It is an awkward thing to admit for someone who researches and teaches how the body works, but I have lived for a long time with a headache that no medical test has explained. This article is about what chronic headache and painkillers taught me — including the part I got wrong.
In Summary
- I have had unexplained chronic headache for years, and for a stretch of them I took a painkiller almost every day. That is not a model to follow, and it runs straight into an established clinical entity: medication-overuse headache.
- As the pain persisted I changed the habits tangled up with it. These days the headache and my body feel largely under control, and I understand why it was happening.
- A headache tells you two things: that you need to get out of the situation you are in, and that your body needs rest now.
- Korean Traditional Medicine has a line for this: jeonggi jonnae, sa bulga gan (正氣存內 邪不可干) — when upright qi is held within, pathogenic influence cannot intrude.
- People who fall ill often may, by resting through those illnesses, tend to avoid larger ones. This is an observed tendency, not a rule, and it does not hold for everyone.
- Two classical longevity instructions — think less to nourish heart qi, speak less to nourish inner qi — are exactly what a headache enforces.
The Honest Part First
If I am going to use my own case, one thing has to be said before anything else.
There was a period of several years when barely a day passed without a painkiller. Life with two small children left me short of both time and patience for anything more considered. But this is not a method to copy.
Used often enough and long enough, analgesics can tip a headache into a state where the medication is part of what sustains it. This is medication-overuse headache, a well-established concept in headache medicine. If you are using painkillers on several days a week and that has continued for months, that fact alone is a reason to be assessed — not a reason to simply stop on your own, which can make things worse in the short term and should be managed with a physician.
I write this out because it seems more useful to show that knowing better is not the same as doing better.
What the Headache Taught Anyway
As the pain went on, I changed the habits bound up with it, one at a time. These days I have the sense that the headache and my body are largely under control, and I know why I was getting them. I have come to see that as part of understanding myself rather than as a defeat.
Beyond that, a headache gives you two things.
First, a signal to get out of the situation. Headache arises from stress — raised vascular pressure, tightened muscles of the head and neck. It appears while the body is mobilising to think and act quickly and get clear of a threat. A hurting head means that where you are right now is costing you something.
Second, a signal to rest. Headache disrupts the day, but it simultaneously delivers an important message: the body wants rest. And the benefits of rest taken at the right moment do not stop at pain relief. Rest prevents damage from accumulating, restores immune function, and reduces the conditions in which chronic disease develops.
When Upright Qi Is Held Within
Korean Traditional Medicine (KTM), the traditional healing system of Korea also known as Hanbang (한방), has a line for this: jeonggi jonnae, sa bulga gan (正氣存內 邪不可干) — when upright qi (正氣) is held within, pathogenic influence (邪氣) cannot intrude.
Rendered in modern terms, jeonggi is close to the body’s capacity to defend and repair itself — immune function among other things. The proposition is not that illness never arrives. It is that what decides the outcome is the state of the host, not only the strength of the insult.
Minor Illness, Immunity and Longevity
An interesting observation follows from that.
People whose defences are weaker fall ill more often. But because they are ill more often, they rest more often, and their immune systems are repeatedly engaged — and they can show a tendency to escape the larger illnesses. Conversely, people who are robust and almost never unwell often go down hard when they finally do, and get it over with in one short, severe episode.
This does not apply to everyone. It is a tendency observed in practice rather than a law, and it is certainly not an argument that being sickly is good. The active ingredient is not the minor illness itself — it is the rest the minor illness forces on you.
The Two Things a Headache Makes You Do
Among the practices Korean medicine hands down for long life are these two:
Sosaryeo yangsimgi (少思慮 養心氣) — think less, and so nourish the qi of the heart.
Soeoneo yangnaegi (少言語 養內氣) — speak less, and so nourish the qi within.
What we actually do when our head hurts is precisely this. Thinking narrows. Talking stops. Stimulation gets avoided. A headache enforces both instructions without asking.
I am not romanticising pain. But if the body had to impose that state by force, it is worth asking what it would take to enter it voluntarily, on a day when nothing hurts.
In Summary
Chronic headache is not an agreeable teacher. Live with one long enough, though, and you learn what the body is asking for: get out, and rest. Switch the signal off with medication while staying exactly where you are, and the lesson simply never ends.
If a headache is new, has changed in character, or you find the number of days you need a painkiller creeping upward, please get it assessed.
Related reading: Pain Is How the Body Distributes Energy · Minor Illness, Immunity and Longevity
This article reflects the teaching and research of Professor Seungho Baek, Professor of Korean Medicine at Dongguk University College of Korean Medicine, specializing in Pathology and Oncology.
