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Ever noticed how different types of travel trigger completely different migraines in your body?
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Let's unpack how flights, road trips, and time zone changes might each be telling a different story.
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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.
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I'm Diane Ducarme. 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, this podcast is educational. For diagnosis or medication,
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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 air travel, road travel, and jet lag each trigger completely different migraine pathways in your body,
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how to identify your personal travel migraine type so you can prevent it before it starts, and
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simple targeted strategies you can use immediately to travel with more confidence and fewer attacks.
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Stay with me till the end because by the end of this episode you will understand exactly which type of travel migraine you experience and
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what your body is really asking for when it happens.
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Now, I love traveling. We're a traveling family.
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I've always loved to discover the world and that's how, by learning seven languages,
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I ended up discovering traditional Chinese medicine and learning Chinese and
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just discovering the world at large. And I started to discover
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the world of migraine, just like it was a continent inhabited by people that speak a certain language. So I
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love travel. And if you live with migraines, travel can feel like a complete gamble.
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You're preparing, you're planning, and yet something shifts. A headache creeps in and the fatigue is gonna hit
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so much harder than expected. You might even start associating travel with loss of control,
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which can take away the joy from something that should feel freeing. It's interesting,
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I met with one of our customers last week.
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Oh, she was so sweet, so sweet. And I may have mentioned this in the podcast before, but in the middle of the dinner
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she stands up and she says, you know that you've changed my life, right?
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And she gives me this massive hug and she says, you know, just travel.
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I used to not travel anymore and now I'm back on the road. That was quite special.
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Now from a Western medical perspective, travel-related migraines are not random.
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They are trigger clusters where multiple physiological stressors
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stack up together. And I want to break down those three types of travel migraine.
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So the first one relates to air travel. They're often referred to as airplane headaches,
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but they overlap strongly with migraine mechanisms.
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So air travel exposes you to reduced cabin pressure and sort of lower oxygen saturation and dry air. And
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studies published in the Journal of Headache and Pain describe airplane headaches as sharp, often unilateral pain, like sinus barotrauma and vascular changes.
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And so what's happening in your body is that the cabin pressure changes affect your sinus cavities and cranial blood vessels,
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that you have a sort of a mild hypoxia, so lower oxygen, that can trigger cortical spreading depression,
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a key migraine mechanism, and then dehydration, which is going to increase blood viscosity and inflammation.
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And a study in Cephalalgia found that up to 8% of air travelers experience airplane-related headaches,
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with higher prevalence, of course, in migraine sufferers.
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Now the hypothesis is that the trigeminal nerve, central in migraine, is activated by pressure imbalance and vascular dilation, triggering pain pathways.
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Now, as some of you may know, I'm Belgian of origin, my mother tongue is French, I live in New Zealand,
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and the first time I came to New Zealand, my children were three and one,
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so you need to imagine we're traveling, the three of us, and I'm trying to take care of them and sort of manage them through the flight.
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Traveling from Belgium to New Zealand is two long hauls of 12 hours, at a minimum, with a stopover,
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and I was alone with the kids. And
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because I was so busy, I didn't drink that much. Oh my god, in that second flight, I had this massive, massive pounding headache that I just couldn't get myself rid of.
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I had to ask the hair hostess to help me out with the children because I was in such pain.
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I learned my lesson very fast. Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate in an airplane.
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Now, the second type are road trips migraines. These migraines are often underestimated because they build sort of gradually.
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Road travel exposes you to continuous sensory input. You have motion, you have light flicker, you have posture strain, you have noise.
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And so research in neurology shows that migraine brains are hypersensitive to sensory stimuli, especially visual motion.
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And so what's happening in your body is that that flickering light and moving scenery overstimulates your visual cortex,
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that the prolonged sitting creates sort of neck and shoulder tension, activating the trigeminal cervical complex.
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And the motion can disrupt the vestibular system, leading to dizziness and migraine.
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And so the magnitude of the problem is that patients with migraine are significantly more likely to experience motion sensitivity, with up to 50% reporting vestibular symptoms.
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The hypothesis is that this type of migraine is driven by sensory processing overload, where the brain struggles to filter incoming signal.
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It's interesting when I ask people, how did you start to have migraines?
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So by developing the Migraine Heroes app, we were, you know, I've been for six years meeting with thousands of people
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and some would say, yeah, it started when I was a kid, you know, in the car I'd get motion sickness.
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And we thought this was it. Yeah, so not always, just anecdotal in some people.
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Now, the third type is quite vicious. It's jet lag migraines. It's often the most delayed and sort of confusing type.
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Jet lag is going to disrupt your circadian rhythms, your internal clock, regulating sleep, hormones, and metabolism.
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A study in the Lancet Neurology highlights how migraines are strongly linked with hypothalamic dysfunction,
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so your brain's timekeeper. So what's happening in your body is that the melatonin production is disrupted,
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your cortisol rhythm becomes more irregular, and sleep deprivation lowers the migraine threshold.
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And so what's the magnitude of the problem is sleep disturbances are reported in up to 70% of migraine patients.
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The hypothesis is that your hypothalamus becomes dysregulated, triggering migraine through neurotransmitter imbalance and inflammation.
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And so jet lag and not living according to circadian rhythms is really a trigger for migraines.
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There's a few podcasts I've done on this topic, so important to live, you know, sort of on time, on your biological clock.
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So from an Eastern perspective, travel is not just going to move your body, it's going to disrupt your internal harmony.
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In traditional time we've seen, migraines are seen as a disturbance of your flow of energy, of your flow of qi and blood, involving your liver, your spleen, and etc.
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If we think of air travel, flying is going to expose you to dry air and sort of upward movement, which in Chinese medicine can cause liver yang rising migraines.
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The pressure change resembles internal wind agitation, the dry cabin is going to deplete your yin fluids, leading to headache and irritability.
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That's what I had when I flew to New Zealand. There's a saying, when yin is weak, yang rises unchecked.
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This explains why you may feel pressure in your head, irritability, or throbbing pain after flying.
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From a road travel perspective, we're talking about movement and movement creating external wind.
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So wind means when things go not to the right place. That's a major cause of headaches in traditional Chinese medicine.
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That constant motion disturbs the liver's role in the smooth flow of qi, of energy, and sitting too long is going to lead to stagnation, especially in the neck and in the shoulders. And
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so this is going to align with the Western idea of tension and sensory overload.
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In Ayurveda, it's going to resemble an aggravation of vatadosha, the energy of movement.
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Symptoms are going to include that sensitivity to light, anxiety, restlessness, pulsating or shifting pain.
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Now third, when we look at the jet lag, it's your disruption of your body clock.
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In traditional Chinese medicine, each organ follows a 24-hour clock.
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We get to that in Western science more and more.
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In traditional Chinese medicine, always being there, always will be there.
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Travel across time zone is going to disrupt that natural rhythm.
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So your heart and your shin becomes unsettled,
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you get to poor sleep, your liver cannot regulate the flow properly, you get to migraines.
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In Ayurveda, again, it's going to reflect the vatai balance, but also ajna's depletion, your core vitality.
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And there's a bit of a deeper philosophy here
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on health. It's not just a balance, it's rhythm.
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When your rhythm breaks, your body speaks
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and sometimes it speaks through migraines.
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Now, what can you do today at home or just before your next trip?
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You need to match your strategy to your travel type.
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If you fly, hydrate deeply.
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I would really recommend here having a warm bottle to be able to have warm water inside the flight.
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It's just so much nicer.
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You can have it even better with a slice of lemon.
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And practice slow nasal breathing to support oxygen flow.
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If you travel by road, wear some glasses,
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take breaks every 60 to 90 minutes,
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and gently stretch your neck.
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If you cross time zones, start shifting your sleep and light exposure two to three days before departure.
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The key is simple.
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Don't treat all travel migraine the same.
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Your body isn't experiencing the same trigger.
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And remember, every small step you take moves you closer to freedom.
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You are powerful, you're resilient, and you're not alone.
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Keep rising, Migraine Hero.
