Dealing With Headaches

When I began having migraines, it was suggested to me to keep a heache journal. At the time I had two jobs so I just couldn’t be bothered to add yet another task to my already over crowded day. So it took nearly ten years for me to discover the triggers to my migraines. When I finally determined them, it was becuse I finally started to keep a headache journal. And I discovered what my triggers were in mere weeks.

I would have literally saved myself a lot of headaches if I had just kept a headache journal in the first place!

Now that I’m a freelance writer, I look back on all my years of panic and misery and call it “research” instead of “me being an idiot.”

Unless you are masochistic, keep a headache journal if you get frequent headaches that interfere with the quality of your life and seem to have no cause whatsoever. Learning what is causing your headaches is the best thing you can do to not only treat your headaches, but take some control back into your life.

Each Journal Entry

You’re not writing The Great American Novel here. No one is going to grade you for proper grammer, punctuation or spelling. You only need to jot down a few words about your latest cranial conundrum. Things you should include are:

• what happened right before the pain started
• what the weather was like that day
• what you ate that day
• what you didn’t normally eat or drink at that time
• for women, what time of the month it is
• what medications you are taking
• how long the headache lasted

The Journal Itself

You could use anything you can make marks on as a headache journal. I used an assignment pad with a hideous gaudy cover so I could see it easier. The small size made it easy to cart about anywhere.

Some people prefer to keep a headache journal on their computers, especially if they want to show the journal to their doctors but yet keep a copy for themselves. There are good links to simple diary or journal keeping software here. You can also make your own Excell spreadsheet of your headaches…unless it’s dealing with Excell that gave you the headaches in the first place.

If you forget to make an entry, you forget to make an entry. Don’t beat yourself up over it. Do it when you can, and fill in what you can remember of your headache. Don’t do as I did and try to make entries while I was having the migraine. You have enough problems as it is without adding onto them.

Over time, look back over your entries. A pattern should be emerging. If you can’t see it, show your journal to your doctor, who might be able to see something you missed. Even show it to your best friend or Mother, who might also be able to see something you missed. Becuase we are so close to our headaches, it can be hard to get a good perspective of where they come from all by ourselves.

Once you find a pattern, then you can get on with proper treatment and management. And if you have been keeping a headache journal for a while now and still don’t seem any wiser as to the causes of your headches, keep on trying and don’t give up on yourself. It is better to do something proactive about your headaches rather than do nothing helplessly and suffer.