A Universal Frozen Treat Problem

You’re enjoying an ice cream cone on a hot summer day, or gulping down a cold smoothie, when suddenly a sharp, stabbing pain shoots through your forehead. The sensation peaks within seconds, making you wince and pause mid-bite. Then, almost as quickly as it arrived, it fades away. You’ve just experienced brain freeze—one of the most common and peculiar reactions to cold food and drinks.

Despite being a nearly universal experience, brain freeze seems completely illogical. Why would eating something cold cause pain in your head? And why does it happen so quickly and then disappear just as fast? The answers reveal surprising connections between blood flow, nerve signals, and your body’s attempts to protect your brain from temperature changes.

Brain Freeze Isn’t Actually In Your Brain

The medical term for brain freeze is sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia, which translates roughly to “nerve pain of the sphenopalatine ganglion”—a cluster of nerves located behind your nose and upper palate. Despite the name “brain freeze,” the pain doesn’t originate in your brain at all. Your brain tissue has no pain receptors and can’t feel pain directly.

Instead, brain freeze happens when something very cold touches the roof of your mouth or the back of your throat. This cold contact affects blood vessels and nerves in that area, triggering a chain reaction that you ultimately feel as head pain.

Rapid Blood Vessel Changes Cause the Pain

When cold food or drink touches the roof of your mouth, it rapidly cools the blood vessels in your palate and throat. Your body interprets this sudden temperature drop as potentially dangerous—cold blood flowing to your brain could theoretically impair brain function, though this doesn’t actually happen from eating ice cream.

To prevent what your body perceives as a threat, blood vessels in the area constrict (narrow) in response to the cold. But immediately afterward, they dilate (widen) rapidly as your body rushes warm blood to the area to restore normal temperature. This rapid sequence of constriction followed by dilation happens within seconds.

It’s this sudden dilation of blood vessels, particularly the anterior cerebral artery, that triggers the pain response. The blood vessel expansion activates pain receptors in the meninges—the membranes surrounding your brain—creating the sensation of pain even though the actual trigger is in your mouth and throat.

Referred Pain Explains the Location

You feel brain freeze in your forehead and temples, but the actual cold stimulus is in your mouth. This is an example of referred pain—when your brain perceives pain in a different location than where the problem originates.

The trigeminal nerve, one of the largest nerves in your head, carries sensory information from your face, mouth, and head to your brain. When cold activates pain receptors in your palate and the blood vessel changes occur, the signals travel along branches of the trigeminal nerve. Your brain sometimes has difficulty pinpointing exactly where along this nerve pathway the pain signal originated, so it interprets the pain as coming from your forehead—one of the areas served by the same nerve.

This is similar to how heart attack pain is often felt in the left arm, or how dental problems can cause pain that seems to come from the ear. The nervous system’s wiring creates these quirks in how we perceive pain location.

Why Some People Get It More Than Others

Not everyone experiences brain freeze with the same frequency or intensity. Some people get it nearly every time they consume something very cold, while others rarely or never experience it. Scientists aren’t entirely sure why these differences exist, but several factors likely play a role.

People who suffer from migraines appear more susceptible to brain freeze. Research has found overlap between the mechanisms that trigger migraines and those that cause brain freeze—both involve rapid changes in blood vessel diameter and activation of the trigeminal nerve. Some studies suggest up to 90% of migraine sufferers experience brain freeze, compared to about 30-40% of the general population.

Individual variation in palate anatomy, blood vessel sensitivity, and how quickly people consume cold foods and drinks also affect susceptibility. People who eat or drink very cold things quickly are more likely to experience brain freeze than those who consume cold items slowly, giving their palate time to adjust to the temperature.

The Pain Has a Purpose

As unpleasant as brain freeze feels, it serves a protective function. The pain is your body’s way of making you stop doing something it perceives as potentially harmful—in this case, rapidly cooling blood that might be flowing toward your brain.

The intensity of brain freeze pain effectively forces you to pause and give your mouth and throat time to warm back up before continuing. This prevents sustained cooling of blood vessels that could theoretically affect brain temperature, though in reality the risk from eating ice cream is minimal. Your body is being overly cautious, but the protective instinct makes evolutionary sense even if the threat isn’t genuine.

The rapid onset and quick resolution of brain freeze also make sense from this perspective. The pain peaks quickly to get your immediate attention, but once you stop consuming the cold substance and blood flow normalizes, there’s no reason for the pain to continue.

How to Prevent Brain Freeze

The most reliable way to prevent brain freeze is simple: eat and drink cold things slowly. Taking smaller bites or sips and allowing time between them gives your palate a chance to adjust to the temperature without triggering the rapid blood vessel changes that cause pain.

You can also try to keep cold food and drinks away from the roof of your mouth. The palate and back of the throat are the most sensitive areas, so letting ice cream melt slightly on your tongue before swallowing, or drinking cold beverages in smaller sips, can reduce the likelihood of triggering brain freeze.

Some people find that warming their mouth helps prevent brain freeze. Breathing through your mouth to bring in warm air, or pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth to transfer warmth, may reduce the temperature drop that initiates the pain response.

How to Stop Brain Freeze Once It Starts

If you do get brain freeze, several techniques can help it resolve faster, though the pain will fade on its own within 30 seconds to a minute anyway.

Pressing your tongue firmly against the roof of your mouth helps warm the palate and may speed up the return to normal blood vessel diameter. Drinking something warm, or even room temperature water, can have a similar effect by raising the temperature in your mouth and throat.

Covering your mouth and nose with your hands and breathing rapidly can warm the air reaching your palate. Some people find that tilting their head back changes blood flow patterns slightly and provides relief, though the mechanism here is less clear.

Essentially, anything that warms your palate and reverses the cold stimulus will help speed recovery—but patience works just as well since brain freeze is self-limiting and brief.

Brain Freeze and Medical Research

Scientists have studied brain freeze not just out of curiosity about ice cream headaches, but because understanding the mechanisms might provide insights into migraines and other types of head pain. Both brain freeze and migraines involve the trigeminal nerve and rapid blood vessel changes, making brain freeze a convenient and reproducible model for studying pain mechanisms.

Research using brain freeze has helped identify how quickly blood vessel changes can trigger head pain and which specific vessels and nerves are involved. This knowledge has contributed to better understanding of migraine triggers and potential treatments, though brain freeze itself is too brief and harmless to require treatment.

Some researchers have even used brain freeze as a tool to study referred pain patterns and how the brain processes and localizes pain signals from different areas of the body.

A Harmless But Memorable Phenomenon

Brain freeze is startling and painful, but it’s completely harmless. The pain causes no damage, has no lasting effects, and resolves on its own within a minute. It’s one of those quirks of human physiology that reminds us how complex and sometimes oddly reactive our bodies can be to simple stimuli.

The next time you get brain freeze, remember that your body is trying to protect you from what it perceives as a threat, even if that threat is just a delicious frozen dessert. Slow down, wait for the pain to pass, and then go back to enjoying your ice cream—just maybe take smaller bites this time.