Swallowing aggressively during takeoff and landing is the only way to manually force your Eustachian tubes to open and equalize the intense air pressure building up painfully inside your head.

A closer look

Swallowing aggressively during takeoff and landing is the only way to manually force your Eustachian tubes to open and equalize the intense air pressure building up painfully inside your head. When an airplane rapidly changes altitude, the dense atmospheric pressure pushes forcefully against your eardrums, creating that agonizing sensation that your skull is quietly trying to implode. Chewing gum, yawning, or pinching your nose and blowing are essentially biological hacks to flex a tiny muscle in your throat that temporarily opens a pressure-release valve behind your nose. If you have a severe cold and those tubes are blocked by mucus, no amount of desperate swallowing will save you from the excruciating, stabbing pain that makes you wish you had taken a train instead. It is frankly a miracle of human evolution that our fragile anatomical plumbing can survive hurtling through the troposphere in a pressurized aluminum tube without permanently exploding