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What if your migraine isn't just pain, but your entire sense of balance, motion and reality
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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,
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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
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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 motion, even subtle movement like a car ride or scrolling
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your phone can trigger a full migraine cascade in your brain.
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What vestibular migraines really are and why they often go misunderstood or misdiagnosed
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Simple, grounding techniques you can use to calm your nervous system and reduce motion
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sensitivity starting today.
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Stay with me till the end, because at the end of this episode, you will understand why
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your brain reacts so strongly to motion and what you can do to gently retrain it.
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If you've ever felt like the world is spinning, tilting or just off, you know how unsettling
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It's not just a headache, it's a loss of orientation, a sense that your body and your
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environment are no longer in sync.
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That can feel scary, isolating and deeply exhausting.
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You might start to avoid travel, crowds or even simply daily movements because you no
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longer trust your balance system.
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From a Western perspective, vestibular migraine is a subtype of migraine that primarily affects
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the vestibular system, the part of your inner ear and brain responsible for balance,
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spatial orientation and motion perception.
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The vestibular system includes your inner ear structure, your brainstem and connection
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to your cerebellum and cortex.
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Its role is to integrate your motion, your head position, your visual input,
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your proprioception so your body awareness.
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When the system is disrupted, you might feel vertigo,
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dizziness, unsteadiness, nausea or visual disturbances.
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Vestibular migraine is considered one of the most common causes of current vertigo, affecting
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up to 1% of the population and yet it remains very underdiagnosed.
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Many patients report years of misdiagnosis, often labeled as anxiety or ear disorders
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and symptoms without headache, making it harder to identify as migraine related.
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In fact, I remember onboarding a woman last week and she did mention that, like she was
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having all of these vestibular symptoms until the diagnosis was posed many, many years later.
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So what triggers that motion sensitivity?
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Research suggests that people with migraines have hypersensitive sensory processing systems,
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like we've talked about in many podcasts.
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A key concept is that sensory mismatch.
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Your brain is constantly comparing what you see, what your inner ear senses and what
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When these don't match, for example, reading in a moving car, the brain becomes overloaded.
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In migraine brains, this mismatch is amplified, it's poorly filtered, it's more likely to
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trigger a neurological cascade.
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So studies in neurology suggest that dysfunction in the brain vestibulonuclei, altered activity
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in the thalamus, your sensory relay center, and increased excitability in your cortex.
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Additionally, the neurotransmitter serotonin plays a role in both migraine and motion sickness. And
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there's a bit of an overlap between vestibular pathways and pain pathways. And
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this explains why motion can trigger dizziness at first, but then migraine pain, or sometimes
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no pain at all, just complete disorientation and still be called migraine.
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So many people with vestibular migraines are especially sensitive to scrolling screens,
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supermarkets, these busy visual environments, flickering lights, moving patterns.
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And a study in neurology showed that migraine patients have increased visual dependence,
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meaning their brain relies too heavily on visual input, which can become overwhelming.
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Now, vestibular migraines are incredibly complex.
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And if you're dealing with them, you've probably been told at some point, it's just in your
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And I really want to be clear, it's not.
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What's happening is more like this.
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So imagine your brain is a snow globe.
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When everything is calm, all the signals, balance, vision, movement are clear and coordinated.
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But during a vestibular migraine, it's like that snow globe has been shaken.
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Your signals don't line up anymore.
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Your brain is getting mixed messages about where you are in space and how you're moving
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and what you're seeing.
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And that's why you can feel dizzy, sort of off balance, disconnected, even though nothing
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obvious shows up on a scan.
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And it's not because something is wrong with you, it's because your brain is temporarily
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processing information in a way that is a little too chaotic.
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And here's the important part.
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If exercises alone haven't worked for you, it doesn't mean you're failing.
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It often means there's a neurological and chemical component that needs to be addressed.
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And with the right approach, things can settle.
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Just like a snow globe does when you give it time and the right conditions.
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If we take an Eastern perspective for a minute, it's not just about the inner ear.
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It's about imbalance and flow of energy and internal stability.
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In traditional Chinese medicine, vestibular symptoms are often linked to liver winterizing.
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One relates to the liver.
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The liver in the system can govern the smooth flow and internal stability.
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And when it's disrupted, it's called internal wind rises.
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And this creates dizziness, vertigo, instabilities.
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This wind is not physical.
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It's represented as sudden, sort of unpredictable movement within the body.
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Just like how you feel when the world around you spins without warning.
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It can be attributed to phlegm and dampness, and so referring to blockages and heaviness
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And these symptoms is going to include brain fog, dizziness, nausea, a clouded feeling
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And in this view, your system is not clear or anchored.
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It's obstructed and unstable.
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And so it makes me think of the story of Cassie.
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So Cassie was complaining about vestibular migraines.
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And when we met, she was funny.
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She said, Oh, and I have met all of the people that wrote all of the books.
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So she had gone. She was living in the US. She is living in the US. And she had gone
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to meet all of the authors of the books on vestibular migraines
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and the best specialists in the country.
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And she said, even though these people are very nice and, you know, without any doubt,
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very competent, they haven't been able to solve my problem.
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And Cassie was complaining about liquids you could feel in her left ear.
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But everyone was telling her that she did not have any liquids, that none of the scans
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could pick those up.
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And this was just a sensation she was having.
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But she was saying, I swear, I have these liquids.
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Now, you know, if you look in the science, the science will say there are no liquids
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in Eastern medicine. Those are recognized as being a part of the issue for some people.
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Anyway, we went ahead and removed those liquids
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and she was just so happy.
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Now, Cassie had two little girl at the time when we did the broadcast.
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And now she's just been in touch this week and give birth to a third child, which was
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so happy and such a small miracle of life and happiness.
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Now, the third thing that can happen is a kidney deficiency.
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The kidneys are seen as the root of balance, grounding, inner strength.
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And when depleted, you may feel sort of very unsteady, easily overwhelmed, sensitive to
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So here, as you can see, there's just different nuances, different possibilities, different
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Even though it has one name, it has multiple different root causes.
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And it's the job to really identify, OK, where is this vestibular symptom coming from?
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So if we look at things from a bit of a more philosophical lens now, in Eastern traditions,
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balance is not static.
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It's dynamic stability.
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Motion becomes a problem when the body cannot adapt fluidly.
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The mind cannot anchor itself internally.
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There's a saying that when the wind moves outside, the wise root themselves within.
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So your symptoms may be your body asking for slowness, grounding, reconnection with internal
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And by no stretch of imagination, am I saying that's simple?
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It is part of some of the root causes and some of the phenomenon happening inside of
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Now, today, in your home, you can try this simple grounding reset practice.
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You sit comfortably and you place both feet flat on the ground.
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You close your eyes and take slow, steady breaths.
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Then gently, you turn your head side to side very, very, very slowly.
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And you keep your movements small and controlled.
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You focus on one stable point when you open your eyes.
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Do this for two, three minutes.
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It's going to help your brain rebuild trust between movement and safety, reduce sensory
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overload and calm your vestibular system.
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The key is not pushing, but sort of retraining very gently.
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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 not alone.
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Keep rising, migraine hero.
