I once told Carol her morning headaches were probably her pillow.
I was wrong, and she had the grace not to say so right away. She’d been waking with a sore head most mornings for a year, and I gave her a pillow opinion over the phone from Arizona. It took her own doctor asking two questions about her sleep to sort it out. That call still sits with me. I should have asked about her nights before I said a word about her bedding.
So now, when someone at the senior centre on Elm Street mentions a headache that shows up every morning and fades by lunch, I don’t talk pillows. I talk about sleep. Not whether they sleep enough. How the sleep is built.
Waking with a sore head
A headache that greets you at the alarm clock is a different animal from one that builds through the day. Not always. But often enough that it’s the first place I look, the same way I look in the brown bag before I look anywhere else.
There are a few usual suspects. I keep a plain list of the signs worth knowing and I’ve handed it out more times than I can count. Then there’s a clock that’s drifted out of step with the day. And there’s plain broken sleep — the kind where you’re in bed eight hours and get five hours of rest out of it.
The point is the same one I make about memory. Before you worry about the frightening thing, check the ordinary things. A morning headache is a clue, not a verdict.
A clock set to its own hour
Some people’s internal clock simply runs late, and it’s not laziness and it’s not new. The problem shows up when life insists on a seven o’clock breakfast.
This is not rare in the young.
What strikes me is how deep this goes. We are still learning the wiring. And in one study I’ve thought about for years, fifteen volunteers spent forty days and nights underground in a French cave with no clocks at all, while researchers tracked their sleeping and waking. They’re nudged there every day by light and habit, and some clocks resist the nudge more than others.
Why memory slips after sixtySee the video on getting a steadier memory after sixty.
The night spent half awake
Even without a shifted clock, sleep past sixty often comes apart at the seams. I think of it like a loaf baked too long — the same hours in the oven, but the middle has gone dry.
That’s poor sleep by any measure, and the morning pays for it. I’ve heard the same described at my table by people with no diagnosis at all: asleep by eleven, awake at two, dozing in scraps till six. By the time they get up, their head aches and their memory feels like a colander.
This is where the memory worry creeps in, and I understand it. A mind that runs on broken sleep misfiles things. But broken sleep is fixable, or at least improvable, and it deserves to be checked before anything heavier. The connection between breathing trouble at night and memory slips by day is one I bring up at almost every brown-bag review now, because for years nobody connected those dots for the people sitting across from me.
Two questions to carry to the doctor
I’d jot these down before any appointment. When do you fall asleep, when do you wake, and what does the middle of the night look like. Two weeks of that, scribbled on the back of an envelope, tells a doctor more than an hour of describing it from memory. What is written down is remembered — that’s as true for sleep as it is for names.
Bring the brown bag too. And if your body has simply always run late, say so plainly. A good doctor would rather hear “I’ve been a night person since I was fourteen” than guess.
Now, some of you are thinking this is just ageing, that sleep thins out after sixty the way hair does, and there’s nothing to be done. I’ll meet you halfway. But lighter is not the same as broken, and a headache every single morning is not a tax you owe for your birthdays. Carol’s wasn’t. Hers turned out to be her breathing, and once that was seen to, the headaches went with it. The assumption that nothing can be done is the one thing I’d push back on hard.
Before you change a pillow, a bedtime, or a single pill, go watch the video and see what’s usually behind mornings like this.
How my own nights shifted
I’ll tell you how it went for me, in order, because it took years and that’s honest.
In my fifties, at the hospital, I could sleep through anything. The basement pharmacy ran on coffee and I ran with it. In my late fifties the three o’clock wakings started — not every night, but enough that I noticed the ceiling had a crack shaped like a river. I did what everyone does. I lay there and did arithmetic about how much sleep I could still get if I dropped off right now.
Around sixty-two I started writing it down, because I tell everyone else to and I got tired of being a hypocrite. Two weeks of notes showed me the pattern: the bad nights followed the late evenings, the ones where I stayed up past my own tiredness to finish something that would have kept. My clock, it turned out, wanted me earlier than my habits did. I shifted supper earlier, then my bedtime, a single adjustment at a time, giving each a month and a half to settle. It was dull. It worked. Okafor about it she nodded like I’d described the weather report. Light and habit, she said. Light does more of this work than most people credit, and a steady ordinary day does the rest — keeping the rhythm matters more than any single trick.
A friend at the kitchen table asking what to do about a sore head every morning would get this: write down your nights for two weeks, take the paper and the pill bottles to someone who’ll listen, and don’t let anyone — including yourself — wave it off as just getting older. Check the sleep before you fear for the mind. That’s the whole of it.
As for what it costs: my notebook and envelopes were free, the calendar by the phone I’ve always had, and the appointment was the usual copay, which I’ve long since stopped tracking precisely but call it the cost of a modest dinner out. The change in routine cost nothing but stubbornness. All in, the most expensive part was the year I spent ignoring it.
A man named George — not his name — stopped me at the grocery store pharmacy last spring. “You the pill lady,” he said. I said I supposed I was. Coincidence?” I told him I never believe in that particular coincidence. He went to his doctor that month. I saw him again in the autumn and he only said, “She was right,” and I never asked which of us he meant.
Watch the video tonight, before you move your bedtime or touch a single bottle — sit through the whole video and then decide what’s yours to change.
Tonight, before bed, put a piece of paper and a pencil on your nightstand. Tomorrow morning, write down one line: when you think you fell asleep, and how your head feels. That’s all. Start there.