The 5 most liberating things I’ve learned about migraine.

Learning about migraine has not only helped me to understand my condition, it has helped me like myself a whole lot more than I used to. Years of blaming myself has left scars, but when freed of that guilt I was actually able to deal with migraine so much more effectively. These are my top 5 most liberating things I have learned about migraine!

1. Migraine is not your fault!

How many years have we spent blaming ourselves? It must have been something I ate, something I did… if I just drank more water, stuck to the diet, blah blah blah. Learning that migraine is genetic, that even with the best lifestyle management, strict routine and good meds you may still get breakthrough attacks, and the variability of chemicals around the brainstem (currently though to be necessary for any trigger to set off a migraine attack) is going to happen no matter what you do… was a huge weight of my soul. After decades of hating myself for making myself sick, I’m now free of that guilt, and much better positioned mentally to actually manage migraine.

2. You have migraine all the time

This was a biggie for me, and I know many others are wrestling with it as a concept. But accepting that migraine is an all-day-every-day condition, that my brain works differently all the time, that my system processes sensory inputs differently all the time, just completely changed the way I looked at it. Like many people with migraine, I had a grab bag of overlapping diagnoses, and was still looking for answers for my fatigue, intermittent dizziness, and mood swings… there must be something else wrong with me, right? When you think about migraine as just the attacks, there’s always a heap of stuff that still needs explaining. Once I really embraced the idea that I had migraine all the time, and the full list of symptoms attributable to migraine, I sat down with my doctor and went through all my other issues. In the end I was left with just two medical conditions – migraine and PTSD – rather than 8 diagnoses and a whole lot of question marks. It may sound silly and superficial because my symptom list hadn’t changed, but suddenly I felt better knowing I only had to manage 1 thing (PTSD for me doesn’t require ongoing management thankfully). It also got a lot easier to give my medical history unburdened by my shopping list of symptom based diagnoses like recurrent costochondritis, IBS and BPPV.

3. Talking fast is a symptom of migraine

Ok, so this may be a thing that was amazingly liberating for me but may not be as applicable for others. My whole life I had been getting in trouble for talking too fast. My whole life. When I was a kid I was forever being told off, especially at school, for talking so fast people couldn’t understand me. When I went to work – in radio, of all professions! – it became an essential part of my job to slow my speech to something that others could understand. 40 plus years of constantly being paranoid about how fast I speak has resulted in an almost normal speed, although I still talk “like Speedy Gonzales” when I’m tired. (Speedy Gonzales was probably my favourite cartoon as a kid, and the name of the fastest mouse in all Mexico was often used as a critical reference point by the various adults in my life when I was in trouble for talking – or doing other things – too fast. In hindsight, it was an odd thing to be told given the affected OTT Mexican tropes and accent… but I can’t undo it now, that’s the first thing that comes to mind!) So, learning that there wasn’t something wrong with me, that I talk fast because I have a migraine brain, and I wasn’t being naughty or wrong by talking at my speed – that it was ok for me to be me!! – was huge. I actually cried when I read a study about people with migraine having a faster talking speed than people without migraine. It’s also one of the joys of working with Migraine Australia – a lot of us talk fast, we all understand each other, and we get heaps done in a really short amount of time.

4. Craving food is a symptom, giving in to those cravings is treatment, not a weakness

As someone who has struggled with weight (in both directions) their entire life, there is always a level of trauma around food. Everything that goes into my mouth involves a calculation of calories and nutritional value, there’s very little that is just ‘I’m hungry’ or ‘that’s looks yummy’ in my decisions to eat or not. Throughout my life, from long before I knew I had migraine, I would be suddenly overcome with a feeling of being ravenously hungry and needing to eat *NOW*, usually followed by stuffing my face with bread in a semi-conscious state. When I say stuffing my face, I mean like demolishing half a loaf of bread in a matter of a minute or two… that would then be followed by remorse, starving myself and working out excessively, and probably still putting on weight. Years of this kind of binging and starving, and my weight yo-yoing, has of course not been good. After a while I learned that resisting the craving was part of the problem, and I started indulging the craving earlier with something small, so I wouldn’t binge eat. It was probably another decade before I understood that craving was a Premonitory symptom of migraine, and that by giving the body whatever it was saying it needed – usually salt – I was managing my migraine, not being a pathetic, weak, pile of useless fat.

5. Anxiety goes hand in hand with migraine

Along with the mountains of self-blame and guilt mentioned above, I also used to hate myself for being anxious. Anxiety is a logical consequence of living with migraine: of course we fear the next attack, and anything and everything that may trigger it. Of course we worry about being judged, or people talking about us behind our backs because we again had to pull out from a social obligation. For some, that very logical migraine related anxiety can help fuel general anxiety which is less logical or understandable, but if it does it is not your fault. In my own case, managing my migraine has largely managed my anxiety, but understanding that this two is just part of having a migraine brain and not a weakness or failing (not that any mental health issue ever is, but I’m sure you understand the self-talk I’m referring to) was also liberating, and made the whole thing much easier to deal with.