Discovering Your Migraine Triggers With Migraine Buddy

Understanding What Could Be Triggering Your Migraines

One of the most effective ways to reduce your migraines is to understand what may be triggering them. Some commonly known triggers for migraines are stress, anxiety, skipped meals and certain foods. The best way to know what could be triggering your migraines is to regularly track all potential triggers.

How To Track Your Triggers

Record all triggers:

It can be useful to note down everything that could be a potential trigger- even if you are not sure! Migraine Buddy will eventually sort out the triggers in the reports and let you know your top three triggers.

Add your own triggers:

Migraine Buddy’s trigger screen allows you to add your own triggers apart from the one that are present in the default options. You can just tap “Add New” and enter a trigger ; add as many as you like because there’s no limit!

Weather as a trigger:

Changes in weather and barometric pressure can trigger migraines. Migraine Buddy makes it easier for you to track weather and pressure changes and link them to your migraines. Weather tracking can be found in Summary Screen of each migraine record. Migraine Buddy records the weather and pressure at the START of your migraines. You can record weather changes and any observations you make about the weather (raining, lightning, impending storm etc) in the notes section which also provides time stamps. If you would like to see the pressure during a migraine, head over to the Buddies tab and screenshot it for your reference.

Headache As A Trigger:

Often times, a headache may progress into a migraine and some people record it as a trigger. It can be a good idea to track headaches which don’t progress into migraines in Migraine Buddy so that you have a better understanding of which headache progressed into a trigger. When recording a headache, you can record it as per usual and in the notes, write down that it was a headache not a migraine. You can also timestamp the notes so it should be easy for you to understand the timeline of events. You will most likely also be able to distinguish the headache from a migraine due to the difference in symptoms of a migraine and a headache.

Sleep as a trigger:

Lack of or too much sleep can both be migraine triggers. Tracking your sleep patterns can help you to understand how your sleep timings are affecting your migraines. You can easily record your sleep patterns with Migraine Buddy’s automatic sleep diary. All you have to do is make sure your Automatic Sleep Detection is turned on in the

Settings screen. Entering your usual wake up and sleep timing will also help the sleep diary show you a pattern for your sleep times over time.

Sometimes, a migraine can be triggered by a simple occurrence such as waking up one hour earlier or later than your usual time. You can refer to the migraine calendar to see if your sleep timings are aligned and in in the report you can filter your period by date to see your average sleep time. This can help you to understand if your daily sleep evolved between certain periods and how that affected your migraines.

Your sleep quality can be affected by your environment too, make sure you have a migraine-friendly pillow, thick curtains and avoid electronic devices in your bedroom.

Avoid Your Triggers

Once you have been regularly tracking your migraines and have identified some recurrent triggers, the biggest challenge starts for you to try and work towards avoiding them!