Category: Triggers
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Did going gray increase my migraine pain?
The author Dr Howard Schubiner has a book called “Unlearn your pain” which I’ll try to summarize soon. Until then, I want to mention a specific concept that he raises in the book – “predictive coding” – which is when you start to see and feel the things you expect…
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Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI) and migraines
My migraines seem to be the result of a combination of stress and hormones, linked to a mobile assemblage of environmental issues such as humidity, excessive noise or dehydration. For some unlucky people however, migraines (and other headaches) are the result of a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). According to the…
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Conditioning and pain
Ever heard of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936)? He was a physiologist who did experiments with dogs. Put simply, he would ring a bell each time he served the puppies their dinner. After repeating the routine often enough, he could ring a bell, and the dogs would salivate even if there…
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“Hidden from View”
A doctor I met on LinkedIn sent me a PDF of a book suggesting it might help me with my migraines; “Hidden from view: a clinician’s guide to psychophysiologic disorders” by doctors Allan Abbass and Howard Schubiner (2018). As the title suggests, I think it was designed for people who…
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Daily persistent headaches
Today’s post is a summary of another fascinating interview from the World Migraine Summit, this time with Dr Andrew Hershey, a director of neurology at University of Cincinnati. This presentation on ‘new daily persistent headaches’ revealed (again) that headaches and migraines are complex critters (my word not theirs). There were…
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The 4 F-words of trauma
This blog post is a very high-level discussion about how people respond to trauma and is hopefully not upsetting in any way, but it IS about stressors, so you may want to give it a miss. * * * * * For a long time when I was growing up,…
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My first migraine
It occurred to me the other day that whenever we experience an event for the FIRST TIME, there is the potential for our hearts and minds to “learn” from how that event unfolded and assume that this is the “normal” way such an event ALWAYS unfolds… that we might accidentally…
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Midnight migraines
A while ago I wrote that I was pretty sure that nightmares can trigger midnight migraines… today I’m adding another unconventional culprit to the list: wearing socks to bed. Hear me out… For a few months there, one of the biggest banes of my life was midnight migraines. I was…
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Mind-messing optical illusions
Quick word of warning – today’s blog post is NOT very migraine friendly – which is so against everything I believe in… except that I do have a curious mind… If you have a migraine – come back tomorrow… this blog post could make you feel unwell… OR if visual…
The Mindful Migraine 