How do you Live with Chronic Migraine?

Are you living with chronic migraine? Learn what chronic migraine sufferers should do to treat chronic migraine headaches.

Chronic migraine can be difficult to live with. Sufferers often find them debilitating and it’s common to see patterns of development where the migraine attacks increases in frequency over time. Very often, the circumstances that cause chronic migraines are individual and dependent on your personal environment, lifestyle, and habits.

If you frequently have migraine attacks, encroaching on over 15 days every month, and at least 8 of those meet the criteria for a migraine, you might be suffering from chronic migraines. Most people keep headache journals where they track both the frequency and severity of their headaches as a means of determining whether they truly have chronic migraine.

There are a few common circumstances and medical conditions called risk factors that have been linked to chronic migraine, such as:

• Being hungry or dehydrated
• Eating certain foods
• Drinking alcohol or caffeine
• Grinding your teeth (especially at night)
• Changes in the weather
• Menstruation
• Hormonal imbalances
• Vascular irregularities
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Traumatic injuries (especially to the head)
• Poor posture

Isolating and reducing the incidence of risk factors may help reduce the frequency of your migraines.

Since migraine has many possible underlying causes and triggers, it can be difficult to isolate causal factors without closely observing your personal daily activities and routines. For that reason, the diagnosis for chronic migraine and the close personal observation required are often performed by experienced medical professionals.

Chronic migraine rarely begin abruptly, there is usually a pattern whereby it worsen over time, starting with symptoms that grow in both frequency and intensity.

How do you live with chronic migraine?

It’s important to first determine whether you truly are suffering from chronic migraine. A common practice recommended for migraine sufferers is to begin by keeping a headache journal. Many people with chronic migraine don’t notice the smaller headaches in their daily lives and only take note of the most debilitating circumstances.

Tracking your daily activities, headaches, and the severity of your headaches can help establish both causal factors and serve as a record so you can have a frank discussion with a medical professional about the frequency and intensity of your migraine. It’s important that your doctor understand the impact that your attacks have on your routines so they can make an accurate diagnosis.

Most sufferers of chronic migraine find that both the frequency and severity of their attacls makes a significant impact on their lifestyles. Due to how debilitating migraine can be, sufferers of chronic migraine often report a drastically reduced quality of life, even impacting their personal relationships.

Chronic migraine can prompt abuse of over-the-counter headache and other pain management medications. If you find that you are frequently dosing yourself for attacks and increasingly reliant on pain management medications, it might be time to seek professional medical advice and consider alternative treatment options.

Chronic migraine can sometimes cause secondary illnesses as well. Constantly being unwell sometimes also causes complications for sufferers like anxiety, depression, and loss of sleep. Such side-effects can in turn worsen your headaches and should not be taken lightly.

If, however, you notice that your migraine attacks are sudden, extremely severe, and are accompanied by the following symptoms, you should seek immediate medical attention because it is possible that you have a more serious underlying condition:

• Severe nausea that might result in vomiting
• Sudden shortness of breath
• Weakness, dizziness, or vertigo
• Numbness
• Blurred or double vision, spots in your vision
• Personality changes, trouble talking, unexpected behavior, or confusion
• Seizures

It’s important to also note that severe headaches after trauma to the head should not be confused with migraine or headaches and require immediate emergency medical attention. Concussions and other brain injuries sometimes share symptoms with migraine.

Does chronic migraine ever go away?

Unfortunately, chronic migraine rarely recede on their own. Patients with chronic migraine report that without intervention, the most common pattern is for their pain to increase in both frequency and severity over time, especially if improperly managed or left unmanaged altogether.

It should be noted that many migraine sufferers, with the help of their doctors, are able to isolate certain triggers that either cause or worsen the effects of their migraine. It is possible, typically by working with a nutritionist, psychologist, or headache specialist, to isolate specific triggers and attempt to remove them from your lifestyle. Successfully isolating and removing a trigger can significantly improve the quality of life of a chronic migraine patient.

Sometimes high-stress and high-activity lifestyles can also worsen the symptoms of migraine attacks and making improvements to your daily routine or following a regular exercise regimen can help sufferers alleviate the pain from their headaches or even eliminate them entirely. Recall that migraines are often linked to poor sleep, poor posture, a lack of exercise, dietary problems, and other subtle causes.

It’s rare for drug treatment courses to cause total remission, but they can significantly improve the quality of life of sufferers. They can reduce the frequency of attacks as well as alleviate the worst of the symptoms.

What should chronic migraine sufferers do?

There are several options for migraine treatment that can help sufferers alleviate the symptoms and even decrease the frequency of migraines. Such methods are not foolproof and often treatment plans vary by individual. Coming up with an individual treatment plan with a medical professional is always recommended.

Acute Treatment

Over-the-counter pain medications and triptans (a class of drugs used specifically to treat migraine attacks and cluster headaches) can be effective at mitigating the effects of individual instances of migraine if taken right at the onset of the headache. Most triptans require a prescription, so it’s common for headache sufferers to begin with more accessible OTC pain relief.

It’s crucial not to become reliant on such medications and it is inadvisable to take medications to treat attacks this way more than twice a week. Improperly dosing yourself with pain medications can worsen the symptoms of a migraine attack and hasten your trajectory toward developing chronic migraine.

A doctor can prescribe other drugs to alleviate the impact of any side-effects incurred from your pain medications or from the headaches themselves.

Preventative

The most common long-term migraine and headache treatment plans involve preventative lifestyle and environmental changes. You’ll need to conduct an in-depth review of your environment and daily routines to establish your migraine patterns, possible triggers, as well as have a doctor review your medical history for other health conditions that might worsen your attacks or complicate your treatment plans.

There are also preventative drug therapies that migraine sufferers can attempt—again, with the guidance of a medical professional—such as beta-blockers, anti-epilepsy, and blood pressure medications that have been known to work for some patients. Taking a course of preventative medications usually begins with a low dose that your doctor will increase until you report effective results or you hit the maximum dosage, at which point you will likely be switched to a different course of preventatives.

Non-drug Options

It’s very common for doctors to begin treating headaches with non-drug options, such as lifestyle changes. Very often, sleep deprivation, stress, or even your dietary habits might be triggers for migraines and eliminating such sources of your headaches can be more effective than a long-term course of treatment that usually comes with undesirable side effects.

Conclusion

Treating chronic migraines usually requires a manifold approach. It begins with a deep analysis of your lifestyle and the pattern of occurrence of your headaches, where you assess whether or not you have chronic migraines and whether there are any specific triggers that might be worsening your symptoms.

In some cases, long-term treatment plans involve drug courses of migraine medications, but the treatments that most improve a sufferer’s quality of life are usually preventative or non-drug related. Many patients report significant improvements simply by making subtle, but impactful changes to their lifestyle like improving their sleep habits, modifying their diets or implementing regular exercise and relaxation regimens to help them de-stress.

If you need help getting started with a migraine management program, the Good Days Program can connect you with a lifestyle coach with expertise and experience in helping patients manage their pain. Get started today!