The Healthy Programmer

Avoiding Headache Triggers

The gray matter inside your skull does not have pain-sensitive nerve endings, but that doesn’t mean headaches aren’t in your head. Many of the blood vessels supplying blood and oxygen to the brain have pain receptors and the muscles surrounding your brain can also sense it. The source of this pain ultimately depends on the type of headache.

There are two macro categories of headache: primary and secondary. We’re focusing on primary headaches, which are those most commonly experienced by programmers (secondary headaches are caused by injuries, tumors, and other things that shouldn’t happen in the course of programming). But even within the primary category, there are several subcategories. They include tension, migraine, ...