Imagine that you are at the beach on a hot summer day, enjoying the sunlight, the beauty of the water, and meeting the people around you. But suddenly, you feel the familiar pain behind your temples and ask yourself: Why do I always get headaches when it’s hot?
Some research shows that as the air temperature increases, the amount of headaches also increases. However, experts like Dr. Nolan Pearsona neurologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, believes that to find the cause of summer headaches, one should pay attention to factors beyond the heat.
“Weather is usually among the top four or five triggers people report,” Pearson tells LiveScience. “But I suspect it’s not just because of the heat, but more so because of the factors that come along with warm weather.”
Hot air does not directly cause headaches
Most research on heat and headache only deals with the correlation between the two. For example, a study might look at headache hospitalizations in different months of the year and conclude that people get more headaches in the summer. But such findings do not prove that heat directly causes headaches. But environmental factors and lifestyle changes that are specific to summer, such as air quality, ambient light, or activity level, may cause different types of headaches.
Pearson recommends that people with headaches focus on these potential triggers. Because now more research has been done in this field and maybe we can manage these factors more easily than the heat itself.
Headache triggers in hot weather
Poor air quality is one of the known triggers for headaches. Also, reducing air quality is one of the common effects of heat waves. Heat can cause the conversion of various chemical elements in the air into ozone gas and other harmful substances; Ozone is a colorless gas that has a wide range of negative health effects.
In addition, air pressure systems and winds originating from warm air can also cause pollutants from coal-fired power plants or cars to remain above cities and not disperse into the air.
The warmer months of the year are also associated with longer days and increased exposure to UV rays. The relationship between light and headache is complex. Although some research suggests that bright light alone is not a headache trigger, people with migraine often become sensitive to light when experiencing a migraine attack. Therefore, intense summer sunlight may aggravate existing headaches.
Heat can also disrupt a person’s normal daily routine and cause lifestyle changes that increase the likelihood of headaches. For example, people in hot weather may forget to drink plenty of water. This can lead to dehydration, which is a known cause of headaches. Also, in hot weather, people may experience a loss of appetite, so blood sugar fluctuations caused by not eating for a long time cause headaches.
In addition to all the above, heat can disrupt people’s sleep schedule. “Good, restful sleep usually happens best in an environment with cooler temperatures,” Pearson says. “When the night’s sleep is disturbed, for example, due to excessive heat, the possibility of migraine and cluster headaches also increases significantly.”
