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What if your migraine isn't random at all but your body has been warning you hours or even days in advance and
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You just didn't know it
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Welcome to migraine heroes a podcast for people living with chronic migraines with years of pain
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Misunderstanding and lack of answers. I'm Deanne Ducarne
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I've helped more than a thousand people reduce the burden of migraines and feel more in control
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My mission in life to help a million people
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Each episode brings you grounded insight into what your body might be asking for and what can truly help
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Just to keep you fully supported.
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This podcast is educational for diagnosis or medication Always work with your doctor
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Now take a breath and let's dive in
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This episode you will learn how to recognize the subtle early warning signs your body sends before migraine attack
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Even the ones most people ignore what is actually happening inside your brain during the pre migraine phase
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So you can stop feeling blindsided and simple immediate actions
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You can take to potentially reduce intensity or even stop the migraine before it fully hits
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Stay with me till the end because at the end of this episode you will know exactly what to do the moment you feel the
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first whisper of a migraine coming on
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So let's start with something really important. You're actually not imagining this that strange fatigue that
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uncontrollable yawning that mood shift that craving it is not random
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and if you've ever thought it just came out of Nowhere, it's often because the early signals are subtle not absent
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From a neurological perspective migraines are now understood as a complex brain disorder involving multiple phases
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Not just the pain phase
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according to Gusby et al
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migraine include four stages the prodrome the aura the headache and the postdrome and
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The prodrome phase can begin up to 48 hours before the actual pain
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Now, let's break down the 10 key warning signs
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Identified in clinical studies and in my work
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the first one is fatigue or unusual tiredness a
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Study in cephalalgia found that over 70% of migraine sufferers report fatigue before the attack
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This is linked to the hypothalamic dysfunction the brain region regulating energy in sleep
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Now I have to say a lot of people who suffer from migraine disease are very often tired
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But still there's a subtle nuance here
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The second key warning sign can be a mood change irritability
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anxiety or low mood and
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That's because the hypothalamus and limbic system your emotional centers show altered activity before migraines
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Last week. I was on a call with a teacher and she was mentioning each time. I feel very irritable
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I pose and I think who do I have a migraine coming on the third one, which is quite ambiguous is neck stiffness
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Often mistaken as a trigger
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But actually an early symptom and research shows involvement of the trigeminal cervical complex
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Connecting neck and head pain pathways
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Indeed a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation here A lot of people will comment on you know
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I start to have pain in my neck and then I know it's coming
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it's going up up up all the way to my brain The fourth key warning sign are cravings especially sugar or carbs.
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So this is not a lack of discipline It's tied to dopamine fluctuations in the brain.
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That's according to the West and the East They see it a bit differently,
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but definitely a lot of sugar cravings just before the migraine attack. The fifth one is
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uncontrollable yawning
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Excessive yawning is a dopamine related symptom a surprisingly strong predictor of an incoming migraine
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And one way to think about this one is when you yawn
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You actually take a big big big intake of air and you push the diaphragm down
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Which is going to start to massage your liver system So even from an Eastern perspective a complete warning sign
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number six sensitivity to light or sound So even before the pain is going to begin your brain becomes hyper excitable
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particularly in the visual cortex
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number seven a certain difficulty concentrating sort of brain fog
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Cognitive slowing is linked to early changes in cortical processing and blood flow
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Frequent urination or thirst and it is going to reflect the involvement of the hypothalamus which regulates fluid balance
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key warning sign number nine
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visual disturbances about 25% of people experience aura links to cortical spreading depression a wave of
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Electrical activity across the brain and number ten increased sensitivity to smell what is called
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Osmophobia and this is tied to hyacinth activity in the olfactory cortex and limbic system
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So what's really happening modern science shows that migraine are not just vascular
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They are neurobiological events involving brain networks neurotransmitters and sensory processing systems
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The key player is the hypothalamus a landmark study in neurology shows that the hypothalamus becomes active
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Migraine pain begins essentially acting as the early alarm signal
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So those random symptoms, they're not so random
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They're your brain signaling a shift in internal balance from a traditional Chinese medicine perspective
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These early signs are not just symptoms
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They are messages messages of imbalance moving through the body's energy system
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And so in this framework migraines are often linked to disturbances in
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liver qi in blood flow and sometimes what is called Internal wind and I'm really aware that some of these names are weird
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But trust me, they make a lot of actual sense
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And so let's translate that the prodrome phase is a bit of an energy disturbance before blockage
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Before the pain is going to appear. There's often a subtle disruption a
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subtle disruption in your flow of energy
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Fatigue is going to relate to what is called qi deficiency or stagnation
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Irritability is going to be linked to liver qi rising if you've done some traditional Chinese medicine
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You know what I'm referring to next stiffness can be blockages in the gallbladder meridian food cravings can be a spleen imbalance
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Sensitivity to light sound can be liver yang rising or internal wind that is going on
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And so in Ayurveda a similar concept is going to exist imbalance in vata movement and pitta heat
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They're going to begin to accumulate before symptoms manifest. And so there's an announcement here
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something coming up
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Something that doesn't feel right
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So the deeper insights here is that Eastern medicine is going to emphasize that the symptom is going to appear before the disease fully manifests
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In other words, your body is going to whisper before it screams
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Those early migraine signals are your body's way of saying something's becoming unbalanced at just now
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Unlike Western medicine which often intervenes at the pain stage
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Eastern traditions focus heavily on early correction and this really resonates with me
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I want to share with you a story that happened to me in
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2019 before we even had a chat in Migraine Heroes app and we even had a nap all together
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back then everything was running through whatsapp and excel sheets very unsexy and I was manually tracking and
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Organizing all of that information. So then one day a client called me and she said something
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Incredible that had happened. She told me she felt a migraine coming on the tingling the paralysis starting in her arms
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So she prepared her usual routine closing the curtains
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Darkening her place warning her husband. She'd be out for two to three days and on her way to bed
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Her infusions and she did that just she was expecting not to eat or drink for a while
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So she routinely grabbed it
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But when she laid down something felt incredibly different and this was really a turning point for me the pain
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Never arrived and it took her a while to process it. Do you need to imagine her?
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She's in on her bed and she's without any pain and without any symptom nothing
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And so she's playing again and again everything that happened to make sense of it
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She's like, I'm pretty sure it was coming. It was coming. I would have not canceled my meetings
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I would have not called my husband
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I would have not shut the curtains and so
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What she did is she ended up picking up her phone and calling me and at the time when she called she was really
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Enthusiastic. I thought maybe we had just prevented the migraine by restoring balance and the migraine was just never gonna come
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altogether because
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She was well on her way of recovery
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But as more stories like hers came in and they were all saying the same thing. I realized something completely different
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I realized we actually had stopped that given attack altogether
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And then what I did after that is for people in my time zone, you need to really imagine me like a detective
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I said I could do this or try to help with that for people who were in Australia and New Zealand where I'm based and
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They could text me live when they were having an attack and if I was available
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I tried to ask a couple of questions and try to
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Stop the attack in its tracks
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And so these were people just listening to these first symptoms and the pain arguably sometimes had kicked in already
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Right and over the years because that worked so well that service became what is now called migraine now
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It's a button in the migraine heroes app
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tool designed for that exact moment when you feel it coming and you pose and you take one action and
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If it works partially you take that action again, which is something I've learned from people doing and
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they say, okay that infusion worked
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I took it second time a third time until I sort of hammered my migraine and then they were able to continue their day
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And I'm personally working on always making it stronger and more precise with every cycle of feedback
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So you see in my university years, I've had quite a lot of coding and so I'm behind that button literally
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You know when you ask you wonder yourself, what am I doing outside of the podcast or drug load namely working on that migraine now button
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I'm constantly asking what worked what didn't and
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Refining it based on each person's context even done factors like weather which I'm aspiring to add
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It's a massive project and commitment
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But when we're incredibly proud of and so it all really starts by picking up on these
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Few symptoms, okay
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These early signs is my mood changing do I feel unusual fatigue is my neck starting to feel stiff
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Do I have a food craving is that I'm just hungry or is that a food craving am I yearning because I'm a little bit
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Fatigued and is that a regular yearning or am I yearning uncontrollably, you know
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How is my sensitivity to light or sound do I struggle to concentrate? Am I suddenly first thirsty?
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do I start to have visual disturbance do I start to be more sensitive to smell around me and as
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You start and you pose and you stop taking the right course of action and listening really intensely here becomes
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Incredible from a bit of a more philosophical lens
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There is an old Chinese proverb that says to treat disease after it appears is like digging a well when you are
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Thirsty the problem face is your chance to act before the storm fully forms now
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You won't believe it
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But as I'm writing this podcast gives me an idea for the iteration of that button
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Like should I ask a question about this like I ask about the migraine pain
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But I realized that if I want to catch it even earlier
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I should actually ask about all of these symptoms because they relate to systems and then we have a sense of where
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What's the angle of this given migraine?
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So at the same time in these moments of the migraine now
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We want to be fast and not ask too many questions because it just needs to be fast
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But really as I'm writing this podcast is giving me an idea to enhance it further
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So my invitation today is instead of fighting the migraine, right that you have a button
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The approach is becoming listen
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Restore your flow. Now. What's my actionable advice of today? What can you do today at home?
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So next time you notice even one early sign fatigue irritability neck tension pose
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and do this So you create a 20 minute migraine interruption ritual you sit or lie down in a dark and quiet room
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You drink a large glass of warm water
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I really insist on the fact that it needs to be warm you gently massage the base of your skull in your temples you apply
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Warmth to your neck or cold your forehead as you as you see your body prefers
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You take a few slow deep breaths to make the energy go back down a lot of the migraine
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The energy goes really up and gets stuck. So by breathing the lung system
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We can attract it back down you inhale for four you exhale for six for five minutes without hyperventilation, right?
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So be gentle it may be simple, but you're doing something powerful. You're responding
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You're responding during that early phase when the brain is still adaptable
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Now some of you are in pain every single day
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and and I hope that as you start to be able to prevent them more and have
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many of the kinds of migraines and the families of migraines that you have that you're able to start to have these where you feel
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Sharp and free and therefore you can start to have distinct migraine and not be in a continuum of pain
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I want to really acknowledge. This is a very different situation and might very well decays
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Be very well decays or that you have continuum of pain and then you still get a migraine attack on top. We're coming we're committed
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What you're going through is awful
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We're on our way and
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Remember every small step you take moves you closer to freedom. You are powerful
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You are resilient and you're not alone. Keep rising migraine hero
