Everyone gets headaches from time to time. When that happens, people tend to just suffer for a few hours, take some sort of pain killer and nap when they have a chance. For a lot of headaches, this does the trick, and people go about their daily lives until the next one occurs.

This isn’t really the case for me because I have chronic headaches. I get headaches almost every day, and their severity usually builds depending on how long I go without having a day off from getting one. I get so used to having headaches all of the time that sometimes I don’t realize I had one all day until it finally gets really bad.

As a reader, you may be wondering, what works to help these constant headaches? The answer: pretty much nothing.

Sometimes my headaches are from dehydration, so obviously drinking water helps with those. Other times, they’re from lack of sleep, so napping is a good solution to those. However, I don’t know what causes a lot of the other ones, so I have tried a bunch of different methods in order to help with some of the pain.

For a while, I used to take Advil, and I’ve gotten to the point where I realize it doesn’t really do much for me anymore. I’ve also taken migraine medications, but those only help with a certain degree of headache. Lately, I’ve gotten into taking Aleve, which actually works relatively well for quite a few of my headaches.

However, pain medication only does so much. I’ve also dabbled in essential oils, which help a bit. I’ve noticed they’re most useful if I’m having trouble falling asleep due to pain rather than if I try to use the oils and continue my day.

For me, one of the most useful methods is to drink something caffeinated. Disappointingly, this method results in its own issues. If I rely on caffeine for too many days, then I build a tolerance to it, which makes it ineffective. However, this results in more severe headaches because now I have to deal with a caffeine dependency that isn’t being satiated.

So yeah, nothing REALLY works, which makes it difficult to go about my day. It’s hard for me to think because my mind never really gets to feel at ease, and I get additional pains in my face from unintentionally tensing it up. The constant discomfort makes it hard to do work and stay motivated, which makes me just want to stay in bed all day.

Even right now I have a headache, which makes it difficult for me to focus on writing this article. I feel like it should be flowing smoother than it is, but at least I wrote something. Last week, I didn’t even write an article because of my headaches.

However, one of the worst parts to having chronic headaches is that people don’t seem to understand what it’s like. They think it’s laziness that makes me not want to do things rather than me being in almost constant pain. Everyone gets headaches, so it’s no big deal, right? I should just get over it and move on.

But until you have headaches for days, weeks, months and years with very few breaks, you can never really understand what it’s like. Very rarely, I go an entire month or two without headaches, and it’s like getting teased with how much easier daily tasks would be if I didn’t have them for the rest of the year.

To sum things up, chronic headaches are a pain in the butt, and I’m still trying to find ways to alleviate the pain. They’re difficult to deal with, but there isn’t much I can do about them right now. At least I’m not letting them stop me from going to school and living my life.