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Have you ever wondered why, when you live with migraines, every light feels brighter,
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every sound feels sharper, and even other people's moods can suddenly feel overwhelming?
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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?
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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 your brain becomes constantly on alert when you live
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with chronic migraines, and why this is not just being sensitive, how overstimulation
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changes your nervous system over time, making you hyper-aware of noise, stress, smells,
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emotions, and even tiny body sensations, and what you can start doing today to calm this
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hyper-vigilance and help your brain feel safe again.
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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 hypersensitivity is not weakness.
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It's actually your nervous system trying to protect you.
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If you live with migraines, chances are you know this feeling intimately.
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You walk into a room and you instantly notice the flickering light that no one else sees.
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I'm thinking now of the many nurses that we serve and how they work in emergency rooms
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with really harsh light.
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But you might also hear the hum of the refrigerator, or you feel tension in someone's voice before
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they even say anything.
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Your body reacts to perfume, to weather shifts, to skipped meals, to crowded space, or emotional
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tension before anyone else notices them.
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And after years of this, many migraine sufferers start asking themselves, why am I like this?
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Why can't I just ignore things like everyone else does?
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But the truth is, your nervous system has likely been trained to be in survival mode.
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I remember discussing with this woman, it was an incredible story.
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She was explaining, I can be at the red light, and I'm walking, and next to me is a couple.
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And the couple is super tense,
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they might have an argument, and they may explicitly argue or implicitly feel tense,
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but regardless, I'm going to feel all of their argumentation inside my body.
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I feel just so, so, so sensitive, hypersensitive to things around me, to people around me.
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And it is quite an extreme example, but it's one that I've heard in many different versions
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and this is what I'm talking about here.
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I want to really explain those concepts to you from a Western and Eastern perspective.
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So let's go West first.
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From a neurological perspective, migraine is, as you know, not just a headache,
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we know migraine is a complex neurological phenomenon involving sensory processing, inflammation,
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pain signaling, and nervous system excitability.
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And researchers have found that migraine brains process sensory information differently, even
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There was a landmark study published in The Lancet Neurology that described migraine as
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a disorder of sensory threshold regulation, meaning that the brain has difficulty filtering
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incoming stimulation,
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and this is called the sensory gating.
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It allows you to tune out background noise and ignore irrelevant, not useful sensations.
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But in migraine sufferers, this filtering system can become impaired,
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and this is going to mean that sounds feel louder, lights feel harsher, smells become
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a lot more intrusive, emotions, even of others, feel completely amplified, and bodily sensations
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become impossible to ignore.
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There was a study published in Brain, in the journal Brain, showing that migraine patients
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demonstrate abnormal cortical excitability, especially in visual and sensory areas of
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In simple words, the migraine brain stays more reactive, more alert, and less able to
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And this hyper-awareness is strongly linked to the concept of central sensitization.
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The central sensitization happens when the nervous system becomes increasingly reactive
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The brain essentially learns danger.
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And the more frequently pain pathways fire, the more easily they activate in the future.
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So imagine a bit of a smoke detector that became so sensitive, it goes off from a burnt
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toast to steam or even warm air. And
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that is often what happens in chronic migraine.
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And this does not only affect pain.
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Over time, the nervous system can become sensitized to sensory inputs, emotional stress, hormonal
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shifts, sleep changes, social overwhelm, and even anticipation itself.
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And I have to say that when we work on profiles, look, some people arrive and they finish super
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And when they go, I can, as a person for the almost seven years I've been working
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on this, like can't remember even their first name.
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I just remember the story, I remember the speed, but I don't really remember the person
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because we spent so little time together
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now with the automated plan inside the app. And we look forward to really helping those
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come and go, come and graduate very fast from our systems.
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But then we also have people who have gone through years, decades of pain, and the pain
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processing is really, really entrenched and amplified,
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and it takes a lot of reassurance, a lot of changes inside the gut brain axis, a lot of
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over and over and over again so that the brain is rewired towards absence of pain,
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which in itself is sometimes can be a much longer process. Research
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from Nature Reviews Neurology have described migraine as a disorder.
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I don't like the word disorder, but we're going to work with that, involving altered
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connectivity between, of course, your brainstem, limbic system, and sensory cortices.
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And these are areas that are involved in your threat detection and your emotional processing
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and your arousal and your environmental scanning.
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And so, in other words, your brain becomes excellent at detecting potential threats.
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But here's the exhausting part.
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When the brain stays in this state too long, it loses its ability to distinguish between
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true danger and normal life.
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This is why many migraine sufferers become hyper aware, not only physically, but also
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And so you may notice changes in people's tone, conflict in the room, subtle tension,
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just like I mentioned earlier in my story with the woman at the red lights, overstimulation
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in social settings, or emotional exhaustion after interacting with certain people.
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And this is not imaginary.
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The autonomic nervous system, especially the sympathetic fight or flight branch, often
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becomes dysregulated in chronic migraine sufferers.
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And so that's what we do day to day to reprogram that.
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Studies published in Cephalalgia have shown altered autonomic nervous system responses
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in migraine patients, including heightened stress reactivity and impaired recovery after
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The body becomes primed to anticipate overload.
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And then something important happens psychologically.
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You begin monitoring yourself constantly.
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Am I getting a migraine?
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Was that food a trigger?
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Did I sleep enough?
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Is the light too strong?
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Is it stress building?
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This creates a loop of hypervigilance.
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Now please hear this carefully.
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Like hyper awareness is not a weakness.
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Your body has spent years trying to protect you from pain. The
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problem is that survival mode was never meant to become a permanent state.
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And I know it may sound harsh to hear some of this, but sometimes understanding, and
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I find personally, most of the time, understanding is the first step towards feeling better,
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being better, living better.
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Now let's go east.
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In traditional Chinese medicine, hypervigilance would not usually be seen as a fixed personality
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trait or a permanent psychological identity.
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It would be understood as a body, a nervous system that have become stuck in a prolonged
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state of guarding, of bracing, scanning and dissipating.
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And importantly, traditional Chinese medicine would generally say the states can change.
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The body is not who you are.
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Your body is responding to situations.
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Traditional Chinese medicine tends to view human beings less as machines with broken
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parts and more as a living ecosystem that constantly adapts to pressure, to depletion,
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to environment, to rhythm, emotion, nourishment and recovery.
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And in that framework, hypervigilance is often interpreted as a system that no longer
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feels safe enough to soften.
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And so the body remains alert even when the danger has passed.
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The muscles stay slightly contracted,
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sleep becomes lighter,
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sounds feel sharper,
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and digestion tightens.
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Nervous system behaves as though something still needs monitoring.
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One of the closest traditional Chinese medicine pattern to chronic hypervigilance, a state
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of tension and overload, which leads to depleted reserves.
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Traditionally, it's going to be linked to what is called a liver cheese stagnation
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or a liver yang or liver fire and the depleted reserves to a kidney deficiency.
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And in traditional Chinese medicine, the liver system is responsible for that smooth
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flow of emotion, of tension, of circulation, of energy, of adaptability.
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And when that flow becomes constrained for really long periods through stress, depression, pleasure,
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resentment, overwork or overstimulation, sometimes unresolved fear, sometimes perfectionism
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or constant responsibility, the body begins to lose flexibility.
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The system starts gripping instead of flowing.
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And over time, the person may become physiologically prepared all the time.
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Not because they are weak, not because they're dramatic, but because their organism has learned
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that relaxing feels unsafe.
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And traditional Chinese medicine would also say that hypervigilance can be about tension,
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but it's not only about tension.
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Sometimes it is about what I was calling about depletion, that depleted reserves.
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So after years of stress, of caregiving, of pushing through, of poor sleep, of chronic
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pain, can be overstimulation or emotional strain,
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the body may no longer have enough yin, not enough restorative reserves to anchor the
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nervous system properly.
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In modern language, you could think of this as losing some of the body's buffering capacity.
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It no longer has buffer.
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The system becomes more reactive because it no longer has enough internal depth, internal
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nourishment, internal resilience to absorb the stress smoothly.
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And this is why some people with hypervigilance do not appear outwardly stressed.
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They may actually appear calm,
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they may appear competent, high functioning or super disciplined.
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But internally, there's a low hum of activation that never fully switches off.
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Traditional Chinese medicine often describes this as deficient heat, restlessness, or minds
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that cannot settle because the body no longer has enough internal coolness and nourishment
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to contain its activity.
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And in that sense, hypervigilance is not viewed as purely mental.
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Traditional Chinese medicine also pays close attention to digestion in these states.
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A chronically vigilant person often struggles to fully digest life, not just food, but digest
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information, stimulation, unpredictability, pressure, and emotion.
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And in Chinese medicine, when digestion weakens, the body becomes less able to transform experience
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into stable energy and nourishment.
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The mind can become scattered, foggy, obsessive, and overactive because the system is poorly
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And another layer appears here.
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The hypervigilance can itself create more hypervigilance.
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Traditional Chinese medicine is going to recognize this self-reinforcing loop long before modern
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neuroscience describes sensitization and nervous system conditioning.
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The body learns pattern, but what is learned can also be unlearned.
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And this is one of the most hopeful aspects of Chinese medicine philosophy and things
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that I've seen over and over again. What I love about TCM is that it generally
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does not see human physiology as static.
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Patterns can deepen over the years, yes, but they can also soften gradually through repetition,
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rhythm, nourishment, emotional processing, safety, rest, warmth, breathing, sleeping,
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The body can relearn regulation, not instantly, not through force, and not usually to trying
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So healing this framework is not simply also calming the mind cognitively.
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It is helping the entire organism experience enough consistency and safety that vigilance
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becomes less necessary.
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And this is why TCM offers approaches to these patterns through many small repeated signals
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rather than one dramatic intervention.
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Regular meals, predictable sleep, warmth, slower transitions, breathing, reduced overstimulation,
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emotional expression, gentle movement, rest after depletion, less rushing, less internal
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suppression, more rhythm.
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Because from a Chinese medicine perspective, the nervous system is not just listening to
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your thoughts, it's listening to your lifestyle.
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And perhaps most importantly, TCM would not say you're a hyper-vigilant
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it would say your system has adapted to prolonged strain in an intelligent but exhausting way.
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And intelligent adaptations can change.
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So today, try creating what I call a low-threat hour.
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So just for an hour, dim harsh lighting, reduce noise, put your phone away, avoid multitasking,
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soften your breathing, do a foot bath,
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take a bucket, put warm water, put your feet to soak in, and allow your nervous system to
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receive fewer inputs. Can you
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Does your body unclench at all?
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Can you notice the unclenching?
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Many migraine sufferers are so used to constant stimulation that they no longer realize how
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overstimulated they truly are.
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Your nervous system may not need more force,
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it may need less pressure. And
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I'm not saying that's easy.
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I'll give you an analogy.
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When I'm stressed, so I had a skiing accident and I broke my femur and I lost half of my
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I shrunk a kidney.
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I was 17 when it happened.
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And because I was on crock roaches for a long time, many months, many, many, a year and
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a half between the two operations, I take all of my stress in my left hip.
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And so when I started to do Pilates 11 years ago now, my teacher was always saying, oh,
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stop gripping that hip.
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And I'm like, what is she referring to?
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I'm not gripping this.
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I'm not doing this.
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I'm not doing this.
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And then over time, you're like, oh, I think I see what she means.
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Oh, and you start noticing, oh, I'm doing this.
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Oh, I'm doing this again in the car, while walking, while running.
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And then you try to ungrip, which is incredibly difficult.
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But over the years, you managed to do it.
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And then little by little, that reflex goes, takes time, takes undoing, but it's feasible.
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And I think if you take any message here today is your body makes sense
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and you can trust it.
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You can really, really trust it.
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And you can also trust its ability to re-regulate,
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that if you give it space and attention, it can, it can, and it will,
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and it actually wants to re-regulate.
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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, Margarine Hero.
