Why Do I Get a Headache Every Day? What Daily Headaches Usually Mean

The Short Version

If you’re asking “why do I get a headache every day,” medicine has a name for it: chronic daily headache — head pain on 15 or more days a month, for more than three months. The most common explanation is not something growing in your brain. It’s several things stacking up: a tension-type headache or migraine that keeps getting more frequent, painkillers taken often enough to create headaches of their own, disrupted sleep, a stress system stuck on high, and irregular caffeine and meal times. The most useful first clue is concrete: count the days you take painkillers each month. Simple painkillers on more than 15 days a month, or combination painkillers and migraine-specific drugs on more than 10, can itself be the reason the headache turned daily.

Two situations shouldn’t be self-managed first: a sudden, explosive severe headache, or headache with fever, a stiff neck, or numbness and weakness, and a headache that appears for the first time after age 50. Those need a doctor before anything else. The full list is in When to See a Doctor.

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Which Kind of Daily Headache Is Yours

If you keep getting headaches once or twice a month, that’s an ordinary fluctuation — a cold, a late night, the days before a period; find the cause and it passes. What deserves real attention is this: headaches two or more days a week, for several weeks running, starting to interfere with work and daily life. That’s the frequency line Mayo Clinic gives for getting assessed.

From there, which of these does your daily headache look most like:

• The tight band: both sides of the head, like a strap pressing or squeezing, mild to moderate, no throbbing, and routine activity doesn’t make it worse. This is the classic shape of chronic tension-type headache.
• The throbbing kind: one or both sides, pulsating, moderate to severe, bothered by light and noise, possibly with nausea. In someone with a history of episodic migraine, attacks can slowly climb toward daily — that’s called migraine chronification.
• Morning headache with repeated medicine use: record the timing, response and medicine days. This does not establish medication-overuse headache; morning headache has several possible causes.
• Suddenly daily: someone with no headache history starts hurting one day, and within three days the pain is constant and never leaves. This “new daily persistent headache” needs prompt evaluation. It’s not a start-with-self-care type.

An often-missed dimension is the hour it hits. A headache at the same time every day carries its own clues. Pain that arrives every afternoon around three or four points toward caffeine wearing off, a post-lunch blood sugar dip, or a full day of eye strain and neck tension. A headache after work is often the let-down after a day of held tension, and weekend headaches work the same way. Pain every other day, synced with a shift or rotation schedule, says check your sleep rhythm first. A fixed attack time is a valuable clue on its own, so log it in the headache diary below. If your headache sits behind your eyes, the trigger list is different — read why headaches settle behind the eyes; if you wake up with a headache every morning, sleep and nighttime breathing matter most — see why you wake up with a headache every morning.

One more distinction that matters: how it started. Did the daily headache begin recently, out of the blue, or did “occasional” slowly become “every single day” over months? Sudden and gradual point to completely different workups, and the next section covers both.

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What Modern Medicine Says About Daily Headaches

First pin down what “every day” means, then look at who turned it into every day.

Chronic Daily Headache Is About Frequency

Chronic daily headache isn’t one specific headache. It’s an umbrella term: 15 or more headache days a month, for over three months. Its most common members are chronic migraine and chronic tension-type headache, plus the new daily persistent headache mentioned above. In other words, “every day” describes frequency, and the driver underneath still has to be found. True primary chronic daily headache has no other disease behind it. In a minority of cases it’s caused by inflamed blood vessels in the brain, infection, abnormal pressure inside the skull, or injury — which is exactly why red flags exist.

When Frequent Medicine Use Needs Review

Frequent acute-medicine use can contribute to medication-overuse headache, but medicine days alone do not diagnose it. ICHD-3 criteria include an existing headache disorder, headache on at least 15 days a month and regular overuse for more than three months. Drug-specific use thresholds are generally 10 or 15 days a month. Needing acute medicine more than 2–3 days a week is a reason to review treatment with a clinician, not a diagnosis or a safe-use allowance. Do not change prescribed or frequently used medicines without advice.

Drug-specific use thresholds are part of the clinical assessment:

• Combination painkillers (containing caffeine or butalbital), triptans, opioids: 10 or more days a month clearly raises the risk;
• Simple painkillers (acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and similar): 15 or more days a month is a relevant threshold;
• A clinician must also assess headache frequency, duration and other possible causes; these numbers alone do not diagnose medication-overuse headache.

The pattern is recognizable too: headache daily or nearly so, waking you in the early morning, relieved by a pill and back when it wears off. The hard part is that from the inside you can’t tell “I’m treating my headache” from “the medicine is making my headache” — which is what the “medication days” column of the headache diary is for.

Other Common Drivers

• Migraine turning chronic: episodic migraine gradually climbing in frequency over years. Mayo Clinic lists the risk factors: being female, anxiety and depression, sleep disorders, obesity, snoring, caffeine overuse, and painkiller overuse. Each one pushes headaches toward daily.
• Sleep problems: too little sleep, broken sleep, and wildly irregular sleep times all make the list; snoring raises the question of interrupted breathing at night. Sleep and pain run in both directions: bad sleep triggers headaches, and daily headaches wreck sleep.
• Stress: one of the most common triggers of chronic headache. Sustained tension keeps neck and shoulder muscles contracted and makes the nervous system steadily more sensitive to pain signals — so headaches come daily during pressured stretches, and fire just as you finally relax after work or on weekends.
• Caffeine: a heavy daily caffeine habit can feed medication overuse headache (many combination painkillers contain caffeine), while a sudden cut triggers withdrawal headache. Caffeine constricts blood vessels in the brain, the body adapts to its daily presence, and when it doesn’t show up, the vessels rebound open and pain follows. The fix is to keep intake steady rather than swinging between a lot and none.
• Skipped meals, too little water: the NHS lists irregular eating and dehydration among common headache causes. If your pain arrives every afternoon, check these two first: did lunch happen, and have you had enough to drink?
• Vision problems and long hours on screens: also on the NHS list. When you can’t quite see clearly, you squint, frown, and lean in, and your head and neck muscles spend the whole day compensating.
• Hormonal shifts: the hormone changes around periods and through the menopausal years can drive headache frequency up.

A Headache Every Day All of a Sudden, or a Slow Build?

If the daily headache crept up over months, it’s overwhelmingly the stack of factors above, and self-checks plus adjustments are a reasonable start. If it arrived all of a sudden — especially with no headache history, going constant within three days, the “new daily persistent headache” pattern — book a doctor first, not a wellness routine. In a small number of cases a daily headache sits on top of a blood-vessel, infection, or pressure problem; the red-flag list is in When to See a Doctor.

Why Every Doctor Asks for a Headache Diary

Mayo Clinic and the NHS give the same advice: keep a headache diary. The reason is practical. Chronic daily headache rarely has one cause, and two or three weeks of notes let the patterns among timing, triggers, and medication days surface on their own — more accurately than any account given in a short appointment. The two-week headache diary below is built for exactly this.

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How Chinese Medicine Reads a Daily Headache

Chinese medicine looks past any single attack and asks why the pain refuses to leave. What follows is the traditional framework for self-observation — an experience-based model, not a diagnosis in the modern medical sense.

Traditional theory sums up pain in one clean line: “where there is blockage, there is pain; where there is undernourishment, there is pain.” The Suwen, a foundational text roughly two thousand years old, describes qi (the body’s functional energy, in this framework) and blood circulating through the vessels “without ceasing, round and round without rest”; once that flow slows and stalls in a vessel, pain appears. In plain terms, the system in your head is either blocked or underfed.

A daily headache also gets its own traditional observation. The Qing-dynasty physician Ye Tianshi, in his Clinical Guide Medical Case Records, proposed that long illness and long pain “enter the collaterals” — the finest branches of the vessel network. Fresh pain sits at the surface level of qi and is relatively easy to shift; pain that has been around sinks deeper, into the blood level, and grips harder. This explains a common experience: people with daily headaches feel theirs is more stubborn than an occasional one, and improvement takes longer. That’s no accident. The traditional framework expects long-standing pain to loosen slowly, and asks for a longer time scale.

Pain at a fixed hour has its own traditional frame too: the Chinese body clock divides the day into twelve two-hour windows, with one meridian line “on duty” in each, and symptoms that repeat at the same time are traditionally read against the state of the meridian on shift. This is observational tradition rather than modern evidence, but as a recording dimension it’s genuinely useful — if your pain arrives every afternoon, log the hour and you collect the modern and traditional clues in one pass. The full framework is in the Chinese body clock.

Along this main line, daily headaches show three common patterns:

Tight and stuck (the qi-stagnation direction): a band-like or bloated pressure, usually on both sides or across the whole head, often dragging the neck and shoulders in; clearly worse after stress, bottled-up frustration, or a run of late work nights; frequent sighing and a stuffy chest day to day. The pain’s intensity tracks your emotional tension almost in sync. (Qi stagnation means the smooth flow of qi is held up — think of tension with nowhere to go.)

Fixed and stabbing (the blood-stasis direction): the pain nails itself to one spot, feels like stabbing, and is more noticeable at night; this is usually the long-sufferer’s headache — exactly the shape “long pain enters the collaterals” describes. (Blood stasis means circulation is locally sluggish, so things pool and press instead of moving.)

Heavy and foggy (the phlegm-dampness direction): the head feels wrapped in a wet towel, heavy and unclear, with chest stuffiness, nausea, a weighed-down body, and a thick greasy tongue coating; people who eat a lot of sweet, rich, or icy-cold food and sit still all day are more likely to land here. (Phlegm-dampness is the traditional label for metabolic dampness the body hasn’t cleared.)

Traditional accounts also discuss tendencies using categories such as qi-stagnation constitution, blood-stasis constitution, phlegm-dampness constitution, the nine TCM constitution types. These are classifications within the traditional framework, not validated predictions of symptoms or explanations of a medical cause. A few episodes, a clock time or a quiz result cannot establish a diagnosis. Persistent symptoms need medical assessment; any TCM pattern needs individual practitioner assessment. See the NCCIH overview for research and safety limits.

Here is where the research runs out: NCCIH’s assessment of acupuncture for preventing migraine and tension-type headache is “may reduce attack frequency, with moderate-quality evidence” — but that’s research on needling, and it doesn’t transfer directly to self-acupressure. On Chinese herbal medicine overall, NCCIH’s verdict is that study quality varies and firm conclusions can’t be drawn. So read everything above as a framework for self-observation and everyday care, not a substitute for evaluation and treatment.

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Everyday Adjustments You Can Start Now

In cheapest-to-change-first order:

• Keep a medicine-day record: write the medicine name, amount and days used, including nonprescription products. Share it with your clinician. The 10-/15-day thresholds are diagnostic criteria in context, not targets or a hard budget for self-treatment.
• Pin your wake-up time: same time every day, weekends within an hour; most adults need 7–8 hours of sleep. If your headache keeps a schedule, rhythm is the first variable to stabilize.
• Three meals on time, no skipping: low-blood-sugar windows are a common trigger for afternoon headaches. Get protein at breakfast, and don’t let lunch slide into mid-afternoon.
• Caffeine steady, not high: the same amount at the same time daily, nothing after 2pm; if you’re cutting down, shave a little each week rather than stopping at once.
• Drink enough water: aim for pale-yellow urine; if the pain comes every afternoon, drink a glass of water an hour before it and watch what happens for a week.
• Give your eyes, neck, and shoulders breaks: every 45–60 minutes of screen time, stand up and look into the distance for a few minutes; raise the monitor to eye level so you’re not hunched over all day.
• Thirty minutes of brisk walking or equivalent cardio daily: regular exercise improves stress, sleep, and pain thresholds at once, and it’s a standing item on chronic daily headache prevention lists. Start at 10 minutes and add weekly.
• Give stress a daily exit: a walk, writing it down, ten minutes of talking to someone — all count. Mayo Clinic’s prevention advice explicitly includes stress-reduction practices like yoga, tai chi, and meditation.

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Chinese Medicine Approaches

The five categories below map onto the three patterns. Start with the one or two easiest to sustain — no need to do everything at once.

Acupressure

Once a day, press with the pad of a finger or thumb to a mild, slightly sore-aching intensity; add a session when a headache is on.

Hegu (LI4) Where: On the back of the hand, between the first and second metacarpal bones (the long bones behind the thumb and index finger), roughly at the midpoint of the second. Traditional use: One of the most-used points for head and face pain — tradition has a saying, “for the face and mouth, Hegu delivers.” Suits all three patterns. Press 60 seconds each side. Do not use during pregnancy.

Taiyang (EX-HN5) Where: In the small hollow about one finger-width behind the point between the tip of the eyebrow and the outer corner of the eye. Traditional use: Local relief for distending pain at the temples; press any time an afternoon attack of the tight-and-stuck pattern comes on. Both sides at once, 1–2 minutes, with light pressure — no need to chase soreness.

Fengchi (GB20) Where: In the hollows on either side at the base of the skull, just inside the hairline, roughly level with the earlobes. Traditional use: Traditionally disperses wind and frees the channels; the go-to when headache drags the neck and shoulders along, and for the heavy-and-foggy pattern. Press upward with the thumbs, 60 seconds each side.

Sanyinjiao (SP6) Where: About four finger-widths above the tip of the inner ankle bone, on the back edge of the shinbone. Traditional use: Traditionally connects with the Liver, Spleen, and Kidney meridians at once; often used for the heavy pattern with poor sleep, and for the fixed-stabbing pattern of long-standing pain. Press 60 seconds each side. Do not use during pregnancy.

These point choices describe traditional practice, not a proven treatment selection by constitution. Pregnancy needs a separate clinical assessment; consult your maternity clinician before any self-acupressure rather than choosing a supposedly safe substitute point.

Food Therapy

The Chinese home-style track and the Western everyday track apply the same set of principles. Pick whichever track matches the ingredients you have — you don’t need both at once.

Chinese home-style track

• Dried tangerine peel and ginger drink: 3g dried tangerine peel (chenpi, aged mandarin peel — sold dried in the herb or tea section of Asian supermarkets, or online) plus 2 slices of fresh ginger, simmered in water for 10 minutes and sipped as tea. Tradition reads chenpi as moving qi and dissolving phlegm, and ginger as warming and dispersing; the drink suits the heavy-and-foggy pattern. Have it in the morning — if your pain comes every afternoon, you’ll have it in ahead of the attack. (Food-therapy use; consult a licensed TCM practitioner before using dried tangerine peel as a medicinal herb.)
• Rosebud tea: 5–6 dried rosebuds (food-grade dried rose flower buds, at Asian supermarkets, Chinese herbal grocers, or online), steeped in just-boiled water for 5 minutes. Traditionally soothes constrained Liver qi and suits the tight-and-stuck pattern — drink it daily through a high-pressure week. Method and details are on the rose flower tea page.
• Hawthorn water: 6–10g dried hawthorn berries (shanzha, sour dried red berries usually sold in slices, at Asian supermarkets or online), simmered for 15 minutes. Sour-sweet and mildly warm, it traditionally moves blood and helps digest rich food; it suits the fixed-and-stabbing pattern and the heavy pattern in people who eat greasy often. If you’re prone to acid reflux, drink it after meals; not advised during pregnancy. (Food-therapy use; consult a licensed TCM practitioner before using it as a medicinal herb.)
• Less sweet and greasy, less icy-cold: bubble tea, desserts, and iced drinks all feed the damp heaviness of the phlegm-dampness direction; if you’re the heavy-and-foggy pattern, run this rule for two weeks before judging anything else.

Western everyday track

• Ginger and honey water: 3–4 thin slices of fresh ginger (about 10g) steeped in 250ml of hot water for 10 minutes; stir in a teaspoon of honey once it’s warm rather than hot. Same direction as the tangerine-peel and ginger drink — warming, dispersing, clearing the fog — so it suits the heavy-and-foggy pattern. Drink it in the morning, or an hour before your usual afternoon attack time.
• Ginger-date tea: 3 dried dates, split and pitted, plus 2 slices of fresh ginger, simmered in 400ml of water for 15 minutes. Warm, sweet, and settling — it fills the same easing role rosebud tea plays for the tight-and-stuck pattern. On a high-pressure, overtime-heavy week, have a cup every afternoon in place of the second coffee.
• Cinnamon-ginger tea: 1 small cinnamon stick (or 1/4 teaspoon of ground cinnamon) plus 2 slices of fresh ginger, simmered in 400ml of water for 10 minutes. Warming and moving, it parallels hawthorn water’s circulation direction and suits the fixed-and-stabbing pattern. If you’re prone to acid reflux, drink it after meals; not advised during pregnancy.
• Plain oatmeal: 40–50g of rolled oats simmered in 300ml of water or milk for 5 minutes; add half a sliced banana or a few chopped dates, no syrup. Warm, soft, and easy to digest — the heavy-and-foggy pattern can eat it as breakfast for two weeks alongside cutting the offenders: iced drinks, desserts, and sweetened yogurt feed the same heaviness, so those go first.

Three pairings across the two tracks, one per pattern: the qi-stagnation direction favors rosebud tea or ginger-date tea; the phlegm-dampness direction favors the tangerine-peel and ginger drink or ginger-honey water, plus the dietary cuts; the blood-stasis direction favors hawthorn water or cinnamon-ginger tea. The “suits” and “avoid” notes apply to both tracks equally.

Emotional Care

For the tight-and-stuck pattern, the trigger often isn’t fatigue so much as bottling things up.

• Give feelings a daily exit: run the day’s frustrations through your head on a walk, write them down, or say them out loud to someone. If you catch yourself sighing through the day, take it as the pressure gauge asking for exactly this.
• Run a shutdown ritual before leaving work: write tomorrow’s three tasks on paper, close the notebook, then leave your desk. Many after-work headaches are the release that follows a full day of held tension, and wrapping up deliberately beats toughing it out.
• Three minutes of slow breathing when a headache hits: in for 4 counts, out for 6. The longer exhale lets the nervous system come down first.

This section maps most directly onto the qi-stagnation direction, but any constitution in a pressured stretch can use it.

Movement and Exercise

• Brisk walking, cycling, or swimming — pick any, 30 minutes a day, at an intensity where you sweat lightly, can still talk, and don’t finish exhausted. Regular cardio is where modern prevention advice and the traditional “move qi and blood” principle meet, and all three patterns benefit.
• Baduanjin (the Eight Pieces of Brocade, a slow traditional Chinese movement routine) is a gentle start for people low on stamina; the heavy-and-foggy pattern can spend extra repetitions on the “Holding One Arm Aloft” movement, and the tight-and-stuck pattern on “Two Hands Hold Up the Heavens,” which opens the chest.
• On a headache day, don’t push through a workout — rest is the main job; pain that worsens with exercise is a stop signal. Log it.

Gentle regular movement suits qi-stagnation, phlegm-dampness, and blood-stasis tendencies alike, and the blood-stasis direction especially should guard the “move every day” rule — pain that has entered the collaterals won’t be nursed back by sitting still.

Sleep and Daily Rhythm

• Fixed wake-up time, 7–8 hours of sleep — the same rhythm adjustment as in the modern section, shared by all three patterns.
• Nap 20–30 minutes, finished by 3pm; past half an hour you wake up foggier, and the heavy-and-foggy pattern especially needs to hold that cap.
• Off screens for the last hour before bed, bedroom dark and quiet; if you’re woken by pain every morning, check your sleep before you buy another pillow.

Sleep rules aren’t constitution-specific, but the phlegm-dampness direction especially needs the nap cap, and the qi-stagnation direction especially needs the pre-bed screen cut — take your worries to bed and the headache is booked for tomorrow.

Different constitution tendencies call for different first moves against the same daily headache — qi stagnation starts by unblocking emotions, phlegm-dampness by changing what’s on the plate, blood stasis by getting qi and blood moving. If you want to know which way you lean, the free constitution test at the end of this page is a self-observation tool (not a diagnosis): it shows your tendencies across nine traditional body types and helps you decide what to do first.

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The Two-Week Headache Diary

Fourteen days of notes will tell you more about your headache than any generic advice. Two minutes before bed, jot down:

What to record	How to record it	Example
Timing	When it started, how long it lasted, same time every day?	Started 3:30pm, about 2 hours
Location	One side / both sides / around the eyes / dragging the neck	Both temples
Character	Band-like / throbbing / stabbing / heavy-foggy	Band-like
Intensity	0–10 score	5
The day’s context	Sleep, meals, caffeine, stress events, screen hours	Only 5 hours of sleep; skipped afternoon coffee
Painkillers	Name + how many doses that day (the most important column in this article)	Ibuprofen, 1st dose
Accompanying symptoms	Light or noise sensitivity, nausea, visual changes	None

After two weeks, the patterns speak for themselves: pain every afternoon on days without caffeine points at the caffeine rhythm; pain synced with overtime days points at stress and held tension; pain fixed to one spot and worse at night points at the “long pain enters the collaterals” direction.

At the end of the month, add one summary line: total painkiller days this month. Over the 10–15 day line, this diary stops being a self-care tool and becomes the best material you can hand a doctor — bring it to the appointment, because it beats saying “my head hurts all the time” by a mile. After making changes, run another two weeks and compare, and you’ll know whether the changes did anything.

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How Long Until You See Improvement

Treat review dates as opportunities to assess symptoms, not guarantees of relief. Headache courses differ, and self-pressure, tea, posture or routine changes do not share an established timetable for benefit.

• During an attack: note whether rest or optional gentle pressure makes you more comfortable. Stop if it does not help, worsens symptoms or hurts; do not delay your agreed treatment to finish a routine.
• Review your diary weekly: summarize headache days, severity, associated symptoms and medicine days. The record helps a clinical conversation; it cannot establish a cause.
• Get assessed when needed: first exertional headache, pain worsened lying down, or new, changing or persistent headache warrants assessment rather than a mandatory one- or two-week trial. Discuss frequent acute-medicine use with a clinician; they decide any medication change. The emergency signs below need immediate help.

See MedlinePlus advice on seeking care.

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When to See a Doctor

Self-care fits chronic headaches with a stable pattern and no red flags. Handle the following by urgency:

Go to the emergency room now:

• A sudden, explosive severe headache — the “worst of my life” kind;
• Headache with fever, a stiff neck, a rash that doesn’t fade under pressure, confusion, or seizures;
• Headache with double vision, vision loss, weakness or numbness on one side, or trouble speaking;
• A headache that started after a head injury.

Book an appointment within days:

• A headache that’s new after age 50, or clearly different from your usual pattern and steadily worsening;
• Headaches that wake you at night, growing more frequent;
• Headaches triggered or worsened by coughing, sneezing, bending over, or exertion;
• Headache with jaw pain while chewing or a tender scalp (especially worth checking over age 50).

Routine booking threshold (any one is enough):

• Headaches two or more days a week;
• Painkillers more than two days a week, or needing more than the label dose to stay on top of the pain;
• Four weeks of self-adjustment with no improvement — bring your headache diary and the medication-day count.

Start with your GP or family doctor, who can refer you to neurology if needed. If medication overuse headache is confirmed, don’t abruptly stop painkillers you’ve been taking heavily for a long time — the withdrawal plan needs a doctor, because suddenly stopping some of these drugs causes a significant rebound.

This article is for general health education and can’t replace a doctor’s diagnosis or personalized advice. If you take any prescription medication, or you’re pregnant or breastfeeding, talk to your doctor or pharmacist before changing any medication or self-care routine.

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Common Questions

Could a Headache Every Day Be a Brain Tumor?

The large majority of daily headaches are primary — no other disease is found behind them, and a brain tumor is only one of the less common causes of chronic daily headache. What deserves vigilance isn’t “every day” itself but the red flags listed above: sudden explosive onset, steady worsening, waking you at night, neurological symptoms alongside, or new onset after 50. With none of those and a long-stable pattern, working through this article’s self-checks first is a reasonable path; with any one of them, get checked before you adjust anything.

I’m Already Taking Painkillers Every Day. What Now?

Take your medicine-day log to a clinician. They need to assess the headache and the medicines before deciding whether medication overuse is involved or how to change treatment. Withdrawal may be abrupt for some medicines and gradual for others, with support as needed; do not design the plan from a symptom checklist.

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A headache every day is usually several forces twisted together, and each strand has a counter once you separate them. For the full map of headache types and care frameworks, start at the headache topic hub; if your pain settles behind your eyes, read why headaches settle behind the eyes; if you wake up with a headache every morning, see why you wake up with a headache every morning; to work out your constitution tendency, read the nine TCM constitution types first, then take the free constitution test below.