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headaches and sleep

I guess I'm just looking for more information about the relationship between headaches and sleep. I am not sure I really understand some of the experiences I've had relating to these two things.
Here's some information:

When I was young, I had headaches about once a week or more for many years, which is what caused me to start carrying around Advil everywhere I go.

In high school I started drinking substantial amounts of caffeine, and now if I don't have any I will usually get a mild headache.

In 11th and 12th grade my sleep patterns were intensely and repeatedly disrupted. In 12th grade in the fall I frequently went 5-6 days at a time sleeping only 3-4 hours per day. Often I would sleep far longer on Sunday, and usually woke up with a headache after the longer amounts of sleep. I hardly ever got headaches during the week when I wasn't sleeping enough, except for the caffeine headaches which were less intense.
On one occasion I slept about 3 hours a day for 6 days and then slept 14 hours. I woke up with the most intense headache I have ever experienced, which I call a "migraine" because it shared most of the symptoms. I couldn't think about anything other than pain, which seemed like something between sleep and wakefulness. I vomited several times. Advil did nothing (it took me a while even to obtain any, because I could hardly move). The pain was reduced by dinnertime; I could move and think again.
Since then I have had two more migraines. Both occurred after relatively long nights of sleep, however neither sleep shift was as extreme as the case I detailed. In fact, since fall of 12th grade, I have never allowed myself to go more than about two days in a row on 3 hours of sleep. I should point out that I have shifted from small to large amounts of sleep many times and not all of them resulted in such intense headaches.

Now I'm in college, and sleeping more. However, I still sleep less during the week than on weekends, and I'm concerned that every time I get "enough" sleep (even during the week) I seem to get a mild headache. Even over the summer, when my sleep pattern finally stabilized at about 9 hours a day, I got frequent headaches for the first month or so.

I'm also concerned about developing a tolerance for painkillers. I take them as infrequently as possible, and try to avoid them if the headache is mild enough. But I recently bought some Tylenol, which I know uses a different active ingredient than Advil, and it seems to work much better and faster. This obviously could just be a placebo effect, or a difference in the dosage.

Answers:


Hopefully someone more knowledgable than I am about this topic will read your post and have some answers. In the meantime I just wanted to say hi and welcome you to the boards :)