium-crushing pain threatening to bring you to your knees.
What just happened? How can you make it stop?
How Brain Freeze Occurs
If it’s your first time, you may have just experienced the painful phenomenon medically known as sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia, induced by consumption of a cold substance that causes blood vessels in the region to swell and send pain signals via the nervous system to the brain.
A rapid cooling and heating cycle triggers the dilation of blood vessels in the forehead, causing them to swell rapidly.
In excruciating pain, people futilely clamp both temples between thumb and fingers with light pressure trying to stop the throbbing or clutch the sides of their heads, applying finger massage techniques to relieve the pressure.
How do you stop it?
How To Treat Brain Freeze Pain
Whether this is your first rodeo or another go-round with ice cream headache, you wonder when the pain will end. Here are five solutions to try.
- Keep the area cold to break the cooling and heating cycle, only stop shoveling more cold faster than the mouth can warm itself.
- Warm your palette with your tongue.
- Take deep breaths to relieve pain.
- Sip warm water.
- Whipped cream acts as a buffer, so pile it on: “Aw, Honey, it’s a buffer for those migraines I get when I eat ice cream.”
Don’t Drink and Drive
Ice cream isn’t the only coldie-but-goodie that can pump blood vessels into a flash-swelling frenzy.
Slurpee sipping caused brain freeze so intense that a Texas driver blacked out and lost control of his pickup truck, which plowed into and seriously damaged four parked vehicles.
Four Fun Facts About Brain Freeze and Ice Cream
- Only 33 percent of us experience brain freeze from eating something cold.
- Ice cream is a foam.
- An average American consumes 21.5 quarts of ice cream per year.
- Researchers induce brain freezes in volunteers to study the symptoms and process that precede migraine headaches.
Is Brain Freeze Preventable?
Sure it is. Eat your ice cream slowly to prevent triggering ice-cream headache and after brain freeze passes to prevent relapsing into monster mini-migraines. Since certain substances like menthol and capsaicin can have sudden cooling or heating effects on our palettes, we may need to lower the speed when eating ice cream combinations and toppings with ingredients like mint or chili peppers.
Computers have their kind of brain freezes not caused by spilled ice cream input. Operating systems can become stricken with freezes, crashes, and reboots caused by unauthorized modifications made by browser hijacker programs.
They mess with your Home page and install beaucoup bookmarks on the desktop that take you to porn sites. Like getting another brain freeze, we ask ourselves how we let this happen.
No worries, though, with freeware that finds and removes trails of CoolWebSearch.
This means you can slowly savor ice cream while playing Frozen on your desktop as a freeware-cherry-on-top removes CoolWebSearch from your computer, thus preventing further brain freezes for either of you. Relieving brain freezes brought on by Mr. Freeze, on the other hand, may require a donation to fund his research.