Why does my lack of caffeine after having it all the time cause headaches? Like it doesn’t make sense to me.
In: 6
Analogy: When you get in a shower a normal amount of water comes out of the shower head. One day the water starts coming out 1000x the rate it normally does, to the point where it starts flooding your bathroom floor. Obviously you don’t want a flooded bathroom every time you take a shower, so you break out the hot glue gun and start plugging some of the holes to reduce the amount of water back to normal, and eventually you do. This works well and you shower normally for a few weeks. Then one day the water pressure goes back to how it was before, and now you’re left with a dribbling shower head plugged with hot glue that’s going to take a while to clean back out.
Our brains try to maintain something called “homeostasis,” which basically means “keep everything running normally.” When you suddenly start flooding your brain with different neurochemicals, your brain starts to “plug the holes,” to get things back to normal, which means when you stop using the drug that causes the flooding, you’re left with only a dribble that takes time to correct itself.
# As it applies to caffeine:
Specifically when it comes to caffeine, your body is used to dealing with the increase in blood flow caused by the caffeine, and therefore gets used to restricting blood vessels to control the increase in flow. When you stop caffeine, your body’s still in the habit of restricting the blood vessels so it keeps doing this even though there’s no increased flow. When this happens in the brain, it can cause headaches (plus the depletion of certain neurotransmitters that can cause headaches too).
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