Sleep is a sacred bond between us and our beds.

When that bond gets broken, we suffer.

Learning what causes hypnic headaches can keep us from ending up with those 3 am head pain wake up calls.

In this article, I will be talking about what hypnic headaches are, what causes them, and what studies have found works really well for them.

What is a hypnic headache?

A hypnic headache is known as the “alarm clock headache” because it wakes you up at night with head pain. Even though it will usually wake you up at the same time each night, it commonly happens between 1-3am or 4-6am. It can be one-sided or on both sides of the head, is sometimes throbbing and lasts between a few minutes and 6 hours.

Watch this video to learn more about hypnic headaches.

It’s #migraine and #headache awareness monthDid you know:#Hypnic headache is relatively rare but important to recognizeLike an ill-timed #AlarmClock blaring in the middle of the nightMostly affects #older folksMust exclude other causes#MHAM2018 #MHAMhttps://t.co/UhGYKzpjUp— Stephanie Nahas (@stephanieJnahas) June 24, 2018

7 Vital hypnic headache causes

Before we begin, we need to understand the clock that our cells live by.

This clock is similar to the clock that we use, but different in that it synchronizes itself based on the amount of light our skin and eyes are perceiving.

It is called our circadian rhythm and functions off of 2 main sources of light.

The bluish hue of the morning light that stimulates our body’s stress hormone cortisol to wake us up…

And the orangish hue of evening light that stimulates our body to drop the stress hormone cortisol and raise melatonin, our sleep hormone.

So cortisol wakes us up out of sleep and gives us energy and focus.

Melatonin is the opposite in that it makes our body wind down, prepare to rest, digest and repair our brains and bodies.

Here is an image showing our circadian clock and how it functions in a normal healthy person.

The black line is cortisol and the white line is melatonin. In the morning, cortisol spikes with the sunrise, and in the evening it drops with the sunset allowing melatonin to spike.

But our stress hormone cortisol may also go up any time we stimulate our body or mind.

• If we work out, cortisol goes up.
• If we go through a traumatic event, cortisol goes way up.
• If we have caffeine, cortisol goes up.
• If we are staring at sources of blue light like screens, cortisol goes up.
• If we are stimulated by an action movie or another event that makes our heart pump, cortisol goes up.

But these aren’t bad, in fact, they are fairly normal. What matters is when this happens and how we respond to it.

It’s normal for cortisol to go up in the morning so we want to maximize our mornings for everything that requires lots of energy and stress.

This allows us to leave our relaxing and winding down activities for the evening, preventing us from raising cortisol.

It is easy to drop cortisol if we are consciously trying to do it(as long as it’s not artificially stimulated).

Only a few minutes of specific breathing can halve our cortisol levels after a stressful event.

See the video below to learn about how circadian rhythms work.

1. Optimize circadian rhythm sleep-wake

Our circadian rhythms are the most important cycle in our body because they regulate every single cell and bacteria we have.

There are a few keys to making sure they stay synchronized so that our hormones and cellular metabolism like our brain cells detox and repair properly.

They are:

• Get direct sunlight every day for at least 15-20 minutes

• Avoiding sleeping in late as once light is coming into your room, your melatonin drops

• Sleep in blackout conditions with no light, street lights, lights from electronics and minimal stimuli like sounds and odors

• Have room temperature be cool but not cold and warm your hands and feet before bed which has been shown to improve sleep cycle quality

2. Melatonin

Melatonin is our sleep hormone and has been shown in studies to help some hypnic headache sufferers.

But be careful with melatonin supplements…

1-3 mg taken sublingually(under the tongue) has been found to be effective whereas some supplements can have hundreds of mg of melatonin and this may cause drowsiness during the day.

3. Sleep foods

When we think of sleep, we have to understand that blood sugar and food quality plays a very large role.

Melatonin, our sleep hormone, is made from tryptophan which is an amino acid that comes from proteins.

The best food sources of tryptophan are:

• Dark chocolate
• Dates
• Red meat
• Fish
• Poultry
• Pumpkin seeds
• Spirulina
• Squash seeds
• Lamb

For blood sugar, we need to know if we have blood sugar handling problems and most of us do.

Do you get irritable when you haven’t eaten for a few hours?

Do you get headaches if you miss a meal?

Do you get severe cravings or other symptoms if you miss a meal or don’t keep your blood sugar up?

These need to be handled through a nutritional protocol to rebuild your body’s ability to use food.

When blood sugar drops, we can actually go into a coma and die so our body regulates this very closely.

To compensate it uses cortisol because cortisol, as a stress hormone, puts sugar into our blood.

Throughout evolution whenever we entered fight or flight mode, our body would need lots of resources so that it could fight or run whatever was causing danger. It uses cortisol, our stress hormone to release sugar into our blood and make it available as fuel.

But this causes more problems if we suffer from head pain and have bad circadian rhythms because when blood sugar drops, cortisol goes up and this causes sleep quality to go down.

We want to avoid this.

Which means we need to balance blood sugar before bed by giving our body foods that support long-lasting energy.

Think of our metabolism as a fire. We want to put logs on it, not twigs, so that it lasts us throughout the night.

Good foods for this are:

• Nuts and seeds

• Wild fish

• Dark leafy greens like spinach and collard greens

• Vegetables with complex carbohydrates like yams, carrots and beets (not potatoes or grains)

• Fatty pastured meats

See our article on blood sugar stabilizing foods here.

4. Kill blue light

Blue light is a 21st-century problem and has contributed to a massive amount of sleep dysfunction.

It is normal in the morning to have lots of natural blue light from the sun.

But in the evening and at night, blue light confuses the body into thinking it is still daytime.

This pushes back circadian cycles and keeps our body from being able to repair and detox when we fall asleep because it still has to raise sleep hormones and drop stress hormones enough to do it.

The best option here is to avoid all screens at least 2-3 hours before bed but it is unrealistic since we are culturally glued to our “smart” phones.

Instead, use these tips:

• Get apps like twilight or night shift on your phone which drop the amount of blue light coming from your screen

• Use apps like fl.ux on your laptop and desktop to prevent blue light from them

• Use physical blue light filters on your screens

• Sacrifice looks, for health, with these blue light blocking glasses

5. Liver, lung and large intestine

When we want to understand what thousands of years of medicine can do for us we need to understand traditional Chinese medicine. This is one of the areas I use to interpret my client’s symptoms and it is very effective for dealing with root cause issues.

Our entire body goes by the circadian clock and our organs have specific times they go through their detoxification phases.

Between 1am and 7 am our body is going through liver, lung and large intestine detoxification and if these organs are having any trouble, we are going to get symptoms when it’s their time to clean themselves up.

This means we want to pinpoint which one is having issues and support them.

Do we feel congestion in the right side of our abdomen under our ribs?

Do we have loose stools, gas, diarrhea, constipation or unfinished feelings after bowel movements?

Do we have a cough, weak lungs, phlegm or live in an environment with poor air quality?

We want to take these systems into account and look deeper into them to understand if the issues they are having are overflowing into other systems like the brain, creating stress in the body and waking us up with pain.

6. Caffeine

According to this study,

“Caffeine taken as a cup of strong coffee seems to be the best acute and prophylactic treatment option.”

Caffeine can be amazing for hypnic headaches both before bed and on waking up with pain.

But this begs the question, is it because our body needs the boost in stress hormones? Is it because we are withdrawing from caffeine? Is it because our cycles are lopsided and need tuning?

Either way, coffee has been found to work well for hypnic headaches as acute and prophylactic solutions…

But this can be bad and cause more problems for those who are already exhausted.

If our body is so depleted in stress hormones that we have to squeeze even more out of it with caffeine, it is not a solution.

Remember, caffeine doesn’t give us more resources, it just attaches to our stress receptors and releases more of the resources we either do or do not have.

It is not a nutrient, just an empty stimulus.

But we can improve that with some tweaks.

Coffee is the most common way to get caffeine into your system so:

• Use a high-quality organic coffee as coffee is highly sprayed with brain-damaging chemicals

• Add some grass-fed butter, coconut oil or MCT oil to your cup to add a ton of nutrition and slow down the “burn”

• Use a nutrient-filled sweetener like raw honey or real maple syrup instead of sugar

• Add cinnamon or cacao for an extra boost

• Avoid coffee after 2 pm if possible and not using it as a before bed prophylactic

• Figure out if you are becoming dependant on caffeine

7. Sleep is brain detox time

In one study, 50% of hypnic headache patients had a previous history of migraine and 40% had underlying sleep abnormalities.

This means we need to figure out what caused our migraines because it could be causing our hypnic headaches and we need to fix our sleep abnormalities.

Migraines are often a protective mechanism used by the brain to make us stop what we are doing and increase the number of resources going to our brain to heal whatever is causing the damage to our brain cells.

See this article to learn more about complicated migraines, see this article to learn about what to do when a migraine or headache won’t go away and see this article to understand the migraine brain.

Sleep abnormalities are a huge issue and obviously connected to hypnic headaches so having a sleep study, fixing circadian rhythms, creating a wind-down routine before bed and reducing stress on the brain may all help.

When we sleep, our brain cells can shrink up to 20% so that they can rest, repair and “squeeze” out any waste products created during the day.

We want to make sure we support this process by taking the burden off our brain, lowering inflammation in our bodies, supporting our lymphatic system to remove waste and providing the nutrients our brain cells need to repair, grow and create stronger pain-free connections.

Click here to become part of the community where you will learn more about migraines and headaches than you ever have and what to do about them.

Share this post with others who need help with their sleep and let me know:

Have you ever experienced a hypnic headache?

See our video on hypnic headaches here:

Migraine auras are fairly common and said to happen in 20-30% of the migraine suffering population.

But auras and prodromes with phantom smells account for less than 1% of the migraine suffering population. (Study)

Some of the smells can be pleasant, and some can be painful to have to endure.

In this article, I’m going to be covering what phantom smells with headaches are and where they come from.

What are phantom smells?

Phantom smells, called phantosmia are a hallucination inside your olfactory or smelling system.

When the brain is affected by something like cortical spreading depression then wires can get crossed and signals can be sent through the part of the brain that processes smells.

This can results in the sensation as if we are inhaling an odor. But it does not actually exist, hence being called phantom.

These can also be created by brain tumors, epilepsy, temporal lobe seizures or head trauma so it is important to see a doctor if you experience phantom smells.

In migraine sufferers, phantom smells usually comes as part of the migraine aura or prodrome.

When the brain has been sufficiently damaged by stress then it will go through a cascade of responses creating cortical spreading depression and triggering migraine.

What is cortical spreading depression?

Cortical spreading depression has become the biggest buzz around migraines with aura in recent years.

It actually gives us a way to understand what is happening during a migraine aura and why.

I’ll keep it simple to make it understandable as the brain can get quite complex and there is a lot about cortical spreading depression we still don’t know.

Cortical spreading depression is a wave of electrical activity that goes throughout different parts of the brain depending on what is affected.

This wave is a series of “blackouts” where the electrical activity drops and “restarts.”

This event may be very damaging to the brain and is present in conditions like migraine and epilepsy.

To tie it to a metaphor, its like you are running your house on a gas generator.

But this gas generator is running out of fuel so the electricity coming out of it is uneven.

This causes the lights in your house to flicker on and off.

The fuel is running low and we need to fix it.

The brain protects you from this energy shortage by ramping up its protective mechanism we call migraine.

It uses the migraine to increase the delivery of nutrients and amplify its ability to repair damage and improve energy generation throughout the brain.

Just like all of our other pain reflexes, they are there to signal to us there is danger, make us stop doing what we are doing, and focus on what is going on.

To understand more about migraine auras see our article on the 3 truths of frequent ocular migraines with images here.

To learn more information than you’ve ever known about migraines, headaches and what to do about them, join the migraine professional community here.

Some headache conditions are extremely rare and painful.

SUNCT is one of them.

This syndrome can attack up to 200 times per day with pain frequently reported as a 9 out of 10.

In this article, we will be talking about 5 Incredible tools for the SUNCT headaches syndrome.

Let’s start at the beginning.

What is SUNCT headache syndrome?

SUNCT stands for short-lasting unilateral neuralgiform headache attacks with conjunctival injection and tearing.

This is a type of moderate to severe pain in the head, around the eye or temples with single stabs, stab groups or a saw-tooth pattern. Below is a picture describing the pain type.

With symptoms often only on one side, it is related to the trigeminal nerve and comes with eye redness and tearing on the affected side.

Pain comes on quickly, peaks, generally lasts between 5 seconds and 4 minutes and on average there are 5-6 attacks per hour.

It’s a type of trigeminal autonomic cephalalgia(TAC).

It most commonly occurs in men after age 50.

There is a lack of effective drugs as well as a lack of studies on new drugs, nutritional and lifestyle therapies that are being used on other headache disorders.

But we will make some connections and talk about tools you can start using today for pain and inflammation.

See this slideshow to understand more about SUNCT:

Symptoms of SUNCT headache syndrome

The most commonly reported symptoms are:

• Pain in the head, temple or around the eye
• Single stabs, groups of stabs or a sawtooth pattern of pain
• Tearing
• Eye redness
• Drooping and swelling eyelid
• Nasal blockage
• Forehead sweating
• Facial flushing
• A sensation of fullness in the ear

To get a better understanding of SUNCT see the video below:

Triggers and causes of SUNCT headache syndrome

There are many different triggers for SUNCT headaches and some of them the same as cluster headaches and migraines like certain lights, scents, and smoke.

These are the most commonly reported triggers:

• Touching the face or scalp
• Washing
• Chewing
• Eating
• Talking
• Coughing
• Blowing nose
• Showering

Even though we want to avoid triggers as much as possible we need to look deeper at the cause or we will continue chasing pain in an endless loop without relief.

The causes are largely reported to be unknown because of a lack of agreement on any one area. This is the same for most chronic head pain disorders and especially for the TACs.

But there are some key areas we need to look at and they include:

• CGRP
• Glutamate
• Inflammation
• Parasympathetic / sympathetic nervous system dysfunction
• Nerve dumping
• Structural issues
• Hypothalamus/brainstem/trigeminocervical complex activation

We need to understand that pain is a protective mechanism by the body used to bring awareness to us. It’s used to signal danger and to force us to stop doing what we are doing that may be causing the pain.

The causes of pain are many and can come from any area of life which means we need to look at our body holistically and see a health practitioner that uses mind/body medicine.

Assessing our mind and body to find where dysfunction is coming from is a much healthier, more rounded and effective long-term care plan and doing this will give us a multidisciplinary approach we can use to find relief.

Surgery / Treatment of SUNCT headache syndrome

The classic treatments that have been found to be effective for SUNCT include:

• Lidocaine
• Prednisone
• Topiramate
• Gabapentin
• Lamotrigine
• Occipital nerve stimulation (Link)

But these are not always effective and don’t provide a long-term drug-free self-sustainable model of health.

We don’t want to just numb pain and reroute it to a different area, we want to address it, learn from it and heal it so that we can get back to our normal lives.

This means we need to look at all the different areas of our life that issues can be coming from including:

• Mental patterns
• Emotional patterns and trauma
• Lifestyle disorders
• Upper cervical and other structural imbalances
• Nutrition and nutritional deficiencies
• Parasitic infections
• Hormonal imbalances

If we can address the root cause of what is causing dysfunction in our lives, we can often find relief from the chronic pain that plagues us.

5 Incredible tools for SUNCT headaches syndrome

1. Triggers and threshold

Before you start on the healing journey of any chronic head pain disorder it’s important to understand your trigger level and threshold level.

Trigger level is the sum total of all the stressors on your body right now.

It’s the combination of everything that adds to your body’s burden including:

• Mental stress
• Emotional stress
• Physical stress
• Environmental stress
• Social stress
• Cultural stress
• Dietary stress
• Spiritual stress
• Electromagnetic stress
• Chemical stress etc.

The threshold level is the level of tolerance your body has to its total stress burden.

If your trigger level crosses your threshold level, your body is no longer able to maintain normal functioning and goes into what is commonly called a flare state.

In this flare state, the body is highly aggravated and the weak area in our body succumbs. If we have chronic head pain like SUNCT then this pain will be triggered.

We want to keep our trigger levels down by reducing the total stress coming in from all areas of our life. And we want to keep our threshold level high by supporting our bodies, healing, repairing and detoxifying systems while also providing positive stress that helps build resilience like exercise and cold showers.

2. Foundation principles

The foundation principles are the main and most important systems in our bodies functioning that support health.

If we have our foundation principles working well, then they are constantly draining our trigger levels because they help our body release stress.

The foundation principles are:

1. Thinking
2. Drinking
3. Breathing
4. Eating
5. Moving
6. Sleeping

Thinking – Understanding when we are caught in stressful thought patterns and how to bring ourselves out of them and release tension.

Drinking – Drinking plenty of high quality water(not tap) with bioavailable minerals away from meals to support detoxification and water exchange inside each of our cells.

Breathing – Retraining our breath so that we breathe long and deep as well as noticing when stress is creeping up on our lives and causing our breathing to lock up.

Eating – Eating whole foods in proportions that are ideal for our bodies stress needs and avoiding sensitive and trigger foods that add to inflammation and immune burden.

Moving – Quality movement that helps free up our spine and detoxify our lymphatic system through pumping and opening up tight areas.

Sleeping – Getting adequate quality sleep every night so that we can synchronize our circadian rhythms and so that our brain can go through its most important detoxification phase while we sleep.

Each of these are very deep topics that the majority of chronic pain sufferers are not taking full advantage of in their healing protocol.

To get a deeper understanding of the foundation principles click here.

3. Upper cervical health and nerve dumping

SUNCT is one of the trigeminal autonomic cephalalgias and this means that it’s connected to the trigeminal nerve and related to the functioning of our autonomic(think automatic) nervous system.

This means we need to understand that any pressure put on the nervous system can cause a process called nerve dumping where the brain releases extra energy from a dysfunctional system into another nerve. This is commonly done into the jaw, eyes, diaphragm and adductor muscles.

But we can’t simply block the transmission and ignore it. The excess of energy is caused by a system having issues that are trying to fix itself. Our brain via the vagus nerve is incredibly smart and actually takes in more information from our organs than it gives out to them in a 9:1 ratio.

This means it’s constantly listening and if our organs are having difficulty because of an issue like too much liver or kidney burden from detoxification or a gut infection like SIBO…

Then there will be a huge amount of energy going to the brain, if it’s too much, it gets dumped into the trigeminal nerve.

This also happens with structural pressure like an atlas vertebrae (C-1) subluxation. Generally, it can happen with C-1 to C-3 and this is why it’s important to see an Osteopath, CHEK practitioner or NUCCA chiropractor ASAP.

Read our article on 3 secret ways of understanding trigeminal autonomic cephalalgias here to learn more about this topic.

4. The natural anti-inflammatory cocktail

If we are in chronic pain we need support. From all areas of our lives.

But using these superfoods may make a huge difference in the quality of our lives, pain, and inflammation.

They are very simple and used in the day to day of many cultures around the world but at the right time, dosage and place, they may make a huge difference.

See our article on migraine prodrome symptoms and scroll down to number 1 the anti-inflammatory 1-2 punch here and read about turmeric and migraines here.

5. St. John’s Wort

St. John’s Wort has actually been shown in studies to help with neuropathic pain and has been used for centuries for both neuropathic pain and depression.

It may be an effective tool but there are interactions with many medications like antidepressants, heart meds, antiepileptics, anticoagulants, HIV medication, and the pill. Always ask your doctor before making any changes to your treatment plan.

To understand more about St John’s wort’s effect on neuropathic pain see this article.

As you develop your treatment protocol with a holistic health practitioner you will want as much information on the different areas of stress and tension that can be coming into your life and because of this, I encourage you to join the Migraine Professional Community here.

To understand more about the trigeminally related head pain disorders read our article on the 3 secret ways of understanding trigeminal autonomic cephalalgias here and learn the 5 profound clues for chronic paroxysmal hemicrania continua here.

Have you ever experienced a SUNCT, SUNA or other TAC? Comment below and tell me what your experience was like.

Share this post with someone else who may benefit from the information.

Nobody wants to have to pronounce trigeminal autonomic cephalalgias(TAC) let alone suffer from one.

In this article, we will make 3 important connections between what the TACs are and actionable items you can do about the connections we make.

What are the TACs?

Trigeminal autonomic cephalalgias are a group of primary headache disorders that are described by the Internation headache society(IHS) as:

“The trigeminal-autonomic cephalalgias (TACs) share the clinical features of a unilateral headache and, usually, prominent cranial parasympathetic autonomic features, which are lateralized and ipsilateral to the headache.”

They are extreme and the only therapies commonly talked about are medications because they are so extreme.

Some like hemicrania continua are known as suicide headaches because of their unrelenting nature.

But we need to look deeper and understand what is going on here if we want long-term health.

These 3 areas will allow us to do that:

• Oxidative stress
• Flares and inflammation
• Balance between the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems

We will explain how these make the difference between your body having to create pain or being able to heal as we go along.

The conditions that fall within the TACs category are:

• Paroxysmal hemicrania
• Cluster headache
• Sunct syndrome
• Suna syndrome
• Hemicrania continua

These are all very different and everything always depends on the individual experiencing the symptoms far more than the actual label you put on it.

If you want a deeper understanding of the trigeminal autonomic cephalalgias, see this slideshow.

Oxidative Stress

Oxidative stress has been proposed as an interconnecting link between all types of triggers of head pain because of the recently found TRPA1 receptor that takes oxidative stress and transmits it to the brain into neurogenic inflammation.

What this means is that oxidative stress becomes inflammation in the brain and inflammation in the brain is bad news.

Oxidative stress in and of itself is a basic form of stress.

It is stress that happens on the cellular level where a chemical has an extra oxygen bond on it that is looking for an electron to make it “complete.”

The problem is that this electron can be very violent and if it comes into contact with body tissue such as brain cells it will steal the electron from them, causing damage.

This happens every second in our bodies as a natural process and our body has anti-oxidants to protect us and stop this from causing damage.

But when we:

– Go through a period of high stress

– Eat a food that creates inflammation

– Have a hormonal imbalance as is usually found with PMS during menses

– Have some sort of gut issue that’s constantly irritating our body

Then these create huge amounts of oxidative stress.

In a healthy person that eats well, moves well, sleeps well and follows the foundation principles, this is but a blip on the radar.

But for someone following the standard American diet living an indoor sedentary life cut off from all the de-stressors nature has for us…

And if this source of stress is constant and chronic, it creates a huge amount of oxidation and this depletes our antioxidant reserves.

Without an antioxidant defense, the oxidative particles floating around our brains and bodies steal electrons and damage tissues until we develop huge problems.

We have to prevent this and stop it at its roots.

This means we have to:

• Stop the stressors that cause oxidative stress as much as we can
• Give our body more of the building blocks to deal with oxidative stress

See our articles on the one common connection behind all migraines here and the foundation principles here.

Understanding flares and inflammation

Next, we need to understand how inflammation plays a part both in the brain causing problems and overload but also in the body that then gets transmitted to the brain and causes the brain to “dump” out onto nerves like the trigeminal nerve.

Inflammation in the brain can come from too many sources to list here because it’s such a primal “fix” that our body uses for everything.

Basically, if something goes wrong, inflammation will come.

A little inflammation is good but having it chronically all the time is bad news for our tissues.

What we can actionably do for brain inflammation is strengthen our blood-brain barrier and prevent leaky gut, give our brain cells the building blocks they need to create energy and run their systems of repair and regeneration and remove the stressors that cause our brains problems.

Strengthening the blood-brain barrier has been studied to be done by stimulating the vagus nerve through cold showers, getting ample good quality sleep and avoiding alcohol and EMFs.

Preventing leaky gut means we are eating foods that feed the good gut bacteria and avoiding inflammatory and sensitive foods that can create damage or immune reactions in the gut.

Some good foods for the gut include:

• Soluble fibers
• Vegetables
• High quality pastured and wild meats
• Resistant starches – these can be created through cooking and cooling foods like rice and potatoes

Giving our brain cells the building blocks is no simple task when we dive into nutritional pathways but when we turn it into something practical we can do daily with whole foods it becomes much easier.

Vegetables and meat will satisfy the majority of our nutritional needs but we can boost that with some seasonal fruit, nuts, and seeds.

Try to eat all of the colors of the rainbow as each color contains different nutrients.

When eating meat remember to not just eat muscle meats as organ meats have far more nutrition and we need to include bones, tendons, and ligaments in our diets because they provide a punch of minerals and get delivered directly into our own tissues.

Soup makes these easy.

Our body can get lazy and slow if we don’t continually ask more from it. This means exercise, proper stretching, stimulating the vagus nerve and breathing exercises are absolutely necessary to make our body try harder to raise our threshold.

Now let’s understand the two branches of our nervous system that function without our direct control and how we can directly influence them to drain our brain or heal the pain.

Parasympathetic / sympathetic nervous systems

There are two systems in our autonomic(think automatic) nervous systems.

There is the sympathetic nervous system which is built on a response to danger. When we are chased by a tiger, going through a divorce or at risk of losing our jobs, our sympathetic nervous system turns on.

This system spikes our cortisol and adrenaline causing us to receive a bunch of energy and sugar gets dumped into our blood to be used as energy for our muscles because our body thinks we are dying.

This activation of the sympathetic nervous system is known as fight or flight mode.

Our body is ready to either fight the danger or run away from it(flight).

It is built into us and activates a huge cascade of actions like:

• Our blood being rerouted from our digestion into our limbs and muscles
• Our sleep hormones being shut off because during danger we don’t need sleep.

The body prioritizes living right now and getting out of danger as opposed to focusing on the long-term. ie. rest and digestion.

This system is absolutely necessary and crucial to our survival but it burns a lot of resources and sends our body’s sync with natural rhythms that regulate every single one of our cells out of whack.

Then we have our parasympathetic nervous system.

This is known as the rest and digest system.

It runs our day to day healing and repair and prepares us for things like digesting food, by secreting digestive juices.

It protects us from infections, colds, and flues as well as setting our hormones up so that when the sun sets, sleep hormones are up and stress hormones are down, giving us a good nights sleep.

Our parasympathetic nervous system is the main healing system we want to be in the majority of the time so that our body is free to repair and digest without being stopped by stress hormones.

But everything we do, think, say, feel and believe influences our body into more of a sympathetic or parasympathetic state.

These systems constantly switch between each other throughout the day, we just want to avoid getting stuck in sympathetic and luckily for us, when we can feel our bodies, we can consciously bring ourselves out of it with tools like breathing techniques, progressive muscular relaxation, mindfulness etc.

• If we did something we think our God punishes, we will be in sympathetic fight or flight mode.
• If we are worried about making money, we will be in sympathetic fight or flight mode.
• If we have just been told by the doctor that we have an incurable disease and are stuck on medications for the rest of our life, we will be in sympathetic mode.
• And if our body “perceives” that there are more stresses coming into it then it can handle, we will be in sympathetic mode because it thinks we are being attacked.

Our body doesn’t know the difference between a tiger or some bills or the hormonal imbalance we have that gets worse every menstrual cycle or even the sugar-rich food we eat that gives us a blood sugar roller coaster.

It thinks there is a stress and it activates fight or flight mode.

But if we stay in this mode we will not be able to sleep, digest properly, heal properly, maintain our immune system, cool brain inflammation or detoxify waste properly.

But we can change the modes, at any point, with our own conscious connection with our bodies.

Remember our body has an autopilot and runs itself for the most part.

But our mind is the pilot and can take over whenever it needs.

So if we are stressing, we need to realize it and drop the stress.

Drop out of sympathetic and into parasympathetic.

Watch the video below to get an understanding of the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems.

The international headache society gives us a lead into how the parasympathetic system is connecting to the trigeminal nerve and how the sympathetic system plays into this by saying:

“Experimental and human functional imaging suggests these syndromes activate a normal human trigeminal-parasympathetic reflex, with the clinical signs of cranial sympathetic dysfunction being secondary.”

And so what we want to understand is that these systems, the parasympathetic and sympathetic are constantly working and balancing each other out.

But we have what is called the vagus nerve which is a master nerve and connects our whole body(including organs) together.

But this nerve has a 9:1 taking-in information to giving-out information ratio.

So it’s always taking in information from our bodies systems and trying to understand what’s going on way more than it is giving out orders.

But if we have an issue in a system, let’s say an organ like the liver, our body will send a ton of energy into the liver to try and process what’s going on and resolve it.

This feedback that the vagus nerve gets can become too much and it will actually end up “dumping” any excess energy into our other nerves.

This is where the trigeminal nerve comes in. The TACs are trigeminal-autonomic-cephalalgias.

This means that are regulated by the autonomic system, think parasympathetic/sympathetic and they affect the trigeminal nerve.

So what we can experience with these TACs is that the brain is actually dumping extra energy into this trigeminal nerve.

This dump, if big enough can create a huge amount of pain and problems.

But the actual source of the extra energy can come from anywhere in the chain, from the brain down to our feet because the body is always taking in information and giving out energy to fix it.

Which is why doctors often call it idiopathic or primary headaches because there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the trigeminal nerve.

The technical explanation is:

The limbic system dumps neurological energy into the masseter and temporalis (muscles of mastication). Any aberrant drives returning via the vagus (which has a 9:1 afferent:efferent ratio) will be dumped into the masseter and other muscles of mastication via the trigeminal. Over-activity of the brain-stem spilling into the trigeminal nerve (often from excessive afferent vagal drives associated with gut inflammation) or limbic-emotional stress.

So what clues do we look for?

We need to look at the whole person and understand that whole body health is the goal, not just avoiding, numbing or removing the trigeminal nerve or associated symptoms.

But there are a few key areas to focus on once you’ve received a full holistic(whole body) assessment from a holistic health practitioner.

They are:

1. Dental health
2. Emotional health
3. Upper cervical and vertebral health
4. Organ health

1. Dental health

Dental health is crucial and this means having someone discover if we have infections in our gums, under our teeth and especially within any dental work we’ve had done as this is one of the most common culprits.

The way dental work is done there is a very high risk of developing bacterial infections under the material and this will leach into the bloodstream and cause a massive strain on the body but also a huge overload right into the trigeminal nerve.

You will want to find a move advanced dentist than a standard one. If you’ve had lots of dental work or dental pain then make sure to find a biological dentist that you work well with.

2. Emotional health

Emotional stress is one of the biggest triggers and contributors to all kinds of head pain and chronic disease.

To address emotional stress it’s often important we go back in time to our childhoods and discover where we learned to respond to stress the way we do today.

Getting overwhelmed about life’s stressors doesn’t serve us and only contributes to more brain fog and problems.

But we need to take the jump and crack open the parts of ourselves that we have protected and shielded because they could be holding the tension that keeps us from living healthy fulfilling lives.

But this can be difficult especially if we have trauma so this is why it’s important to talk to skilled trauma release therapists and professionals who can help you learn to respond to stress instead of just reacting to it.

3. Structural health

Upper cervical health and especially atlas vertebrae health is a huge part of releasing the tension our body can create if we have a problem in this area and seeing an upper cervical trained chiropractor can do wonders. Here is a link to a study that found chiropractic bring relief for some trigeminal neuralgia patients.

Here is the link to find a NUCCA chiropractor who uses gentle movements and specifically deals with the atlas vertebrae which is a major cause of body pain and dysfunction. 

4. Organ health

And then there is organ health. This is huge and could not be covered in a blog and maybe even in a book but we need to understand there is a connection between our organs, the health of the rest of our body, and the pain in our heads.

We need to be willing to find the right practitioners that can help us make sense of this and not settle for the opinions of just the first line of medical healthcare providers like doctors, neurologists, and headache specialists.

So many patients are rewarded with health when they ask the right questions and find someone who can help them create answers to those questions, not just dead ends with medications.

This is why it’s important to see someone who will give you a full mind/body assessment which is what your GP was originally intended to do but the insurance-based model of medicine has cut down their time to do so.

Instead, see a local naturopath or functional medicine practitioner in your area or join the Migraine Professional care plan.

To get a deeper understanding of head pain conditions than you’ve ever had before and get to the root of what’s creating issues join the Migraine Professional Community here.

See our article on one of the TACs called hemicrania continua and learn 5 profound clues for chronic paroxysmal hemicrania continua here.

Have you ever experienced any of the TACs? If so, let me know below what worked for you and what your experience was like.

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