It is commonly thought that stress and tiredness are among the causes of headaches , and in fact this is often the case: during intense periods, when one is physically and mentally exhausted, it is easier to develop painful attacks. However, the opposite is also true: there is a particular form of headache , called weekend headache , which appears when one finally relaxes and slows down.
What are the symptoms?
- An intense pain, a real pounding that generally involves only one side of the head and intensifies with movement.
- Feeling of constriction and heavy head.
- Annoyance with lights and noises.
- Nausea, chills and paleness .
- Shortly before or in conjunction with the crisis, irritability, tiredness, drowsinessand a tendency to change mood may also appear.
Those just described are the main symptoms of weekend headache.
What causes weekend headaches?
As the definition itself suggests, weekend headache is a particular form of headache, almost always a migraine , which occurs on weekends, when one has the opportunity to slow down and “switch off”.
It may seem paradoxical that this problem appears precisely on free days, but in reality this is not the case: unlike other forms of headache, such as tension headache , in which the crisis begins during the stressful event, in fact, in migraine the pain occurs when the debilitating situation that triggered it has ended and the person has begun to relax.
The cause? Even today, neither the reasons for this occurrence nor the mechanisms are known, even if it is hypothesized that the psychophysical relaxation that follows stress is able to cause a variation in some hormonal and biochemical balances , responsible in some way for the crisis.
Just think that when you are under stress, your body produces a large amount of hormones , including cortisol . When you slow down, hormone levels drop sharply: the rapid drop in cortisol and other substances causes headaches.
This is what would also happen in weekend headache: the moment the subject stops and rests, the painful event occurs.
Changing habits are also to blame
Weekend headaches could also depend on other factors, and in particular, on an alteration of the normal sleep -wake rhythms : on weekends, in fact, we tend to go to sleep and wake up later and this could influence the normal biological and endocrine functions, causing a series of repercussions, which can also lead to triggering a migraine attack.
Diet could also play an important role: on weekends we tend to eat more irregularly , allowing ourselves a few too many indulgences and overdoing the consumption of those foods and drinks that could favor the onset of a crisis, such as alcohol , sweets, spicy foods.
Be careful with coffee too : the fact that on Saturdays and Sundays we tend to consume this drink at unusual and different times compared to the rest of the week could create alterations that, among other things, could have the power to favor headaches.
What are the useful remedies?
- Try to respect your usual sleep-wake rhythm: if you can’t go to sleep and wake up at the same time as the rest of the week, try to at least sleep the same number of hours . Sleeping too little, but also too much, increases the risk of headaches.
- Take care of your diet, trying not to indulge in too many excesses and food excesses.
- Try to drinkthe same amount of coffee every day and at the same times. Don’t stop drinking on the weekend, but don’t overdo it either.
- Don’t fill your weekends with a thousand activities trying to make up foreverything you didn’t manage to do during the week, but don’t spend two days lounging in bed either.
- Learn to listen to your body and give yourself what you need, while remembering that the ideal is a right balance between rest and movement.
- Don’t concentrate relaxing and enjoyable activities on weekends, but try to distribute them evenly throughout the week.
What treatments?
If you realize that you are suffering from weekend headaches, it is important to contact a specialist to understand how to act. It can be useful to keep a diary , noting all the characteristics of the attacks : when they occur, how they manifest themselves, what symptoms they cause, what you have done/eaten in the hours before, in order to identify the triggering factors and find the most suitable solutions.
Your doctor may prescribe specific treatments, such as triptans , a class of drugs used to treat migraine attacks; he or she may also suggest using other medications, such as analgesics , or resorting to other treatments/strategies to improve the situation.
