Managing migraine often focuses on avoiding known triggers. The idea is simple: avoid the triggers and you avoid the pain. But this approach is like putting a plaster on a leaking pipe without understanding why the pipe burst. It’s time to dig deeper and ask a more fundamental question: not what triggers your migraine, but why are you sensitive to these triggers?
Take the usual suspects: histamine-rich food, toxins, strong smells, a busy social event, alcohol or a sudden change in the weather. These don’t cause migraine in everyone, so why do they have such a profound effect on some of us?
When our brain is short of “energy”, it struggles to process these stimuli effectively. This can be due to various factors, including stress, lack of sleep, the wrong fuel, too few electrolytes or the wrong balance… and usually a combination. Frequent attacks can make the trigeminal nerve hypersensitive. This nerve plays a crucial role in migraine pain. As a result, every new stimulus can come in harder again.
Your brain has a kind of spam filter (the PAG, or “periaqueductal grey”) that is supposed to block unnecessary sensory information. Think of stimuli from outside such as light, sound and smells, but also of the pain signals from your migraine itself. If the PAG doesn’t get the message from the surrounding brain areas that everything is safe, every stimulus is perceived as unsafe, so your brain becomes hyperalert and your pain threshold drops.
So should we accept a life in which a simple glass of wine with cheese and a bit of bad weather leave us defenceless? Certainly not. That’s why I find the conventional advice to avoid triggers frustrating: it misses the bigger picture. It’s not about building a life around our migraine; it’s about building resilience within ourselves.
Let’s shift our focus to regaining flexibility. By supporting and reprogramming our body and brain, we can create a robust system that can handle a small trigger without collapsing. This means looking at lifestyle changes, nutritional support, thought patterns and beliefs, our capacity to detox and to deal with stress hormones, training our response to stimuli and so on, to restore our brain’s ability to cope with potential triggers. Avoiding triggers is only a temporary survival strategy, not a cure. To really get migraine under control, we have to look deeper and build a more resilient system.
At the Functional Migraine Clinic, we believe in a holistic approach to migraine: one that is based on the individual and embraces the complexity of the condition. The Building Block Analysis maps your individual building blocks, so migraine no longer has to dictate your life.
