No Poo Update

 When something is a part of your life, every day for decades, it feels very different when you stop doing it. Even something as small as shampooing my hair every day has left a bit of a void where it used to be. I'm still marveling that my hair isn't falling out or a mass of grease. It's doing... fine. 

Now, I did have a headache last weekend. A long, drawn out one that wouldn't quit until Monday morning. Boo. 

BUT I don't think it was hair related. Period related, likely. Maybe bowel related. 

I didn't cave and wash my hair though. I persevered and the headache was gone on Monday morning (just in time for work, oh joy). 

When I saw my hair stylist for a cut, I told her about my decision to stop shampooing. She was all for using less product, but a bit leery of me never shampooing again. I agreed to do it on occasion, but I plan to only do it if I use hair product and need to clean it out. I do some girly things, but hair products ain't one of them. I own a few, and use them MAYBE 5 times a year. 

My boar bristle brush arrived. I really don't need to brush my hair since it is super short, but the scritchy bristles feel so nice on my scalp that I do it anyway. Less hair brushing, more ... petting? Sure, I'll take that. 

Last week, I was using baking soda almost every day. I decided to curtail that, because I don't want to be using it every day or even every other day. I don't want to depend on it. Plus, I don't have a baking soda dispenser for my shower, so I keep forgetting to get it before I get wet. It's hard to handle baking soda once your hands are wet. 

I know that correlation isn't causation, but I have noticed that my body seems to be running hotter since I stopped shampooing. And I've lost weight, but that's something I've been working on all year. With two less steps in my shower routine (shampoo and conditioner), I think my showers have been a little faster. Not much faster because I am the kind of person who enjoys just standing in a hot shower, but a little. 

Overall, the experiment is going well. I wasn't sure that I would make my minimum goal of six weeks when I started, but now that I've got more than four under my hat, so to speak, I think I'll make it just fine. When I feel the need to wash the hair, I'll use my husband's shampoo, but I don't think that will be happening all that often. 

And on the plus side, I've been waking up with some awfully cute bed head. 

No Poo!

 I have joined a movement. Though I didn't realize that's what I was doing when I made the decision to stop shampooing my hair. 

It wasn't a decision that I made lightly; I have, for years, known that when I go too long between shampoos, I get a headache. Not a little headache, a big, draining, all-consuming headache that WILL NOT go away until I shampoo my hair (and I usually need a good night's sleep in addition to that before it totally goes away). 

Last week, I was on vacation. I washed my hair on Monday evening, but then I didn't have another chance to shower until Thursday. And I thought, I should try just rinsing my hair with water and see if I can defer the headache. Why not? I'm on vacation - worst case scenario is I start getting a headache and cave into the need to shampoo.

I made it through Thursday and Friday and Saturday without getting a headache. I showered each day and combed my hair in the shower to try to get any dirt out. On Sunday, I decided to do a baking soda wash, which I'd read was a substitute that "no poo" people use. 

No Poo is the name of the movement. I didn't make it up, I swear. There's a website and everything! 

It's been over a week now. I'm trying to give the whole experiment at least 6 weeks, to give my hair plenty of time to decide how to behave without shampoo after decades of near-daily shampooing and conditioning. My hair doesn't smell bad, though it does smell like hair. No dandruff or dirt build up or oil build up yet. More important - no headache yet. 

I'm glad that my hair is as short as it is, since I've read that folks with longer hair can have a harder time doing this. But I think I need a haircut anyway - the big question on my mind is: what will my stylist think??

The biggest reason for stopping the shampoo is that it clearly has physical effects on me. I know that shampoo is safe enough to be sold as a consumer product, but that doesn't mean that my particular body likes those chemicals to be applied constantly. If I can get "addicted" to shampoo, if shampoo withdrawal causes real and consistent symptoms, then I want to see what happens when I quit that addiction. 

And there might be a smidge of me thumbing my nose at the systems of the world. Next up: bra burning ;)

Headache Resurge

I'd managed to go quite a while without getting a bad headache. That streak ended over the weekend.

I've come up with a new theory on them. I know that my jaw has been ground down a bit from tooth grinding - enough that even I could see it on the x-ray. And I've heard that some people get weather aches in bones that were previously broken. Therefore, if I get a headache when the rains come, and that headache radiates out from that very jawbone...

Unfortunately, that hypothesis would mean there's not a whole lot that I can do to alleviate things, at least not that I have found. Maybe if I could flee to a hyperbaric chamber? I feel like I've tried so many things to treat the headaches, with mixed success at best.

When I have the headache, there's not much room for anything else. Just the throbbing, aching pain, radiating out from the jaw or the neck, sometimes the sinus, but almost always the left side. I keep trying things to get rid of the pain, but the best I can usually get is some level of ability to ignore it. Just enough distraction to keep me from screaming into a pillow.

On the other hand, I did manage to go quite a while without a headache. AND there were other rainstorms in that time period, so maybe the whole weather ache theory is bunk after all. So I should look at what I was doing in that time period, what I might have done that kept the headaches away for months at a time, and maybe what I did to bring them back.

It could have been stress, but I should have been getting more headaches during the whole pandemic crisis, right? The only other factor that might be at play is my menstrual cycle. I wonder if I could find a correlation between headaches and a coincidence of being on my period and having a storm front pass through?

I guess I'll have to start tracking the weather...

Why Headache

I've been trying to figure out my headaches for a while now, and I think I might have reached, if not the answer, then an answer that should help me have less of them. I know that I have a lot of tension in my neck, especially on the left side. I know that I tend to have headaches on that side that radiate from my face down my neck, sometimes including the temple, sometimes including the right side, but mostly just a direct line from facial sinuses to neck and shoulder.

What I didn't know, until my husband told me a couple weeks ago, was that I've been grinding my teeth in my sleep. He insisted that I order a mouth guard online as soon as possible, and I did - though I was tempted to just wait until my dentist appointment the next week. Ambrose considers that the best mouth guards are the ones that you heat and mold to your own teeth, and that the ones from the dentist are probably a rip off.

On the other hand, I do have dental insurance so I might as well use it.

I readily believed Ambrose when he told me that he woke up to hear me loudly grinding my teeth. It's not only the headaches, but that for most of my life, my mom has worn a night guard because she grinds her teeth. I guess I get to blame her for it :)

When I did to go the dentist, it was time for a panographic x-ray. And that x-ray revealed that not only have I been grinding my teeth, resulting in some wear on the surfaces, but I've been grinding my jaw, resulting in a visible difference between my right and left side in the bones. As the hygienist pointed out, on the right, the bone was nice and round, while on the left it was narrower and pointier.

The dentist recommended going with a night guard from them because the one I had was chewy, and the tendency people have when something chewy is in their mouth is to chew it. That logic seemed sound to me, so I asked them to check with my insurance to see if I have coverage for a night guard.

Then, of course, I checked my coverage online, and after about 30 minutes of trying to figure out where I could view my actual dental coverage contract and what the technical term for a night guard is (occlusal guard, fancy), I found that I do have coverage for it, and that it will probably come out to paying the same as for a premium one I could buy online. It depends on how much my dentist charges. But it's nice the insurance will cover something.

Ambrose was pretty pleased with himself when I told him that the dentist had confirmed his suspicions about the teeth grinding. He's been calling me gnasher.

Since I've been wearing the mouth guard that the dentist doesn't approve of, I've been feeling better. Only one headache (on the day I went to the dentist). And it feels like the muscles on the left side of my neck are releasing some tension. And though the headaches haven't gone away completely yet, they don't feel quite as severe as before I started wearing the mouth guard overnight. I'm ready to take the plunge on the night guard, even if it means I'm turning out like my mom.

Headaches

I think I've been getting migraines. I've spent a few years calling them sinus headaches, but my husband finally convinced me that sinus headaches come from sinus infections. And I haven't had a sinus infection in a long time, but almost every time it rains I get a "sinus" headache.

And since I started tracking more seriously again, I'm seeing these headaches are not a once or twice a month kind of thing. More like once or twice a week, sometimes more. And that's just not something that I want to have in my life right now. It's extremely difficult to work while these are going on, especially considering most of my working day is spent staring at a computer screen, in an office space that does not have great options for blocking light.

So I'm trying to be scientific about it. I'm tracking not only when I get a headache, but what I do to treat it and whether that treatment works. The fact that over the counter pain medications do not work is part of what leads me to believe this is in fact a migraine and not something else. They do typically go away overnight - if I can fall asleep. Although, sometimes it seems like they go away overnight only to recur the next afternoon. Has it really gone away if it comes back right quick?

At any rate, I'm trying to look for what, other than precipitation, might be triggering these headaches. I'm trying to figure out a way to relax my neck and shoulder muscles. I'm trying a variety of different treatment options to see if I can find something that will knock these headaches out before they grow large enough to be a hindrance to work and life. I know one of the next steps should probably be making an appointment with a doctor, but I'm hesitant to do that. When I did a search for area migraine specialists, most of the results were chiropractors, and I don't particularly like the idea of going to a chiropractor. They strike me as quack medicine, and I had a skeevy experience as a young teen.

The other option would be a neurologist, but I don't feel like the headaches are THAT serious. And yet, I recorded 5 in the first half of July. That's not a small number.

I know I've had at least one for-sure migraine headache in my life. When I was 13, I vividly remember being in gym class in 8th grade and seeing this afterimage at the edge of my vision, like I'd just looked at a bright light and then away from it. But the afterimage didn't fade. It stayed and I found it quite curious. Then I began to feel ill. The headache was intense, and I received permission to go home sick. As soon as I got in the house, I ran up the stairs to the bathroom and vomited. That was a very stressful time in my life; I remember being all bent out of shape about completing a workbook for Confirmation.

I never had another migraine like that, and I compared all other headaches to that experience. None reached anything like that level of symptoms, so I assumed that I wasn't having migraines. Just stress. Tension headaches maybe. But never so frequent that they interfered with my school or work. Not until fairly recently has their frequency increased to the level of bothersome. Maybe 18 months ago it started getting more frequent and irritating. But they've been around, just less frequent, for more than 5 years and less than 10.

They don't have auras or cause me to vomit. No, they're just headaches that won't quit until after a good night's sleep- mostly. They favor the left side with the throbbing agony, but also share the "love" on occasion by involving my entire face in the pain fest (which is why I thought it was sinuses). I do get light sensitivity from them. And while I wouldn't go so far as to say that I get auras, because I'm comparing to that original one, I do get some visual effects. Lingering afterimages, but not persistent ones.

I'll get to a doctor after the backpacking season is over; for the most part, I don't get these headaches when I'm backpacking. So maybe I have to just devote my life to being an itinerant backpacker and forget about the 9 to 5 life.