Types of Headaches
Where it came from
A real medical infographic — the kind of clean clinical chart you'd see in a doctor's office or a pharmacy pamphlet — diagramming where different headaches hurt. It started getting edited into a joke format around 2016.
A tidy medical chart shows a few heads in profile, each shaded to show where it hurts: tension headache wraps around the whole skull, cluster headache stabs behind one eye, migraine takes over half your head. Then there's one more panel with a made-up type and an absurd cause. The joke is that last entry. You keep the real ones intact for the deadpan setup, then add "Caused by: replying all to a company-wide email" or "your group chat at 2am" and let the clinical formatting sell it.
It works because the source image is so straight-faced. Three legitimate diagnoses, rendered in serious infographic blue, and then a fourth one about your in-laws, drawn in the exact same somber profile head. Nobody breaks character. The chart just quietly files your worst Tuesday next to a real neurological condition.
It's mostly aged out now. This is a very 2016-era format — the "edit one panel of a real chart" gag got replaced by faster stuff, and you don't see fresh ones much anymore. It went around hard for a stretch, every account swapping in their own specific source of pain. It surfaces occasionally when someone's genuinely miserable and reaching for the joke, but it's coasting on recognition at this point.
Search interest, over time
↳ data courtesy of google trends
