I suffered from severe migraines for most of my life, but they were much more frequent when I was younger—about two or three times a week. During high school they decreased in frequency a lot, to maybe once a month or once every two months, and now that I am in my late ’20s, I only get migraines once or twice a year. Unfortunately I can’t give you much rationalist advice; although I discussed migraines with my doctor and we worked together to find a solution, to my understanding it’s still not a scientifically well-understood problem. So all I can tell you is what I’ve found worked for me.
My symptoms were usually a severe throbbing pain around my head somewhere between my eyes and ears, light and sound sensitivity, nausea, and a strange kind of dizziness. Reorienting my head would affect the pain a lot, and so during a migraine I usually end up with my head tilted to one side.
I couldn’t find any good way to rid myself of a migraine once it had started, but Advil worked well for dulling the pain, after about 15 minutes. I’d just lie in a dark room until it passed, which sometimess took up to an hour.
Preventative measures worked the best.. I did learn some warning signs (well, feelings that are a bit hard to put into words) that a migraine might be impending, and after I noticed them I would try to remove myself to a quiet, low-stimulation environment, and make sure that I was well-hydrated and calm. That would often help avoid the migraine becoming severe. I found that migraines were always much, much worse when I was dehydrated, which as it happens is an easy condition not to notice.
I don’t know exactly what has caused the large reduction in frequency of attacks for me, although I’m thankful for it. It could just be that my body grew and changed and now I don’t get them as much. It also could be dietary changes—I used to eat very different foods when I was a kid than I do now, including a lot of instant ramen noodles and other salty foods, and candy, whereas now I keep a much healthier diet. I cut out the ramen noodles at my doctor’s suggestion that MSG might be a trigger, and that was definitely correlated with a major decrease in occurrence frequency, but it wasn’t a controlled experiment and I changed a lot of other things too. I wouldn’t be surprised if the dietary changes helped, but it’s hard to be certain.
Good luck. Migraines are bad, bad, bad and I hope you can get rid of them.
*Edit: By the way, have you been to an optometrist lately? It might be that you are suffering from low-level eye strain and are in need of glasses.
I’ve had glasses for about a decade now, and my eyes have remained stable for over a year. The MSG recommendation had popped up a few times, so I’ll try cutting it out.
Sadly, my migraines have evolved to some beast that constantly gnaws away at me, so I can’t really take preventative measures. I would just love to have a break for a few days so I can get the edge in this struggle.
That sounds beyond terrible. I really wish I could be of more help. I know exactly how awful it is to have a migraine for one hour, but I cannot fathom what it must be like to live with it perpetually.
Well, here is some general Less Wrong-style advice which I can try to offer. The first thing is that since you have been coping with this for so long, maybe you don’t have a clear feeling for how much better life would be without this problem. If these migraines are as bad for you as I imagine they are, then I would recommend that you make curing yourself almost your first priority in life, as an instrumental goal for anything else that you care about.
I agree that it is worse than blindness. If I went blind, I would learn to cope and not invest all of my energies into restoring my vision. But if I were you, I would classify curing your migraines as a problem deserving an extraordinary effort as if your life itself were at stake ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/uo/make_an_extraordinary_effort/ ). That means going beyond the easy and obvious solutions that you have already tried (such as medication) and doing something out of the ordinary to succeed.
Treat this as mere speculation, since I’m not up-to-date on the migraine literature anymore… but an example of out-of-the-ordinary solutions, you could try renting a different house for a month, moving to a different city, or even moving to a totally different country for a couple weeks. The thinking being that if there is an environmental trigger, a shotgun approach that changes as many environmental variables at once might solve this. For example, if it turned out you have a sensitivity to something in your house, moving house for a while might work. If it turned out to be air pollution in your city, then moving to a cleaner environment might fix it. Unfortunately, unless the state of migraine knowledge has advanced a lot, I think the space of possible hypotheses is huge. So...
Basically, I’m suggesting that you might want to try something on the scale of a month-long trip to live with Buddhist monks in Nepal, or on a Kibbutz in Israel, or to a fishing village in Newfoundland, or something. Changing at once basically everything about your lifestyle from diet, exercise, environment, sleep schedule, electronic devices, and interpersonal interactions. It’s not the kind of solution most people would try, especially since the daily responsibilities of life (work, family, money, etc) always seem to take priority, and nobody has the time to just go and leave for a month. Especially since you have a severe impairment which probably makes all the other things take even more time and effort. But that’s the difference between making a desperate effort, and “trying to try” just to satisfy yourself that you’ve done as much as anyone else would do. If curing your migraines is your top priority in life, as I think it should be right now, then it’s worth investing a year of your time.
Anyway, that’s the only other thought I have. You should try the easy things first of course (starting with MSG), but before you give up make sure you understand how wide the space of possible solutions might be, and how many different lines of attack might exist that haven’t even been thought of yet.
Well, I’ve actually grown a bit as well. I can successfully put most of the pain to one side whilst I’m doing something, but my general cognition goes down quite a lot. There is little I can do about that besides resting, which is when the migraine pain train comes full speed.
The major lifestyle changes sound nice, but they are beyond my current capabilities. I am not yet even 20, and I have some important exams in about a month and a half. That is what I am most worried about. I can still do well, but not nearly as well as I could do if I didn’t have this condition.
But I will definitely do things like a radical alteration of diet. Also, I’ve stayed in other countries for over a month, and that didn’t seem to help, but maybe it was the environment. And trust me, I will do everything in my power to get rid of these damn things.
Thanks for the reply! I really hadn’t thought about some of the things you mentioned. I’m going to have the year after my exams free to do whatever I want, so if I can, I’ll try something like you mentioned. There’s got to be something similar I can do in my situation.
I suffered from severe migraines for most of my life, but they were much more frequent when I was younger—about two or three times a week. During high school they decreased in frequency a lot, to maybe once a month or once every two months, and now that I am in my late ’20s, I only get migraines once or twice a year. Unfortunately I can’t give you much rationalist advice; although I discussed migraines with my doctor and we worked together to find a solution, to my understanding it’s still not a scientifically well-understood problem. So all I can tell you is what I’ve found worked for me.
My symptoms were usually a severe throbbing pain around my head somewhere between my eyes and ears, light and sound sensitivity, nausea, and a strange kind of dizziness. Reorienting my head would affect the pain a lot, and so during a migraine I usually end up with my head tilted to one side.
I couldn’t find any good way to rid myself of a migraine once it had started, but Advil worked well for dulling the pain, after about 15 minutes. I’d just lie in a dark room until it passed, which sometimess took up to an hour.
Preventative measures worked the best.. I did learn some warning signs (well, feelings that are a bit hard to put into words) that a migraine might be impending, and after I noticed them I would try to remove myself to a quiet, low-stimulation environment, and make sure that I was well-hydrated and calm. That would often help avoid the migraine becoming severe. I found that migraines were always much, much worse when I was dehydrated, which as it happens is an easy condition not to notice.
I don’t know exactly what has caused the large reduction in frequency of attacks for me, although I’m thankful for it. It could just be that my body grew and changed and now I don’t get them as much. It also could be dietary changes—I used to eat very different foods when I was a kid than I do now, including a lot of instant ramen noodles and other salty foods, and candy, whereas now I keep a much healthier diet. I cut out the ramen noodles at my doctor’s suggestion that MSG might be a trigger, and that was definitely correlated with a major decrease in occurrence frequency, but it wasn’t a controlled experiment and I changed a lot of other things too. I wouldn’t be surprised if the dietary changes helped, but it’s hard to be certain.
Good luck. Migraines are bad, bad, bad and I hope you can get rid of them.
*Edit: By the way, have you been to an optometrist lately? It might be that you are suffering from low-level eye strain and are in need of glasses.
I’ve had glasses for about a decade now, and my eyes have remained stable for over a year. The MSG recommendation had popped up a few times, so I’ll try cutting it out.
Sadly, my migraines have evolved to some beast that constantly gnaws away at me, so I can’t really take preventative measures. I would just love to have a break for a few days so I can get the edge in this struggle.
Thanks for replying; every data point helps.
That sounds beyond terrible. I really wish I could be of more help. I know exactly how awful it is to have a migraine for one hour, but I cannot fathom what it must be like to live with it perpetually.
Well, here is some general Less Wrong-style advice which I can try to offer. The first thing is that since you have been coping with this for so long, maybe you don’t have a clear feeling for how much better life would be without this problem. If these migraines are as bad for you as I imagine they are, then I would recommend that you make curing yourself almost your first priority in life, as an instrumental goal for anything else that you care about.
I agree that it is worse than blindness. If I went blind, I would learn to cope and not invest all of my energies into restoring my vision. But if I were you, I would classify curing your migraines as a problem deserving an extraordinary effort as if your life itself were at stake ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/uo/make_an_extraordinary_effort/ ). That means going beyond the easy and obvious solutions that you have already tried (such as medication) and doing something out of the ordinary to succeed.
Treat this as mere speculation, since I’m not up-to-date on the migraine literature anymore… but an example of out-of-the-ordinary solutions, you could try renting a different house for a month, moving to a different city, or even moving to a totally different country for a couple weeks. The thinking being that if there is an environmental trigger, a shotgun approach that changes as many environmental variables at once might solve this. For example, if it turned out you have a sensitivity to something in your house, moving house for a while might work. If it turned out to be air pollution in your city, then moving to a cleaner environment might fix it. Unfortunately, unless the state of migraine knowledge has advanced a lot, I think the space of possible hypotheses is huge. So...
Basically, I’m suggesting that you might want to try something on the scale of a month-long trip to live with Buddhist monks in Nepal, or on a Kibbutz in Israel, or to a fishing village in Newfoundland, or something. Changing at once basically everything about your lifestyle from diet, exercise, environment, sleep schedule, electronic devices, and interpersonal interactions. It’s not the kind of solution most people would try, especially since the daily responsibilities of life (work, family, money, etc) always seem to take priority, and nobody has the time to just go and leave for a month. Especially since you have a severe impairment which probably makes all the other things take even more time and effort. But that’s the difference between making a desperate effort, and “trying to try” just to satisfy yourself that you’ve done as much as anyone else would do. If curing your migraines is your top priority in life, as I think it should be right now, then it’s worth investing a year of your time.
Anyway, that’s the only other thought I have. You should try the easy things first of course (starting with MSG), but before you give up make sure you understand how wide the space of possible solutions might be, and how many different lines of attack might exist that haven’t even been thought of yet.
Well, I’ve actually grown a bit as well. I can successfully put most of the pain to one side whilst I’m doing something, but my general cognition goes down quite a lot. There is little I can do about that besides resting, which is when the migraine pain train comes full speed.
The major lifestyle changes sound nice, but they are beyond my current capabilities. I am not yet even 20, and I have some important exams in about a month and a half. That is what I am most worried about. I can still do well, but not nearly as well as I could do if I didn’t have this condition.
But I will definitely do things like a radical alteration of diet. Also, I’ve stayed in other countries for over a month, and that didn’t seem to help, but maybe it was the environment. And trust me, I will do everything in my power to get rid of these damn things.
Thanks for the reply! I really hadn’t thought about some of the things you mentioned. I’m going to have the year after my exams free to do whatever I want, so if I can, I’ll try something like you mentioned. There’s got to be something similar I can do in my situation.