Headache can be simply defined as pain in your head. Pain can be dull, throbbing pain and sharp unbearable pain. Headaches can occur on any part of your head like front head, sides or on the back of your head. Some kinds of headache are limited to particular spot on the head (if there is any tumor inside) and sometimes the pain would radiate across the head.
Headache in the morning can change the course of entire day. It is unpleasant to wake up with a headache. Number of factors can cause headache ranging from stress, anxiety to more severe causes like tumor etc. All you need to do is to identify the nature of pain, its intensity and discuss with your doctor to find a solution. Headaches are of many types like migraine, tension headache and cluster headache. And headaches can be short lived (acute) or chronic (long period).
Morning headaches often attack you between 4-8 AM when the body is preparing for major physiological changes. Adrenalin hormone is produced in bulk during the early hours of the day during which headache can occur. And the body is in a condition to secrete lesser amounts of natural painkillers like endorphins during morning hours. This can also cause morning headache.
Morning Headache Causes
- As said earlier, headache comes in any intensity ranging from dull pain to staggering one. By describing the symptom properly, your doctor would be able to diagnose the root cause easily.
- Daily headache in the morning can be caused due to physiological as well as psychological factors.
- Some of the physiological factors causing morning headache include infection in the brain (meningitis), swelling or inflammation in the blood vessels of the brain, excess of pressure (intracranial pressure), presence of tumor in the brain and any other brain injury.
- Excess usage of medications like analgesics, pain killers can also cause headache. It is not wise to take OTC drugs for pain for more than a week.
- Headaches associated with other symptoms like nausea or vomiting can be due to digestion related problems.
- Tension (stress) headache can sometimes produce symptoms similar to migraine causing dull pain and pressure like feeling on the forehead and back of your head.
- Many people can get headache when they are not sleeping properly at night. Insomnia or sleeping sickness can weaken the brain’s function disrupting its normal activities. Morning headache can get triggered due to lack of quality sleep and sleep apnea and the person would wake up feeling heavy.
- Wrong sleeping posture can also cause headache in the morning. Sleeping in the same position or awkward position can produce a crick in your back along with morning headache. When you are putting excess of pressure to particular muscle in the neck or shoulders the entire night, it can cause considerable pain in that part.
- Very low blood sugar levels can cause morning headache for sure. People with prolonged diabetes often experience headache in the morning when the sugar levels have dropped down due to deprivation of food for hours together.
- Some people are in the habit of grinding their teeth during sleep which can produce vibrations that affects your head, neck and even shoulder producing morning headache and pain throughout the body.
- Cluster headaches can wake you up in the middle of sleep causing throbbing pain. Cluster headaches occur in episodes for days or weeks together.
- In addition to the above causes, headaches can occur without any apparent cause in millions of people.
Tests
Based on the symptoms, intensity of pain and its origin, your doctor would get cues for physiological problems like infection or other neurological issues. He may request for various tests including CT scan or MRI scanning of brain. The report of MRI brain can give precise picture ruling out any other abnormalities. In case your headache is stress induced, you will be referred to a professional psychologist to identify the underlying problem.