I hardly ever get headaches, it’s just not my thing. So when I do, especially when it’s so bad I can barely see, I pay attention.
This story starts at home: Sometimes when my husband is away for the night, I have trouble sleeping. I have an “in a pinch” supplement I lean into when that happens.
I was having a lot of trouble sleeping that night. I took one, and then a couple of hours later took another, and then fell asleep pretty quickly. Once or twice I’ve done that before.
But this time, WOW did I wake up with a rockin’ headache, so bad I could barely see and it sure hurt to move my head! “Must have slept WEIRD” I thought, thinking it had something to do with the nighttime contortions that take place while sleeping with a 25 lb whippet that can somehow transform into a 5 foot x 5 foot area in a bed at night!
Pause: in every experience of discomfort, we choose how we’re going to move through it. Some options are: de-escalate with my language and thinking, or embellish it to others and myself? A mastery level move is: can I learn more from this experience than the discomfort and inconvenience cost me? I use the term my friend and energy-worker colleague, Chuck Pisa, uses here: I look for “gems.”
Another way to look at this is this Buddhist quote from the Parable of the Two Arrows:
“When touched with a feeling of pain, the uninstructed worldling
sorrows, grieves, and laments, beats his breast and becomes distraught.
He feels two pains, physical and mental.
Just as if a man were struck by an arrow
and then struck again by a second arrow.”
If I look for the gems, I can avoid the second arrow.
Back to the story. It was a swim morning, and I was determined to get there. I did all the things I could think to do: strong green tea, my morning supplements, and a hot shower. The stretches I could remember, it was hard to think straight! And, yay: I was able to see well enough to drive when it was time to leave.
I got into the pool, and by about 30 mins into swim, I felt significantly better! Thank goodness!
Fairly productive day with work and school, a sweet conversation with my husband that leaves me a little awake, so I once again take the supplement…and IMMEDIATELY spike that SAME EXACT headache. It’s so specific – right side of the head, parietal area, right eyebrow. Hurts into my teeth and neck. Sharp. Intense. And this has NEVER happened before – definitely not TWICE IN A ROW!
So what happened? That was the moment the story changed from “Annoying symptom” to “Must understand this NOW.”
In that instant, I felt both frustration and gratitude. Frustration, because, well, ow. Gratitude, because the timing was too clean to ignore. My body had just run a perfect A/B test: supplement on, pain on. Supplement off, pain off (after swim-assisted metabolizing). It was inviting me to stop blaming the dog and start looking at my terrain.
From the anatomical side, the pain location lined up beautifully with the supraorbital branch of the trigeminal nerve (V1) which supplies the frontal sinus, forehead, eyebrow, and upper eyelid. When that nerve is irritated, by sinus inflammation, histamine, or vascular changes, the classic symptom is exactly what I had: an eyebrow/forehead headache that can radiate into the eye, teeth, and neck.
From the TCM side, that region sits squarely in the Yangming channel territory (Stomach and Large Intestine) that crosses the face and frontal sinus. When there’s “wind-heat” or “phlegm-heat” in Yangming, we get frontal headaches, sinus pressure, and facial pain. Oak pollen, stress, mold, gut dysbiosis, hormone shifts, and overtraining all raise internal “heat,” “damp,” and histamine, making that territory much more reactive.
Gem #1: Oak pollen had been particularly high the last couple of days. Although I’ve never been particularly sensitive before, it was one raindrop in a storm of many changes / stressors that included: stress, gut dysbiosis, hormone shifts, training shifts. Histamine reactions are threshold phenomena. You can tolerate something for years, like my sleep supplement, until your baseline “bucket” slowly fills with invisible inputs. The day the bucket gets closer to full, the same little drop that was fine last year suddenly spills it over.
That’s what functional medicine calls loss of tolerance, and what TCM might describe as Wei Qi and Yangming becoming over-taxed: the defensive Qi is busy with too many battles, and the channels of the head and face get congested and hot.
Gem #2: My “threshold” had changed, not the basic goodness of my body.
I’m oddly grateful for that realization. It shifted the narrative from “My body betrayed me” to “My body is telling me my load is higher than I think, and my resilience needs tending.”
So what was the supplement actually doing?
Many night-time formulas contain ingredients like chamomile, citric acid, flavoring compounds, and melatonin. I’d also had a few cups of chamomille tea in those 48 hours. For most people, most of the time, these are all gentle allies. But in a body whose histamine bucket is already closer to full, they can be the straw:
- Chamomile (a ragweed family plant) can trigger or amplify sinus and frontal headaches in sensitized, allergic, or “primed” mucosa.
- Citric acid and flavors can stimulate trigeminal nerve endings in the nasal cavity, reflexively activating that supraorbital branch.
- Melatonin can shift cerebral blood flow and vascular tone enough to tip an already-sensitive trigeminal system into pain.
Layer that on top of oak pollen, stress, sleep loss, gut shifts, and training, and you have exactly what I experienced: a nerve that was fine for years suddenly screaming at a familiar friend.
Gem #3: Nothing is “forever safe”, everything is safe or not, in context.
I had tucked this supplement into the mental drawer labeled “harmless.” That label stopped me from being curious at first. The headache forced me to update the label to something more accurate: “Harmless when my system is spacious. Not harmless when my bucket is full.” That’s a nuanced kind of safety I now extend to foods, meds, and even training volumes.
Gem #4: Pain relief is not the same as problem resolution.
There are times when we absolutely need pain control. And there are times when the pain is the only honest witness we have that something upstream needs our attention. This episode reminded me to ask, “Is this a moment for quieting the alarm, or is this a moment to investigate why it’s going off?”
So what did I actually do with all this?
First, I stopped the supplement. That was the easiest gratitude: “Thank you, body. Message received.”
Then I got curious about the bucket. I looked at:
- My sleep rhythm and nervous system load.
- My hormone landscape (perimenopausal shifts, thyroid, cortisol).
- My gut, had there been changes in digestion, bloating, or reactions?
- My environment, Florida oak pollen, any mold exposure, indoor air quality.
- My training, was my “rest” after my race too long?
From a functional lens, I focused on lowering histamine load (more fresh-cooked food, fewer aged/fermented triggers for a bit, vitamin C and quercetin where appropriate) and supporting gut and liver clearance. From a TCM lens, I supported Spleen Qi and Stomach function (warm cooked foods, gentle bitters), soothed Liver Qi, and rubbed LI4!
And I kept swimming. Not as a way to outrun symptoms, but as a way to partner with my blood and Qi. Exercise stimulates red blood cell production, moves lymph, and, when dosed wisely, strengthens what the classics call righteous Qi, the inner integrity that allows the immune system to meet challenges without collapsing or overreacting.
Gem #5: My body and I are on the same team.
This is the deepest gratitude I carry from that week. It would have been easy to frame my body as unpredictable or “too sensitive,” and start thinking I couldn’t trust it or myself. Instead, the more I zoomed out, the more coherent it looked. Of course spring in Florida, late-night worry, a beloved whippet, hormones, histamine, and a trusty supplement would intersect sometimes. Life is like that.
Nobody *wants* to get a headache, especially one so bad they can’t see. The miracle is that my body gave me such a clear, repeatable, anatomically logical, and energetically meaningful signal and then gave me tools (movement, breath, curiosity, knowledge) to understand it.
Proud of myself for Decoding My Dolphin: I’m also deeply grateful I didn’t just crush the pain with an NSAID. In the moment, an ibuprofen might have quieted the pain. But in my case, it likely would have been a short-term mute button and a long-term disservice. An NSAID could have dulled the pain enough that I never connected it back to the supplement. I might have kept taking that product on every restless night, irritating the same sinus-nerve pathway again and again, plus adding gut irritation and prostaglandin disruption to a system already dancing with histamine.
If you find yourself saying, “This has never bothered me before, why is it a problem now?”, you might be in your own “gem moment.” Your histamine threshold, your Wei Qi, your nervous system load, they all change over time. When your body responds differently, it’s not betrayal.
It’s updated information.