Behavioral strategies to relieve a migraine

When a migraine headache strikes, it can easily knock you off your feet. Aside from the throbbing pain, there may also be nausea, vomiting, or sensitivity to light and sound. The pain can be so severe that some of the patients that Dr. Joseph Mercola has seen have actually considered suicide as a reasonable solution!

What typically triggers a migraine?
It’s different for everyone but here is a breakdown of common migraine triggers:

• Changes in sleeping cycle: Both missing sleep and oversleeping can trigger a migraine.
• External stimuli: Bright lights, loud noises and strong smells (even pleasant ones) can trigger a migraine.
• Food: Many people experience migraines when they eat certain foods, especially wheat, dairy, sugar, artificial preservatives or chemical additives. Cured or processed meats, alcohol, aspartame, caffeine, and MSG are common culprits.
• Hormones: Some women experience migraines before or during their periods, during pregnancy or during menopause. Others may get migraines from hormonal medications like birth control pills or hormone replacement therapy.
• Physical exertion: Extremely intense exercise or even sex has been known to bring on migraines.
• Stress: Any kind of emotional trauma can trigger a migraine, even after the stress has passed.

Among the many other possible migraine triggers are weather and seasonal changes, skipping meals, altitude, dehydration, allergies, fluorescent lights … easily a number of things that you could encounter in any given day.

Headache medications: Causing more harm than good
According to Dr. .Mercola, a debilitating headache may be one instance where you could justify popping a pill that would give you instant relief. However, headache medications only work in half of the people half the time.   They also have intense side effects, including “medication overuse headache,” which often occurs when people take too much of a headache drug. Once you taper off the drug, you can also get rebound headaches that can be worse than the original!

Other side effects of migraines drugs include:  Ulcers and gastrointestinal bleeding; Stroke and heart attack; Muscle weakness; Dizziness; Nausea
Fortunately, there is a better way.

Quick, natural tips to relieve a migraine

Preventing migraines begins by avoiding the triggers. Most often this means eating healthy whole foods (avoiding most processed ones) and managing your stress effectively. Regular exercise will also help to keep migraines away by improving your response to stress along with the underlying inflammatory conditions that can trigger migraines.

Ideally, these are the things to focus on so that you can reduce your migraines altogether.

But if a migraine does strike and you need relief NOW, try Dr. Mercola’s ideas:

1. Stimulating your body’s natural painkilling ability. By putting pressure on a nerve just under your eyebrow, you can cause your pituitary gland to release painkilling endorphins immediately.

2. Using Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). Newcomers who use this simple process by themselves achieve relief 50 percent to 80 percent of the time and, in many cases, the relief is complete and permanent. More sophisticated uses by an EFT expert may be required for some migraine sufferers.

3. Green apple scent. One study found that the scent significantly relieved migraine pain. This may also work with other scents that you enjoy so consulting with an aroma therapist may be beneficial.
Other useful techniques include:

• Putting a cold compress on your forehead or behind your neck
• Massaging your ears and ear lobes
• Massaging the “crown” of your head — the ring of muscles that circle your head where a crown would sit

Some people even say that having a purring cat, which sends out low frequency vibrations, next to their head relieves migraine pain.

The point is that there are many, many non-drug options out there, and finding the one that works for you is likely just a matter of trial and error.

Resource Center:

www.mercola.com

Long term strategies

These approaches are suggested by the U.S. Headache Consortium.

1.  Biofeedback. Thermal (hand-warming) biofeedback combined with relaxation training and electromyography (EMG) feedback show promise as migraine therapies.

2. Cognitive-behavioral therapy.  This is a fancy name for a form of stress management.  This strategy teaches you how to recognize stress and minimize its effect.

3. Relaxation training. Relaxation training teaches you to control muscle tension visualization techniques.

4. Meditation. Meditation is the repetition of a sound or visualization which in turn leads to deep relaxation.

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