How to Actually Find Your Migraine Triggers
If you've ever tried to log your migraines in a notebook, you know the problem: by month three you have 30 entries, and the question you actually wanted to answer — what is causing these? — is buried in the data. Migraine triggers are real, but they're slippery. They cluster in patterns that are invisible in a list and obvious in a calendar.
The fields that matter
Headache specialists ask about the same set of things every time. If you log them consistently, the conversation gets vastly more useful:
- When it started — date and time. Migraines often have circadian patterns; logging morning vs. evening onset matters.
- How long it lasted — hours. Some types resolve in 4–6 hours, others run 24+. The duration distribution is part of the diagnosis.
- Peak severity on a 1–10 scale — not "how bad is it now" but "how bad did it get."
- Aura — none, visual (zigzags, scotomas, light flashes), or other (smell changes, language difficulty, motor symptoms). Aura presence/absence and type splits migraine into clinically distinct categories.
- Location — one-sided, both sides, around the eye, back of head. The location pattern points at different sub-types.
- Suspected triggers — what was different about the day, the food, the sleep, the stress.
- What helped — medications, dark room, sleep, hydration, cold pack.
Why the list approach fails
Imagine you've logged 30 episodes. You scroll through and try to spot the pattern by eye. Was the headache on October 14 caffeine? Was the one on October 21 the wine? Were both before your period?
You can't hold 30 multi-dimensional data points in working memory. Nobody can. The trigger pattern, if it exists, is invisible at this level.
Why a heatmap works
Lay the same data out as a calendar grid — one cell per day, coloured by the worst severity that day — and the patterns leap off the page. Three rough days in a row before each period. A run of red cells the week of a deadline. Quiet stretches that correlate with vacation. Trigger correlations show up as visual clusters, not as data points to be reasoned about.
This is the same insight that drives the cycle Symptom Tracker heatmap — a calendar layout makes patterns instantly visible that a list buries. For migraines specifically, the worst-severity-per-day rendering is what shows you whether your bad-headache-days cluster.
Triggers that are real, triggers that are myths
The trigger landscape is messier than internet lists suggest. The genuinely well-established triggers in clinical literature:
- Sleep changes in either direction (too little OR too much)
- Skipping meals / fasting
- Dehydration
- Stress (and the let-down from stress — many people get migraines on Saturday morning, not Friday afternoon)
- Hormonal cycles in menstruating people
- Specific foods in some people — the "common triggers" lists (red wine, aged cheese, chocolate) are real for some people but not most. Personal patterns matter more than the generic list.
- Bright light, loud noise, strong smells — usually amplify rather than start
- Weather changes — pressure swings particularly
- Caffeine — in either direction (too much or withdrawal)
Triggers that are not well-established despite popular belief: most "trigger foods" outside the well-studied few, MSG, gluten in non-celiac people, specific weather metrics beyond pressure swings.
The personal pattern is what matters. Logging consistently gives you yours.
Reliefs are part of the data
What helped each episode is as informative as what triggered it. If NSAIDs work for you 80% of the time and triptans don't add much, that's worth knowing. If sleep ends most of your episodes, that's a clue. If nothing reliably helps, that's also a clue — it points at a different headache class (cluster headaches, tension-type, medication-overuse).
When to skip the log and call a doctor
A few presentations shouldn't be reasoned about with a tracker:
- The worst headache of your life — especially sudden onset (thunderclap headache). Get medical help.
- Headache with weakness, numbness, vision loss, or trouble speaking — even if those resolve. Could be a stroke or TIA.
- New headaches after age 50 with no prior history.
- Sudden change in pattern for someone with stable migraines.
- Headache with fever, neck stiffness, severe nausea — possible meningitis.
The tracker is for the typical chronic / recurrent migraine pattern. Anything outside that is medical territory.
Skip the notebook
The Migraine Tracker logs episodes with all the clinical fields a specialist will ask about — duration, severity, aura type, location, multi-select triggers (18 canonical options), multi-select reliefs (11 options). The 60-day calendar grid surfaces clusters at a glance. Top-5 triggers stat shows what's actually correlating. Bring the CSV (or just hand the phone over) at your next neurology visit.
Same on-device privacy as the rest of /health — localStorage only, CSV export, clear-all in one click.
The short version
The trigger pattern is in the data, but you can't see it as a list. A calendar heatmap and a small set of consistent fields make it obvious in weeks. Bring the structured log to your next neurology appointment — they ask exactly these questions, and a 3-month log saves the first 15 minutes of the visit.