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Brain Freeze

What exactly is brain freeze?

What exactly is brain freeze?

Eat your ice cream or slurp your smoothie too fast and you'll fall victim to brain freeze, aka ice cream headache, that sharp pain between your eyes that comes on fast and furious when you eat something too cold too quickly. What's happening? When something very cold hits the roof of your mouth, the blood vessels above it constrict; the pain you feel is the effects of those same blood vessels dilating as your body tries to send more blood to the area to warm things up. The pain lasts only about 30 seconds or so, but if you want to get rid of it sooner, try pressing your (warm) tongue to the roof of your mouth. Or avoid it altogether by keeping the cold stuff away from that area in the first place.

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