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Ever felt like your feelings hurt?
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Like a relationship or an emotion around a relationship is giving you a headache?
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Let's unpeel how emotions can be hidden triggers.
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Migraine Heroes is a podcast for chronic migraine sufferers who've seen countless
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doctors with no results.
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Learn how to reduce your migraine attacks without endless medications or constant sacrifices.
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Hello, I'm Diane Ducard and I've helped over 500 people break free from migraine,
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even after suffering for up to 60 years.
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My mission in life?
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To bring this relief to a million people using a unique blend of Eastern medicine and Western
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In this episode, you will learn how both Eastern medicine and Western science explain the emotional
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migraine connection.
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How to define an unhealthy migraine triggering relationship.
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And the three most negative emotions in relationships that will literally trigger migraines.
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Now stay tuned till the end.
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I will give you a small bonus advice on how to solve for this effectively.
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In Eastern medicine, emotions have long been seen as integral to health.
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Anger, resentment, anxiety, grief, fear, overthinking are not just fleeting feelings,
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but they are vital forces that shape the body's inner balance.
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In traditional Chinese medicine, for example, each specific emotion will link to a specific
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In the same way you have a gut-brain axis, you have an emotion-to-gut axis.
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In modern Chinese medicine, the heart and the body are one, and when a thought lingers
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in your mind, it echoes through your organs.
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In the West, for centuries, we separated the mind from the body.
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That came from a French philosopher and mathematician called Descartes, who proposed the mind-body
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dualism theory, called in French, la théorie du dualisme corps-esprit.
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And so the whole idea was that the mind and body were described as separate substances,
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the mind being immaterial and the body a physical machine.
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Now fast forward to today, science is finally catching up.
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What Eastern wisdom intuited, modern neuroscience is now measuring.
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We've discovered that trauma isn't just something you remember, it's something your body holds
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Physically, studies show that people who've experienced trauma in their childhood have
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measurable alteration in their vagus nerve, the mass regulator of rest, digestion and
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Here I mean that you can see the trauma in the physical body.
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It is not immaterial, it is material, visible to the naked eye.
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And as you now know, the vagus nerve winds from your brainstem through your chest and
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your gut, connecting thoughts, feelings and physical symptoms in a tangible, trackable
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So it is a big find and it's a big deal.
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Now Western medicine excels at identifying extremes, brain scans, biomarkers, breakdowns,
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but only recently have we begun to see that everyday emotions like chronic stress, subtle
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tension, unspoken grief, can also leave a lasting mark on your body.
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The emotional undercurrent of our relationships, especially toxic ones, may be the most underestimated
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triggers for chronic conditions like migraines, and that is a massive shift.
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Now let's go into unhealthy relationships for a minute.
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An unhealthy relationship is one where the connection constantly drains, it confuses
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or it diminishes you rather than supports, energizes or uplifts you.
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It's marked by patterns of disrespect, control, criticism or emotional neglect.
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You might feel anxious, unsafe, angry, overthinking or like you're constantly walking on eggshells.
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Communication becomes hurtful or non-existent, boundaries are ignored and your sense of self
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In short, in an unhealthy relationship, it's going to make you feel less like yourself,
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So note that here, I'm going to go from complete neglect and abuse all the way to daily small
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challenges in relationships.
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I'm not going to pose a judgment or a scale on the magnitude of the problem of the relationship,
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but on the magnitude of the damage, the physical damage it is creating inside of you and trying
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to teach you where that damage is created.
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I'm also in this podcast going to refer to you to all your relationships, the ones with
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your parents, with your siblings, with your children, friends, colleagues, boss, neighbors
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and even favorite, disliked or liked politicians, the people in your life that makes your feelings
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The first time I discovered this was five years ago, it was with one of my very first
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We're going to call her Amelia.
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Amelia was based in New Zealand and we had worked together.
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She had a lot of temple migraines, left and right, top of the head migraines.
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She had a lot of migraines before her menstruation and we solved for all of that.
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I was super proud, honestly.
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And in her tracker, I could see that the intensity and the frequency of her migraines were decreasing.
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But sometimes out of the blue, the migraine will pop up again.
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So I would coach her and explain her how to get rid of it.
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And then one day I asked to sit down with her and I said, look, Amelia, I can always
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explain to you how the migraine comes and how to solve for it and how to abort it.
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But I have a question, like for all people I work with currently, which was not many
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at the time, I can explain why the migraine happened in the first place, how it was triggered.
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But for you, it's almost like there's a phantom trigger, you know, something invisible.
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And so she explained to me that her first onset of migraine was at five years old, which
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But what I didn't know was that it had coincided with a time when she had been physically and
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sexually abused by a man.
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And she explained that each time she was thinking of him, of that situation, and she was thinking
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of suing him and rising to the occasion to defend a woman and defend herself, she would
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have these massive migraines.
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And that's when, for the first time, I understood how important emotions are in the context
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And that's why I want to teach that to you today.
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Now, I would like to share with you the three emotions in relationships that, according
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to me, create the most damage in migraine management.
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I'm going to go from the least surprising to the most surprising.
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The first one, least surprising, is how much stress and anxiety can be caused by an unhealthy
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In traditional Chinese medicine, the kidneys are your deepest energy reserves.
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They store your jing, your essence, your ovarian reserve.
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They govern your vitality and they anchor your nervous system.
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Chronic stress, particularly from unhealthy or toxic relationships, slowly depletes this
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And when you're constantly under stress, your body stays in a fright, flight, or fight mode,
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which traditional Chinese medicine is going to call a kidney deficiency.
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Now, it can be a kidney yin deficiency, a kidney qi deficiency, a kidney yang deficiency.
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But essentially, you're going to feel exhausted, but wired.
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You're going to feel anxious, but numb.
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And this internal depletion is going to lead to symptoms like fatigue, insomnia, lower
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back pain, hormonal imbalance, premature hair loss, or hair gray, behind the head migraines,
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neck tension, and migraines at the time of relation.
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The migraines will often feel deep, draining, or tied to hormonal shifts or burnout, rather
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than feel explosive.
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And why the unhealthy relationships are especially harmful is because they're going to create
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a long-term emotional instability, fear, insecurity, rejection, which directly taxes the kidney,
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the organ system associated with fear and survival in traditional Chinese medicine.
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And so over time, this kind of emotional wear and tear is going to weaken your core vitality,
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making you more sensitive to noise when having a migraine, more sensitive to smell when having
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Now, from a Western lens, chronic relationship stress is going to dysregulate your hypothalamic
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pituitary adrenal axis, also called the HPA axis, which can blunt your ability to recover
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from stress and increase what is called your allostatic load.
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That's going to mean that you're always just a little too close to the edge.
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Your nervous system loses its resilience, and migraines become more frequent and harder
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The challenge is the following.
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The emotion to gut-brain axis is biodirectional, and that's a big find.
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So that means that the more you feel stressed, the more it will make your kidney system weak.
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And the more your kidney system is weak, the more you're likely going to be stressed.
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And so that's going to start from a relationship that is going to cause stress, to giving you
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migraines, to giving you the fear of a migraine causing the next migraine.
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Now, the second emotion in relationship that can cause migraine is anger.
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In traditional transmission, anger is the emotion linked to the liver system.
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The liver system is the most hyper-connected system to the brain, and the liver's role
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is going to go beyond its physical function.
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It's responsible for the smooth flow of qi throughout the body.
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When anger is expressed explosively or repressed for long periods, it's going to disrupt this
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flow causing what's known as the liver-qi stagnation.
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When anger is expressed violently, the qi can rise too quickly.
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That's what traditional transmission is going to call liver yang rising migraines.
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The surge can lead to symptoms like on the temple migraines, left and right temple, migraines
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on top of the head, migraines across the eyebrows.
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It's like a pressure cooker letting off steam all at once, often resulting in intense, bounding
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When anger is repressed or unexpressed, the qi is getting stuck.
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It doesn't move freely.
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This can lead to chronic tension in the neck, shoulders and jaw, digestive issues or hormonal
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Over time, this internal buildup creates migraines that feel tight, constricted or cyclical,
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often worsened by stress or PMS, so in the days leading up to your menstruation.
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From a Western standpoint, we know that the emotional suppression activates the stress
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response, increasing cortisol and inflammatory markers.
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The vagus nerve, which plays a role in calming the system, is often underactive in people
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with chronic emotional tension, contributing to migraines.
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Now the challenge is the following.
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This emotion to gut axis is, as you now know, bidirectional.
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So the more I'm going to feel angry, the more it will make my liver stagnant and intoxicated.
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And the more my liver is intoxicated, the more I'm going to feel angry.
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And this is where, according to me, a higher level of medication can also alter your emotion
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and how they come about.
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Now, the third emotion in relationship that can cause migraine is overthinking.
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Having your mind constantly active.
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In traditional Chinese medicine, the spleen is responsible for digestion.
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Not just of food, but of thoughts and of emotions.
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It is the organ that transforms nutrients into energy and blood.
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When your mind is constantly active, worrying, planning, analyzing and replaying conversations,
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you overload the spleen's function.
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This is called a spleen qi deficiency or overthinking injuring the spleen.
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When you overthink, your mental energy is stuck in a loop and the spleen struggles to
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transform and transport qi effectively.
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This can lead to forehead migraines, brain fog, bloating, fatigue after meals.
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You may also notice sugar cravings or digestive imbalances or more runny stools as the spleen
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Now, why this matters for migraines?
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The spleen is also the root of blood production in traditional Chinese medicine.
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If overthinking depletes your spleen, it leads to qi and blood deficiency, especially in
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The result, your brain doesn't get nourished properly and you're more vulnerable to forehead
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migraines and then migraines all over the head and after menstruation, especially when
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paired with fatigue or poor sleep.
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Now in practice, overthinking of all of what I see in my work causes another imbalance
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that I see in a lot of people suffering from migraine.
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It is the fact that your blood is going to start to circulate from your brain back to
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your heart, back to your brain, back to your heart, and it's going to form an intense short
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loop of blood flow that no longer goes in your digestive system.
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It's sometimes called a heart fire or agitated spirit.
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That's going to cause very intense migraine.
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And when I see that in your Migraine Heroes app, you know, through the Tongue Tracker
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and the Daily Tracker, Dulce, Julie, and I, we intervene immediately and pop a few additional
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foods in your app to swiftly overcome this.
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And I have to say it does the job and it's really, really important, otherwise it cascades
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From a Western perspective, chronic cognitive stress is going to increase the mental load
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activating the sympathetic nervous system and disrupting the gut brain communication.
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And this imbalance is going to reduce your nervous system's ability to rest and digest,
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creating the perfect environment for migraines.
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Now, bonus advice.
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How do you get out of this as effectively as possible?
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You need to start creating space.
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You need to take gentle, gentle measures, very discreet measures for distance.
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You need to not try to cut ties, not try to stop the rapport in the relationship,
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but loosen it a little bit unseen so that they're no longer hurting you or no longer
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You need to let yourself slowly drift toward the people who make you feel grounded, seen,
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Your nervous system and your brain will thank you.
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And remember, every small step you take moves you closer to freedom.
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You are powerful, you are resilient, and you are never alone.
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Keep rising, migraine hero.
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Found this episode helpful?
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