How can I identify what triggers are causing my migraines?4113955

There are many triggers which can cause migraines. These can be environmental – the weather, your stress and anxiety levels, whether you’ve exercised, the number of hours you’ve been working, how much of that time is sitting before a computer screen and whether the light is natural or artificial. They can also be dietary. Many foods and drinks, as well as a large number of additives, have been linked to find a neurologist. Caffeine, alcohol, tannin, citrus fruits, some preserved meats, food colorings, even foods which have simply been prepared in advance and not stored very well, rather than made fresh, can be causes of migraines in some cases. Keep a migraine diary. Keeping a dairy that tracks these dietary and environmental aspects can be the first step in identifying and removing the triggers that are causing your migraines, meaning that your attacks are less regular, less severe, or perhaps stop altogether. If you keep notes of what you’ve eaten, drunk and done, and whether you’ve had a migraine, what the early symptoms were, how severe the attack was, how long the main symptoms and the pain lasted, and where the pain was centered, it soon becomes apparent that there is a pattern to the attacks and the triggers. You will almost certainly identify a number of triggers which combine to build your migraine attack.

Make lifestyle changes. Once you’ve begun to identify which triggers are combining to build a migraine attack you and your doctor can work together to treat the attacks, and prevent a debilitating regularity of patient care. This is only possible by making some changes to your lifestyle to remove some of the triggers, in partnership with medication that can be taken at the first symptoms –which you’ve also identified in your migraine diary – preventing a migraine developing further, and pain killers to sooth migraines that do develop, meaning the attack isn’t as long lived. Isolate the worst offenders. When you make these lifestyle changes it’s hard to know what things you need to cut out, as there are often a number of triggers working together to cause your migraine attacks. The best way to understand fully what your main triggers are is to work through a list of potential triggers one at a time, removing one from your daily routine to see whether it makes a difference. For example, you may have identified that days on which you work on a computer screen for eight hours in a room with fluorescent lighting, then drink red wine after work, you suffer with a migraine the following morning. You could first try to avoid alcohol, and see whether the migraine develops. If it does try taking more regular breaks from your screen, and using a specialist shield over the screen to prevent eyestrain. If the migraine still develops it might be that the fluorescent lighting is to blame, and moving to a desk with natural lighting, or replacing the bulbs with a different kind of light, can make a difference. If you isolate one trigger at a time you will be able to identify which triggers are the most regular culprits – and then you can change your lifestyle to remove or replace those triggers with other options that are less likely to trigger a migraine attack. This process can take time, but it’s worth taking this careful approach as it could be that you have one or two main triggers that are causing ongoing problems, and simple changes can free you from the debilitating pain and disruption of regular migraine attacks.