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What if the sound of a blender, your child's voice, traffic, or even someone unloading
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the dishwasher was not just noise, but your nervous system waving a red flag before a
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Welcome to Migraine Heroes, a podcast for people living with chronic migraines with
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years of pain, misunderstanding, and lack of answers.
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I'm Diane Ducarme, I've helped more than a thousand people reduce the burden of migraines
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and feel more in control.
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My mission in life?
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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
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Just to keep you fully supported, this podcast is educational.
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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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In this episode, you will learn why everyday sounds can feel painfully intense when you
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live with migraine, and why this is not you being dramatic, fragile, or difficult.
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How the migraine brain processes sound differently according to the West, especially when the
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nervous system is already sensitized or moving towards an attack.
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And how the East views hearing, sounds tolerance, and deep preserves of the body deeply connected.
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Stay with me till the end, because by the end of this episode, you will have more understanding
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of your hearing system and how it relates to your migraine episodes.
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If you've ever felt your whole body tense when someone slams the door, when dishes clatter
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in the sink, when a dog barks, when a motorcycle passes, or when several people speak at once,
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So at Migraine Heroes, we occasionally take care of teachers or nurses that work in emergency
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departments and noises can be very intense for them professionally.
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For many people with migraine, sound does not simply enter the ears.
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It enters the whole nervous system.
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It can feel sharp, and it can feel invasive, agitating, even threatening.
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And then comes the guilt.
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Why can everyone handle this?
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Why am I so reactive?
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Why do I need silence so badly?
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But your body's not feeling you.
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It's maybe trying to protect you.
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So in Western medicine, your sound sensitivity in migraine is often called phonophobia.
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It does not necessarily mean fear of sound in the emotional sense.
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In migraine, it usually means sound intolerance, sound discomfort, or sound-triggered worsening
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And the international classification of headache disorders includes sensitivity to sound along
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with sensitivity to light as one of the associated features used in migraine diagnosis.
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So when a person says, noise gives me a migraine, science does not dismiss that as a preference
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It recognizes that migraine is not just a headache.
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It doesn't mean people will, but science does, just to keep your sanity.
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So one important study on this topic was published in Cephalalgia, and the article was titled
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Ictal and Interictal Phonophobia in Migraine, a Quantitative Controlled Study.
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And it looked at sound sensitivity during migraine attacks and between attacks.
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And the researchers highlighted that phonophobia was common in migraine, yet it is often measured
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only by asking patients how sound feels to them.
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And so their work helped show that sound discomfort can be present not only during the attack
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itself, but also in the spaces between attacks, which many patients know deeply.
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So even on a better day, the nervous system may still feel easily overwhelmed.
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Another study earlier called Phonophobia in Migraine, which was also published in Cephalalgia,
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found that people with certain migraine features showed increased sensitivity to sound.
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And the authors also suggested that phonophobia and photophobia, so sensitivity to light,
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may share a related underlying mechanism in migraine.
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So in simple terms, the same migraine brain that struggles with bright light may also
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struggle with loud or sharp sound, but not always.
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So now let's go one layer deeper.
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Why would sound become a trigger?
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So one explanation is sensory amplification.
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In a healthy, calm nervous system, the brain filters sensory information all day long.
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It decides what is important and what can be ignored.
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The hum of a refrigerator, the traffic outside, a phone notification, the footsteps upstairs.
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Most of these sounds are filtered into the background.
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But in migraine, especially in chronic migraine, this filtering system can become less efficient.
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The brain may treat ordinary signals as unusually important.
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This is where the thalamus becomes very interesting.
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So the thalamus is often described as a sensory relay station.
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It helps us regulate incoming sensory information before that information reaches higher brain
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In migraine, research has pointed to altered processing across networks involving the thalamus,
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brainstem, hypothalamus, and cortex.
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And these networks influence how the brain evaluates light, sound, pain, and internal
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A review in study literature around migraine sensory symptoms consistently shows that people
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with migraine often experience multiple sensitivities together.
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Light sensitivity, sound sensitivity, smell sensitivity, and touch sensitivity.
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And we've done podcasts on all of these as they're quite different one from another.
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And a cross-sectional study in the Journal of Headache and Pain investigated sensory
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hypersensitivities in people with migraine and found that symptoms such as photophobia,
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phonophobia, and osmophobia are common in clinically very meaningful.
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And so these sensitivities are associated with migraine burden and disability.
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It's important because it tells us something compassionate and practical.
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Sound sensitivity is real and it's not isolated.
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It often belongs to a bigger pattern of nervous system sensitivity.
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Now let's talk about the word sensitization.
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So sensitization means the nervous system becomes more reactive over time.
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So imagine a bit of a smoke alarm.
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A healthy smoke alarm goes off when there is real smoke, but a sensitized smoke alarm
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may go off when you make a toast.
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The alarm is not broken in a random way.
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It just is set too sensitively.
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Now note that this view of the world is a little static in my opinion.
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So if you reflect on your youth, you may not have been so sensitive to sound, light or
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smell as you are today.
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So something became more sensitive.
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Then in Western medical terms, we take sort of a snapshot, but in the East, we look at
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the progression towards and then away from that sensitivity.
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I just want to mention that as a parenthesis, there's really in the West an idea of diagnostic
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as something static that defines you and in the East, as a momentary attribute.
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So in Western terms, central sensitization is going to refer to increased responsiveness
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in the central nervous system to input that would normally be tolerable.
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So your brain, I really want to insist, is not being dramatic.
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It's doing too much, too fast, with too little buffer.
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And I like the word buffer here because buffer is something that can be increased.
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You can increase buffer.
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You can re-increase the threshold before pain arrives.
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And you have to trust me on this.
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I'm really conscious you're probably listening to all of these podcasts.
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And the goal of these is really for you to understand, to start to develop that intelligence
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of why is my brain in so much pain so frequently and trying to start to make sense of it.
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And I really hope you find in all of these podcasts what really speaks to you in terms
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of your migraine experience, what symptoms relate to your experience, what time of the
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month, what weather patterns, etc.
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And I really encourage you to search these podcasts by terms that correspond to you.
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I've been working with people who suffer from migraine with the sole intent to give them
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less frequency and less intensity of pain, more control, tools to work with, and a life
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full of colors and regained joy. Just being themselves again. Just such a drastic change
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in people and their personality.
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It's something that makes me absolutely joyful and wake up every day for.
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Your buffer is not static.
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If you lost it over the years, can you build it back?
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I encourage you to think about that question because in that question is hope and understanding.
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So I'll repeat. Your buffer is not static.
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If you lost it over the years, can you build it back?
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Do you believe you can?
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Now let's go east.
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From a traditional Chinese medicine perspective, sound sensitivity is not viewed as an ear
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It's understood through the balance of the whole person, your nervous system, but also
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your organs, your emotions, the circulation of your energy, the quality of your rest,
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the state of your blood, and the relationship between the inner and the outer worlds.
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So in traditional Chinese medicine, migraine is often connected with patterns and you're
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going to learn about the liver, liver cheese stagnation, liver yam rising, and therefore
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the gallbladder, the kidney system, the stomach spin system, your blood, your Qi, your energy.
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Sometimes you're going to hear words such as wind, heat, flake, more stagnation.
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And these words do not mean exact same thing as organs in Western anatomy.
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They're a functional system.
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They describe patterns of movement, of nourishment, of regulation, of flow.
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Now, sound sensitivity often suggests that the system is struggling to regulate stimulation.
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The outside world feels too strong because the inside world does not feel anchored enough.
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So one classic idea in traditional Chinese medicine is that the kidneys open the ears,
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the kidney system.
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So this means that hearing, sound tolerance, and the deep preserves of the body are connected.
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When someone is depleted after years of pain, after years of poor sleep, after years of
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stress, overwork, hormonal strain, or emotional exhaustion, sound may feel more invasive.
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The body has less root, less buffer, less quiet inside.
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So in traditional Chinese medicine, we might also look at the liver system and the liver
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is associated with the smooth flow of Qi, of emotional regulation, sensitivity to constraint.
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And so when liver Qi stagnates, a person may feel tense, may feel irritable, tight in the
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neck and shoulders, sensitive to stress and reactive to the environment.
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And when that stagnation transforms into heat or rising yang, symptoms may move upward.
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Headache, pressure, dizziness, irritability, red eyes, light sensitivity, sound sensitivity.
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In this view, noise does not merely enter the ear.
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Noise agitates the rising movement in the body.
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It adds force to a system that is already moving upward too intensely.
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So you may recognize this feeling.
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So you're already tired. Your neck is tight. Your jaw is clenched. Your thoughts are racing.
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Then someone starts playing loud music or the children begin shouting or a chair scrapes
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across the floor. And suddenly the sound feels like it shoots straight into your head.
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Traditional Chinese medicine would say the system needs descending, grounding, cooling,
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So that tradition asks a gentle question.
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What is the quality of the body right now?
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This is why Eastern medicine rarely says just avoid the noise.
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It asks how to build a body that can meet the world with more stability, with more buffer.
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From this perspective, silence is not only the absence of noise.
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Silence is a medicine.
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But silence is not meant to become isolation.
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Silence is meant to restore your center so you can return to life with more steadiness.
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You know, I have so many people I meet and they make their lives smaller.
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They stop drinking. They stop socializing. They stop working.
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And they make all of that life smaller so that they have less stimuli.
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The idea is not to reduce life.
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The idea is to expand. It's to increase the tolerance and the buffer for it. So
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when sound hurts, the invitation is not to blame yourself.
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The invitation is to listen more and more deeply.
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Maybe your body is saying, I'm overloaded.
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I need nourishment.
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I need fewer competing inputs.
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I need to feel safe.
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And this is an important shift.
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Instead of seeing yourself as too sensitive, you begin to see yourself as highly informative.
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Your body gives early signal.
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Your body speaks before the migraine shouts.
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The work is learning to hear those signals with compassion.
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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're not alone.
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Keep rising. Migraine hero.
