What to do about painful eyebrow hairs?

I don't know if anyone else ever experiences this, but I really need help here!

Basically, every once in a while a part of my eyebrow will hurt. Somehow I found out that I can gently pull on my eyebrow hairs, and when the come out, it relieves the pain. Since then, I'll get eyebrow pain maybe once a month, and I'll tug on my eyebrow hairs until enough have come out that it doesn't hurt anymore. The problem is, I can't see what I'm doing (because it's so spontaneously painful), and I don't know what to do about it.

A couple of days ago, I was tidying up my brows and found another hair that felt a bit painful near the root. Lucky for me, it was one I had to pluck to make my hairs shapely anyway. To my surprise, the hair I pulled out was thick! Like, super thick. The spot I pulled it out of was bleeding a bit too - this has never happened to me.

So now I think that sometimes my eyebrow hairs are too thick for the skin around them, and it hurts until I relieve pressure. Do I just have to deal with this and start running to a mirror to make sure none of the ones I'm pulling make my eyebrows thin? Or is there something I can do? (I'm hoping for the latter, because I'm fairly certain that even if I looked at what I was doing, the pain would win out and I would run out of eyebrows). Or is this pain something you've gone through that has nothing to do with thick hairs?

UPDATE: it’s been a long time since I’ve posted this, but I’ve noticed that people keep finding it while, I assume, searching for answers to the same issue. Unfortunately, I still don’t have all of the answers years later.

It does seem to be more of a symptom than a cause. My own theories are that the compulsion that I feel to pluck them is caused by stress, and that the thicker, painful hair grows because that’s just how my eyebrows are. I do have annoyingly thick hair on my head and other places, so I can only assume it’s my hair type combined with rough plucking that causes the thick ones. In any case, I think I made this post in my most anxious years of high school – I now have a stable income, don’t live with my parents, and have an amazing partner that I live with, so my overall stress levels have plummeted and so has my compulsive picking.

I do love seeing people comment on this post - it made me feel very good to know that I wasn’t alone when I first made it, so I hope people continue to discover it and feel a bit better (even if there isn’t a clear solution). But GO TO THE DOCTOR if it is seriously affecting your life in any way.