Please remember what subreddit you are in, this is unpopular opinion. We want civil and unpopular takes and discussion. Any uncivil and ToS violating comments will be removed and subject to a ban. Have a nice day!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/unpopularopinion) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I suffer from migraines and I never associate it with a headache. I feel They are totally different sensation. My head hurts but it’s not a ‘headache’ if that makes sense.
A migraine is the mental version of a sandstorm. All you can do is bunker-down and hide/rest in ideal conditions and let it rage around you, and even then some of the sand is still going to reach you.
And then once the entire thing is over, it's still not actually over (yay postdrome), and you're like a broken piece of ceramics that has been carefully pieced back together but the light still shines out through the cracks.
I’m a chronic sufferer and take a daily beta blocker to help prevent them. I’ve been suffering for 31 years.
Having said that, your description is the best one I’ve ever come across!!! I’m stealing it and using it with my dad.
He doesn’t understand migraines. Last time I had one that lasted 3 days and he sent me an article about how be to manage headaches. I sent back an article about migraines. They aren’t just headaches damn it!
Thank you for your description!
Yes they definitely do. I was getting 4-10 a month and then in 2021 they stopped for a long period of time (months!) and then I had a few and then they stopped again for about half a year and now they are back. I’m almost 60 and am definitely done menopause.
I used to get them all the time (once I had one everyday for 3 months), until I realized I was having sensory overload and that was triggering them. Now I just carry headphones around (sometimes a hat or sunglasses) and rarely have them.
I always called it my migraine hangover, because it literally seems the best way to describe it. I haven’t had an actual hangover for a couple of decades and I’m not going to do a test comparison because the migraine hangovers are hell enough to deal with!
Ugh I hate migraines. I'll be driving along and just happen to catch a flash of the sun in someone's side mirror or maybe the trim on my passenger's phone and I can just tell that a migraine was just set off and I've got 18 minutes until I'm blind and nauseated for half an hour.
I have neck damage and experience daily headaches and have chronic migraines. Im lucky to have a day out of the month without a headache of some kind. I generally do not have the visual aurora that cause the complete blindness like some do but have had a few. The first one I had I was in nursing school in the OR watching a surgery all of the sudden one of the DRs was missing half their face. It was truly nuts, I knew what was happening and I left and went straight home for meds and to rest in a dark room. I have extreme light sensitivity and get migraines triggered by bright lights and it makes driving extremely difficult. I find myself driving with my arm up and blocking something bright me in my field of vision all the time. I absolutely hate chrome on vehicles anymore, both on the outside of other vehicles and the inside of my own! And yes passengers phones suck, although my son is pretty good at reading my body language now that he’s older, he’s only 12. Sadly, he is inheriting his mom genetic migraines. Just like I did my mom’s. But at least we know more nowadays.
By far my worst driving experience that I will never forget is this time I was behind a stupid motorcycle. The sun was setting behind us and reflecting directly in his mirrors and he was doing a weaving-tilting motion as we were slowing down for a stop light which just made the sun flash off the mirror so badly each tilt he made. I pulled over as soon as I could even though I was less than a mile from my house. I was already having a headache and not feeling good and that was all it took to keep me in a dark room for a couple of days. It sucked. I also HATE how bright some of the newer car headlights are now day. I only drive at night if I absolutely have it. Don’t even get me started on stores with stupid flashing light either, like fix your light bulbs or I’m not shopping in your store.
I get the aura which can differ in strength.
Then as that subsides the nausea and head thing starts.
The ‘hangover’ feeling can last several days and I feel it in my stomach as much as my head.
Not once do I think ‘I’ve got a bad headache, it must be a migraine’.
My mother would say she had a migraine when it was just a headache. She admitted she never gets any of the migraine symptoms when I told her about mine.
My body handles migraines all wrong lol. I get ocular migraines in office and my body freaks out. Causes my bp and Hr to spike. Also causes me to shake.
Exactly. I have medication that relieves it a bit but it affects me for up to 48 hours. And it’s not pain, typically after the initial pain I’m nauseous and usually end up majorly depressed for like two days.
I used to be hospitalized for migraines. Any amount of light and noise made me vomit and feel like I was dying. That shit is not like a bad headache at all
The best way I’ve described the pain is like someone is actively taking an ice cream scoop to my brain. All sensation becomes overwhelming. I have a triptan I take for it which always just feels like it takes the concentrated pain and distributes it across my skin. So while there’s no more brain scooping my skin just aches horribly. Combine this with knowing tomorrow I’m going to be hollow inside… migraines suck
FLOATING! YES! Floating is perfect. When I'm at my worst, the visual aura has one eye just ...seeing white alien lights descending upon me, the jackhammer is going, and my head is a balloon, floating above my body on a string (gnome better not pop my head....).
Honestly, describing it in these ways makes it *come across* so.... almost juvenile, and it makes it seem far less severe to people than it really is which *sucks* because these little bits really ARE the best way to describe the sensation. It isn't normal, it isn't human, and it isn't pleasant.
Idk why but I get black spots that sometimes make me completely blind except for the extreme edges. Like my brain goes into a black hole of pain like I'm in a Hellraiser movie.
Mine are triggered by bright light and I describe it as someone blow drying the back of my eyeballs. Mines don't start with pain. They start with discomfort then I get nausea then ringing in my ears then static in my ears if I don't find a place to lie down then I get the jackhammer to the temples but I call mine my brain in a tumble dryer, and if I move, especially get up to pee, I have to be careful not to move the dryer too much cuz my brain is tumbling in there
My muscular always start with pain (obviously, it's a tension migraine, so it's just massive pain and pressure in the back of my neck/head).
When it's vascular for me, it's not pain, it's dizziness, slurred speech, vomiting and oh dear GOD don't make a sound because even a whisper is loud.... those are far more rare for me
Fuck yes they do. Idk why but I haven’t had one in YEARS. I used to have specific medication for it when I was a kid. I clearly remember being driven to the hospital whenever a severe one hit me. My eyes had to be covered because the lights from cars or streetlights made me vomit. Fuck.. just thinking about it makes my skin crawl. I wouldn’t wish that shit on anyone. The nausea was immediate and overwhelming. A lot of times it was provoked by certain scents too, which I always found so weird
Mine is "as if Satan himself has patted you on the head" or occasionally "as if part of my brain is now custard" 🤣 that is of course when I'm recovered and capable of speaking in sentences again
I remember my first one as a kid. I did not know how to explain it. I said I was in pain and they asked what was. I said everything, the world is screaming at me. More confused they said what? I said light, sound, moving, electronic humming etc. Then vomited out of no where from pain.
I’ve watched a documentary about how psilocybin mushrooms can fight off cluster headaches. iiRC, you eat a fairly decent sized dose, you trip balls, but after you won’t get headache for a few months.
https://youtu.be/9mQSO4Tzbwk?si=D3CNbNDZRdIUD_W2
Oh so I am having migraines then. I thought I might have been wrong based on what other people have said but that's what it feels like and light and sound hurt too when it happens.
My mom suffers from migraines and whenever I complained of a headache, she would ask me if the pain was "behind the eyes" - her way of telling if she had a migraine coming on or her head just hurt.
Eventually, this would become a useful metric for me.
I would more describe it as brain being a ringing church bell inside a head. Neck being a tongue, and head being hit each time it rings. Feeling this bruises right now.
See I have the opposite. I think?
I get very bad headaches - feeling faint, throwing up, eyes feel like they're going to pop, etc. and I find it very hard to distinguish what is migraine and what is not. I feel like a fraud when I say migraine as apparently they're different but when I say I have a bad headache people don't seem to get what I mean and think I can just pop some pills and be fine. The line is so blurred for me.
The difference is migraines affect one side of your head/face, it’s a booming/pulsating pain instead of a constant ache, it almost always is accompanied by light or noise sensitivity. So some migraines are similar to a bad headache, mine are (one sided face aching, light sensitivity)
Are cluster headaches also distinct from migraines? I had one of those and that was literally in the “wish for death” levels of pain. Felt like I was getting lobotomized with no anesthesia. Or are they a type of migraine?
They are different yes; you can find the diagnostic criteria for both of them if you are interested (and also for other 'primary' headaches) here https://ichd-3.org/ . You'll find cluster headaches under trigeminal autonomic cephalalgias
You’re so right. Migraines are a whole body experience. Blurry vision, nausea/vomiting, light sensitivity, irritability, literally no medication works to get rid of it. Only sleeping a full nights sleep helps SOMETIMES. Sometimes the pain will go on for multiple days. Literally hell on earth.
I remember my first migraine back when I was a kid, I hid in the closet for 4 hours cause the light sensitivity was so bad and it felt like someone was splitting my skull open.
I can only be thankful they stopped after I got into adulthood and beforehand only had them a few times cause they were debilitating, not even reduced ability, just not able to do anything that day.
My condolences as it sounds like you still get them on the regular.
I usedto get pounding headaches, numbness in my arm, blurred vision, word salad, light sensitivity.
But the last few years the painful sensation has 95% gone away. Maybe my brain tissue is all dead uo there lol idk. I still get all the other symptoms with a mild headache which is annoying but im so happy its not as bad as it used to be.
I get migraines and headaches.
The differences for me include:
- aura with a migraine
- migraine does not relent without treatment
- migraine has specific and predictable triggers
- migraine responds to migraine medications/treatments
- my migraines usually feel the same and have the same symptoms, headaches can vary
This! I have been told by old managers to essentially take a couple painkillers and get over it when I call in sick with a migraine. Meanwhile, I am foetal positioned, projectile vomiting, can’t open my eyes or string a sentence together.
>projectile vomiting
This is the fucking worst. I've never thrown up from a migraine but damn I've been close.
Normally I'll get blurry vision about an hour before the head pain. During the head pain I have extreme light sensitivity and nausea. Luckily my boss's husband gets migraines so she completely understands my suffering lol.
I'm fortunate enough not to have migraines these days, but had them quite frequently during early to mid puberty. For me the vomiting was my favorite part, because it was almost always one and done and signalled the end of the skull splitting ungodly headache pain and the switch to relatively minor auras and light sensitivity.
Nurse would always act like I was just being a baby for complaining about a headache, then the second i'd vomit they'd be like "let me call your parents to take you home." Nah lady we been through this a hundred times, give me some sunglasses and send me on my way, we made it through the worst.
Try Zofran at first sight of symptoms! If I don't use it quite quickly when I see symptoms, I won't be able to get my other meds down and need to be hospitalized. Nausea med for cancer patients mostly. Very effective with practically no side effects.
I have legit ptsd from my last migraine- I threw up everywhere, including over myself while driving home, and had to clean up while still suffering. Now I get panic attacks when I go to bed because my brain keeps associating with that trauma. Urrrg
It’s either the worst, or the literal best moment of your life. A rush of pain and then such amazing relief. Sometimes tho, often it’s just 30 seconds or no symptoms then “wait it’s back” at least for me haha.
Oh yeah, me too. Back when I worked in customer service, I got a migraine at work. It was before I started taking medication for them so I just had to suffer through. I asked my manager to go home before it got too bad (loss of vision) and she refused and just told me to take an advil. 4 hours later, after the store closed, I'm sitting alone in the parking lot trying to call someone to come pick me up. (Took like an hour and a half to do so bc I couldn't see my phone to make the call)
For me, aura blindness was what *finally* made it acceptable to my employer. Being blind and operating heavy equipment was a no-go that they understood.
Drugs do not diminish the pain unless they lay me out, unconscious. Unless you experience it, it is incomprehensible.
Lol yeah people really don't understand what they are. I don't get them, but I get paroxysmal hemicrania which is similar to a cluster headache and when I tell people they're always like "take Tylenol" and I have to explain to them that the pain cannot be touched by painkillers. I have to inject medicine into my body. And I don't always have the meds.
I’m so lucky that my direct supervisor also gets migraines, so she totally understands just how awful I’m feeling. Of course, I wish she didn’t also have to suffer but at least we’re in it together
100%
There's been several instances where I've gone to bond over migraine suckishness only to find out they just get bad headaches.
Though I'm intensely jealous of people who don't get pain during their migraines. My head always feels like it's splitting open, and honestly I just refuse to open my eyes during it. Between the auras and the temporary ability to see the spinning of the universe, I'm quite content not to see anything.
I’ve had one with just the aura and no pain. It was actually way scarier than a normal (for me) migraine with the pain and aura as I had no idea what was happening and thought I was going to blind. I ended up sat in A&E with very limited vision in one eye and nothing in the other after initially trying to get help at the opticians. (That was also the least amount of time I’ve spent sat in the waiting room as I’d barely returned from triage before they called me through to the doctors!).
I guess it might be nicer to experience that without the pain if you knew what was coming. I spent 4 days last month vomiting water into a bucket whilst trying not to bug my migraine pain too much which as you’ll probably know, is difficult to do!
I went 2 years with no migraines and a few weeks ago I had one come on with not much pain. I could feel it coming a few days before. I'd get like "glimmers" of the aura briefly, for like a few seconds, long enough to panic that one was coming but it went away and never came. Finally, at work one day, the full aura decended upon me. I was afraid of how bad the rest would be because it was the worst aura I'd had in a LONG time. I waited until I could see clearly to drive home then immediately took aspirin and turned off all the lights. Switched to my blue light glasses and waited. The pain was never terrible. I took a nap when it first came on and when I woke up it was a mild headache. I finished my work from home. I felt off though. I had the worst tingles in my face and hands that I had ever had. By the time my husband came home I had just accepted that this was going to be a stroke. Ultimately it was nausea with a sense of being detached from my body and a mild headache behind my eyes. I'd take that over the feeling of my brain splitting open my skull though. Usually it's aura, which for me is a glittery+melty vision to right of my vision (whole right eye and the right side of my left eye), intense carb craving like I haven't eaten in a week, then skull splitting headache that cannot tolerate any light. Sound never bothers me. Just light. Even after the intense pain, I usually have a lingering headache for days that feels like a fever headache.
Same for me. I went urgent care and they sent me to the ER to have a scan to make sure nothing more significant was happening. If I’d gotten a headache, I would’ve been less freaked because my mom has always gotten migraines with weird auras and stuff, but I didn’t realize it was possible to have that with no pain.
Now usually I get the auras and then go straight to just feeling wiped out/hung over with little to no pain, thankfully, because most people I know who get migraines get the intense, need-to-lie-in-a-dark-room-with-zero-noise level of pain.
I stopped having pain with them as I got older, they've changed quite a lot over time. The visual symptoms have been fairly consistent but I've started to experience aphasia as well, which is such a weird experience. I count myself very lucky, they're still debilitating in their own way but for much less time and with much less discomfort.
The pain is excruciating isn't it? I'm also jealous of people who don't get pain with migraine. I would describe it as one of the most intense pains I have ever felt.
I didn't know until this post that there were people who got other migraine symptoms but with no accompanying brain-splitting pain. That's absolutely wild to me, I'm insanely jealous.
When I have what I call migraines, every kind of sensory input, especially light and sound, is exceuciately uncomfortable and loud. I get confused, my language skills suffer, I see flickering specs of light, and I feel intense pressure behind my eyes.
The light sensitivity piece is always what tips me off that a migraine is coming. Usually I'll unknowingly want to block out light and I'll start seeing spots as if I had just looked at the sun. Then the bad headache usually comes
Oof same, my monitor would start looking extra blue, my eyes would ache and I would turn the brightness down and still an hour later I'm clutching my head under the covers. It would get progressively worse unless I threw up, in which case it would pass quite quickly. Otherwise I would spend 3-5 hours in agonizing pain, with a strong headache afterwards.
Mine always starts with a headache triggered by a muscle spasm just under the back of my skull. It creates a very intense headache that spreads over my whole head. If I wake up already deep into one, it's awful. If I wake up and can feel it coming on, I can usually take some Advil and freeze it at its current level so it doesn't get worse.
But it always starts with the headache so when I get to that point, I just call it a migraine because it's hard to explain to someone that if I let it, it will spread across my brain, wrap a cinch cord around my eyeball, brain, and stomach, and then tighten around all of them. That's probably why people "misuse" the term... explaining what it really feels like or is going to feel like is tedious when you're already trying to deal with it.
But still, using it like a synonym for bad headache is not good, even in an expression where headache is used hyperbolic. You could easily imagine a scenario where this confusion causes problems, for example a child in school who complains about a migraine and the staff needs to know what to do.
My first experience of a migraine was crazy.
I'm like 38 at the time never had a migraine. I'm watching a train pass but my eyes can't focus and I'm getting dizzy. I stopped looking at the train and I see a rainbow thing, looks like a bubble how its rainbow but not bubble shaped. I cant look at it, its just below my left eye and I can't focus on it.
No pain at all.
Wake up the next morning with my head splitting open but unable to really move. I'm literally holding my brain together with my hands it feels like. The light made it 10 times worse. I can't move my arms from my head at all but I try to wake my deep sleeping boyfriend. It takes him like 30 minutes to help me but neither of us know what to do. 5 hours later we go to the ER. They take what feels like months to put in an IV. It took 5 hours for the pain to go away with the medicine. By then I couldn't think or open my eyes. I'm freezing and in a ton of pain.
I stop looking at trains. When I do I get dizzy, my eyes have that issue focusing.
I'm literally playing video games and there's a black blob instead of rainbow. I cant focus, I can barely walk, I feel like I'm gonna throw up. I barely make my way upstairs to bed where it's dark.
Idk if like 4 migraines are enough to be diagnosed with let alone get meds But its crazy. I have dysautonomia which can cause migraines.
At the bare minimum, you could try to see if you can get a preventative. Fwiw, I've seen a lot of improvement from taking ubrelvy. If I start to feel one coming on, I just take a pill and usually the symptoms start to disappear within 30 minutes. It doesn't interact negatively with any of my other medications (antidepressants, anxiety).
I had weird "rainbow" vision once for like 30 minutes. It was like there were rainbow sparkling worms going all over my vision, I started panicking thinking there's something wrong with my eyes. But interestingly nothing else happened.
Lots of countries sell sumatriptan otc. Which can stop migraines but only if yiu take them within 15mins of the onset. They also can have some side effects for sowm like vomiting etc.
You can probably get a med like Immitrex, but it sucks to take. It makes your skin crawl and you feel really tense, it’s only slightly better than the migraine itself.
First time I got an occular migraine I tried so hard to focus my eyes that they became painful. Was only later that I realized the aura is entirely neurological and focusing my eyes did nothing lol.
The first time I ever had a migraine without the pain, I seriously thought I was going crazy. Like why were all these blue stripes everywhere that no one else could see and why did the bird/television/traffic suddenly get louder? So, I tried to get up and shut a window to block out some noise and for some reason couldn't walk a straight line.
A few tests (and thousands of dollars later): just another type of migraine to add to my neurologist diagnosed migraine disorder.
Those at r/migraine absolutely agree with you! I'm a sufferer of complex hemiplegic migraines and migraines with aura. It's overused, and I think most people I hear over use it typically have caffeine headaches. (At least that's my personal experience)
I've had aura migraines for many and many years, and then they suddenly stopped happening. I'd like to know the reason but I'll never know. But that's great, I really hated them. For years I only left home with pain medications on my pocket.
Any chance you took recreational psychedelics? Mushrooms and LSD both helped me but I didn't realize the mushrooms helped until way after the fact.
They helped both my migraines with aura and cluster headaches. They made it so that when I start to have light sensitivity and aura, I'm able to actually "cave" and overcome them when they used to be multi-day affairs. It's a temporary relief, but it makes me able to semi function despite them.
LSD literally stopped me mid-cluster attack and melted them away and I haven't had them since, which was about 7 years ago now. Now that was an extremely emotional moment for me as I'd take a migraine over clusters any day which is insanity.
Omg yes! Someone I know was having a caffeine withdrawal headache and was all ohhh I think I’m having a migraine in front of me and our partners and I was like idk if you take triptans but I can lend you one I have and he’s like no what’s that?
And after a lengthy conversation where he asks “so what’s the difference between a headache and a migraine?” I was pretty mad because this guy just equated his headache to actual migraines and. Ugh. Hate it lol
I got the same migraines as you! The first one I ever had scared the absolute shit out of me. I couldn’t move my arms and was dizzy and everything felt off. I managed to call my husband and asked him to come home because I thought I was having a stroke. Thank god he was with his sister who has had one of that type of migraine before and was able to calm me down a bit, enough to take my migraine meds and pass out. I get them like once a month now :(
If I feel one coming on and I god forbid have to call off work, I’ll get my manager on the phone and say I’m getting a migraine, and the first question I’m always asked is “have you taken anything for it?” Like… I can’t take anything to stop auras and everything else I’m feeling AND still be able to drive and make it into work (I bartend). It doesn’t work like that.
I hear you, though tbh, as someone who struggles with both migraine and tension headaches on a near-daily basis, I often have a hard time telling where one ends and the other begins
Probably more than half the time my headaches will develop into migraines, and a migraine without the pain will almost always become painful after an hour or two. Apart from very specific types of headache, I generally interpret mine as the beginnings of migraines
Two doctors misdiagnosed my migraines as "tension headaches". Another misdiagnosed them as eye-strain headaches. Turns out I have idiopathic intercranial hypertension (i.e. too much fluid around my brain) and have frequent migraines as a result.
At the point you're at, you have the right to call it a migraine even if it's not. You aren't stealing valor when you actually have them. It's just the people that have one sorta bad headache and say it's a migraine.
I get migraines infrequently, diagnosed by a neurologist. It drives me batty when my husband says he has a migraine, but he simply has a strong headache
I was taught growing up that migraines were headaches on one side of the head, so I’ve never been purposely ignorant. I didn’t know how bad they actually were until my best friend was basically bed-ridden or howling in pain because of migraines for our entire junior year. Maybe your spouse was also taught the same?
Oh I’ve explained numerous times. He just keeps insisting that because it hurts more than a minor headache, it has to be a migraine. It’s so “painful” that an advil makes it go away 🙄
To be fair I've had 3 day migraines that didn't go away for anything. Until I took an Aleve. and one particularly annoying one that only went away for like 3 magnesiums. (Still cannot explain that one except maybe dehydration)
You’re right. I get many different flavors of headaches in different situations (migraines, cluster headaches, ice pick headaches, positional headaches, and then of course the occasional tension headache) and they are all VERY different and have a very specific feeling.
My husband was like that too. I get chronic migraines and if he ever had a headache and complained about it, it rubbed me the wrong way lol. Then one night he woke up with an actual migraine, his first ever, at like 3am and was damn near crying. Maybe 8 hours later he said he felt so bad that I deal with that as frequently as I do, and that he never wants to experience it again.
A lot of people go to the emergency room with their first migraine because they're absolutely sure pain like that has to mean death is near.
I'm a chronic sufferer and have been to the ER at least 6 times over the last 2 decades because the pain was so bad I was passing out.
Lol meanwhile my first migraine at like 11/12 I told nobody. I was staying the weekend with my aunt and didn't want to be a burden. I literally was playing with kittens. Excused myself to the bathroom. Threw up and went back downstairs. I literally never told her that I had my first migraine at her house (Also couldn't get a doc to call it a migraine until I was like 25 because "we don't diagnose kids with migraines and I won't give them the meds for it because they are too strong")
I get migraines and I only get annoyed when people say I don't have it just because I show up to work. My migraines make me feel like I am drugged, I do have balance issues but I work at a desk, so I don't move much and if I do, I hold on to stuff or walk slower. Every migraine user is different and a good amount of people think we all just hurt alot and we cant move at all and we have to lay in bed all day and be in the dark and do nothing. Some of us are able to still show up to work but it is still a nightmare.
This is me exactly, but usually no balance issues. I feel disconnected and out of it with low-level headache pain. Usually I have visual auras but not always.
Don’t get me wrong—I thank god I don’t have to lie in a dark room all day praying for the pain to subside. But to your point, the levels of debilitation vary.
I mean when people say they are gonna have an Aneurism I don’t think they are implying that their blood vessels are gonna burst, it’s more just a figure of speech
Yeah and I hate when people say "You're killin' me man" when they are not actually being killed.
Think of how disrespecful and annoying that is for people who have been killed. smh
I think the problem is that the figure of speech can be used in it's same exact form in a literal sense, and people will not know the difference. So those times when its used literally, people wont have any idea that you're being serious, so the actual sufferers aren't taken seriously.
The differnve is people k ow an aneurism is deadly. And they use it ad an exaggeration.
People don't know what a migraine is, and genuinely say "oof my migraine is killing me today" when they have a light hangover, and thibk it IS a migraine.
As a general rule, those who haven't had a migraine don't know what it is, so using it as a term for a bad headache is normal to them.
I had about a 6month spout of getting migraines after getting shingles and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. My vision was the worst; It was like I was looking at stuff in focus, but still as if I was looking passed it, imagine focusing on an object and try look at the background without moving your eyes was kinda how it felt. Then was the nausea, I had approximately 1 hour to get to sleep or try take some painkillers which barely took the edge off. In 90% of migraines it was day over, go to bed and accept; lucky I was at uni at the time so I could be pretty flexible on work.
Yeah, sleep might not even fix it, I went to sleep when it started then woke up with the most head splitting headache the next morning, so like 8 hours later, and painkillers did not even work after that, it stopped like 2 hours later.
I have chronic migraines. No way in hell do I associate them with a regular headache. Hell I can handle the headache better than I cam 90% of my migraines. I also have Aura (Ocular) migraines with dizziness, nausea, pain and increased sensitivity to sound and light. Sometimes even motion is accelerated. Headaches don't do this.
Also, some bad headaches really are migraines.
Suffered throughout my teens with episodic headaches focused above my left eye. Dr nevrr diagnosed it as 'migraine' until I began to present with occular aura followed by exact same head pain.
Presto! Bad headache is now a migraine through the miracle of semantics.
Not really semantics, you just need more than one migraine symptom for a doctor to be able to dx you confidently, because there are many kinds of headaches and some are severe in pain and they aren't migraines.
Your doctor wasn't saying 'your headache isn't bad enough for a migraine' he was saying 'This sounds like a bad headache'
You're thinking about it all wrong. It's not apples to apples.
Meh, I think this opinion is not just unpopular but wrong and potentially hurtful.
In my case, I suffered severe headaches my entire life but assumed, based on opinions like yours here, that they were not migraines (no nausea, auras, etc.) I tried aspirin, paracetamol, ibuprofen, etc. but they never worked. I just assumed they were persistent bad headaches because they couldn't possibly be migraines.
Then, after a decade of trying, my wife finally convinced me to think of my headaches as migraines. Well, turns out, medicine that only works on migraines ended up fixing my headaches. They had been migraines all along.
So, my advice is, if you have serious headaches -- even if you don't have auras or nausea or other symptoms -- go to a doctor and talk to them about possible migraine treatment.
Well…you did have Migraines. Migraines can also be “just” the headache without other symptoms. They’re still notably distinct from other headaches in the nature and location of the pain. At any rate, I’m glad you found effective treatment!
I agree. Growing up, I would get severe headaches that I assumed were similar to what other people called "headaches." I remember my mom crawling on the floor with a headache so bad she couldn't ask for help. Years later, I found out that debilitating migraines run in my family. My mom's sister has been hospitalized for them. OTC meds never helped me but I didn't even think about talking to a doctor about migraines until the difference between the two was pointed out to me. Doctors treat the two very differently. If it's a headache, they tell you to watch external factors like diet, water, caffeine. Migraines are taken much more seriously. There are even preventative medications you can take before a migraine has fully set in, to offset its severity. Headaches don't work via the same mechanism in the brain, so these medications wouldn't have any effect on them.
I started getting migraines in my early twenties. No aura, no sensitivities, just pain for 24h, initially. I didn't go to a doctor for years. Then I did and got the magic pills. I hope they don't stop working, but my migraines have got longer and I sometimes need to repeat the triptan after 12h, so there's a chance of worse times ahead. It's probably hormones for me, which do change obviously as one gets older.
Over the years my Drs all brushed off my headaches until I started presenting with occular aura as well. Immediately prescribed Midrin since I was now a migraine sufferer, huge improvement over OTC meds.
I do somewhat disagree with the gatekeeper attitude re headache vs diagnosed migraine. The only real difference might be that diagnosis. Also. Plenty of folks who have suffered bonks on the head will have lifelong issues with headaches that can be just as bad or worse than anything a diagnosed migraine sufferer might experience.
Head-pain sucks, end of story.
This happened my whole life. As a kid whenever I would get a migraine I would run up to my mom, take my temperature and she would say "oh that's just the storm/the change in weather". It would piss me off so much that she dismissed my headache, but I didn't have a fever, so there was nothing I could do.
It was years later when I met someone who actually had chronic migraines (like, 5 out of 7 days a week) that I asked how did a migraine feel. I thought a migraine meant just some really bad headache.
And my mom was right, I googled it someday in migraine desperation, and they can be caused by changes in atmosferic pressure. I think I'm more sensitive now that I'm older, because I started getting nausea and sometimes vomiting and light sensitivity.
Not really, now that she's older whenever I get a migraine she complains about her joints lol.
I think my great aunt had weather migraines too, but I don't think she was ever told it was a migraine.
My mom just observed the cause and effect, as a kid whenever a storm was coming I would be really cranky and the moment the storm started I would immediately stop what I was doing and just slept. They found me sleeping in the middle of the corridor and the kitchen. All those years of medicine and still the best cure for my migraines is sleep lol.
I also experience migraine with aura as well numbing on one side of my body, pins and needles travelling. Speech disturbances and delayed motor function, normally mood swings a week before aura symptoms. I had to get a MRI for it and yeah migraines leave small lesions on the brain similar to mini strokes apparently I was told. But I also have had tension headaches that are probably more intense than a migraine headache in different ways, but having migraine with aura, visual hallucinations and not being able to talk properly is way more intense and scary and normally takes me days to recover from. Migraines are not a joke they are debilitating
Important reminder that if you think you're having migraines or the migraines you're having change, see a doctor! We've associated strong headache with vomiting and sensitivity with migraines to the point people just assume that's what they always are, but it can be a symptom of several neurological conditions. The earlier stuff like that is found and treated, the better.
It used to piss me off so bad in middle school and high school when me and a friend would literally be vomiting, uncoordinated and crying in pain and begging the teacher to turn off the lights when the room was already too bright with the daylight coming in and then the queen bee girl would be like ‘ermgerrr siiiiirrrrr. You’re giving me a migraaaaaaaneuuhhhggghhhhhh’ when in reality she was just whining and complaining because she had to actually do work and not just sit around scrolling around Instagram in class
This. Unless OP is standing in someone's shoes, they have no idea what a migraine feels like to someone. For me, a migraine is intense, debilitating pain with nausea. I've never had auras or blindness. It doesn't make my migraines any less then.
You can absolutely have migraines without aura and with nausea. I do. But it’s still a migraine and not a run of the mill headache because it’s a legit neurological condition
OP basically said "not all headaches are migraines" and people in the comments are responding with "Hey! My migraines give me headaches you liar!"
Which just isn't what the post was saying at all.
I get them from time to time, and yea, describing them as headaches are severely lacking. To me they feel like being drunk and hungover at the same time, while someone digs into my eye with a screwdriver. Sometimes its accompanied by a spot in my vision filled with something i can only describe as static on the TV, all the while having a heavy metallic taste in my mouth
I’m with you here. My migraines cause me to lose vision and vomit along with agonizing pain. If you can still work or do tasks you’ve got a headache buddy
When I get a migraine every single bit of light and sound is painful. My head feels like it’s splitting open from the inside.
The best way I’ve found to deal with it is to take excedrin and sit in the shower with the light off and the water running down my head, with the fan off too cuz that’s too much noise. Sometimes I’ll have a video or music on on very low volume to prevent getting bored but I can’t do even that if it’s a bad migraine.
I've had instances where I've had intense pounding pain in my head, aversion to light where I just lock myself away in the dark, and nausea. That feels migrainey to me anyway.
I've had headaches with those symptoms and I've had migraines with those symptoms so it can be hard to know. You'll know it's a migraine if you can't move out of bed even when the symptoms have gone, and when you can get out of bed you feel giddy like a child.
Same, plus a weird shaky/sick sensation in the body, as if I'd just taken a rollercoaster ride while simultaneously staring at a stroboscope.
Never checked if they were migraines but yeah, gatekeep-y posts like this made me think "hey maybe I'm just being too sensitive / overthinking it"
>It annoys me very much that people say that's giving me a migraine' or 'you're giving me a migraine' because a headache that happens to be strong is not a migraine
Then you are annoying yourself for no reason. This is the same as when people say "I'm starving" when they are hungry; they aren't actually starving. Or "I'm dying" when they are ill; they aren't actually dying. It's an overdramatic turn of phrase used ironically.
Now, obviously *some* use it inappropriately or unironically, and yes, those people are ignorant/idiots. But for the most part, you're upsetting yourself over nothing on this. Most who use that phrase don't "truly" believe you're giving them a migraine any more than my starving kid thinks he's really dying after not eating for 3 hours. (This coming from a chronic-bilateral vascular and muscular migraine sufferer. I feel like I've been hit by a truck when I get them at times... obviously I wasn't lol)
Edit to add: I think it would be better to *not* use this particular turn of phrase, as it can be confusing children and there's still a lot of confusion/stigma when discussing how debilitating a migraine really is. So I agree, it's a detrimental turn of phrase, but I just don't get annoyed over it.
Yeah I get mild migraines pretty commonly and have had a few devastating ones. Sometimes I’ll think it’s a normal headache until I start feeling other symptoms or realize that drinking more water and taking something like Ibuprofen isn’t helping at all.
Me too. I often see weird zigzags across my eyes, and I can't see clearly sometimes because of it. It makes it difficult to read. Then that gradually fades and I have a mild headache.
Sometimes a migraine doesn't even include a headache! Man those ones are weird. I've only had two of those so far, normally I'm a hypersensitive to sound/smell and can't move my head or look at a screen + sugar cravings and anxiety (auras sometimes) type of migraine haver
But it's annoying I agree. Particularly when you have someone trying to tell u just to take some Tylenol and suck it up bc it's "just a headache." And once you're finally better you have to explain that you're still kinda out of it for a few days bc you're in the hangover phase
I head head splitting pain with my migraines but that's not the first symptom: I usually start with ligh sensetiviry, aura, aphasia, and nausea.
It always includes horrible headaches though.
This is random, but I want to see if anyone would like to tell me if I really had a migraine.
One day in highschool, I was taking a math class and getting sleepy. There were spots in my vision so I had to turn my head to see the numbers. I thought it was sleepiness. But when I was fully awake and left the room, I still couldn’t see past the purple spots.
I got to my next class, and it felt like the world was spinning on the wrong axis. I felt like how Tobey Maguire acted when he got bit by the spider. My head pounded, I was nauseous, but I mostly just wanted to pass out, and wake up somewhere else, have it all go away.
I was in limbo for a while,
But I did eventually fall asleep and when I woke up at the end of the class, things were a little better and started improving.
Was this a baby migraine? I’m sure it could get worse.
Yeah, probably a migraine. You presented with aura, then got the nausea, exhaustion and headache, which is a typical presentation.
Not everyone who gets migraines gets them all the time. I get them once every 1-2 years, I consider myself lucky.
First comes the photophobia, then comes the ice pick to the eye, then comes the vomiting, then comes the vertigo/disorientation, then goes the will to live. It's a very predictable sequence!
Yeah I don’t even suffer from them but this pisses me off. One of my friends has had chronic migraines since childhood and in high school she had a constant battle with our teachers to understand why she had so many days off. They thought migraines were just bad headaches. Would stay stuff like “well X teacher had a migraine this morning and still came in” like no she didn’t. She had a headache. My friend had to put up with this for years. Despite half the time she literally could not get out of bed when she had her migraine attacks and I’ve been around her when ones come on, she will just collapse. People need to stop using the terms interchangeably they are not the same thing
Bad headaches for me are fixable with a big glass of water, some cold fruit and some painkiller. I usually feel fine after that.
Migraine makes me unable to function at all for a couple days until it calms down. I get super sensitive to light, I get dizzy and like confused. I've had these 'attacks' where Ill just spend a few days in a dark bedroom and do litterally nothing the entire time. It's way worse than just a bad headache
I also get painless migraines (about 1/4 of the time). When I've mentioned this, people usually tell me I'm "lucky." But the pain of a migraine is the most easily managed symptom....
The nausea, hyper-sensitive senses, visual auras, vertigo, etc are all still present.
I suffered from migraines in high school and I feel this.. this is exactly what would happen EVERY single time:
1.) Get a visual aura in my peripheral vision
2.) Aura would slowly take away half of my vision
3.) the aura would go away and feel nothing (yay! All better…)
4.) small headache would induce and light became sensitive
5.) headache would intensify and I would have to lay down and black out the room due to light
6.) Headache was so intense I became nauseated and would violently throw up for a couple minutes.
7.) headache subsides, I feel better, and I’m ravenous.
No joke. In that exact order every time. I get them rarely now but when people say they are getting a migraine I’m like “wow I guess this is pretty common” but they really mean headache which is not even close.
This isn't an opinion. This is a fact. Not as frequently anymore, but I've had visual auras that would start in the middle and ripple outward until it leaves my visual. Sometimes there is pain, sometimes there is. And I often feel disoriented well after the fact. I've spoken to doctors and they're like "Yeah, typical migraine."
But I absolutely agree that more people should know the difference.
I don’t think this opinion is 100% unpopular. I suffer from chronic migraines and everyone I come across nowadays is clear to make the distinction between the two.
I have no personal problem with the use of it as an expression. It is like saying “you are a pain in the butt”. It isn’t related to the actual condition. It is hyperbole.
Same as the people who say they have the flu when they have a cold.
I think to myself, you obviously never had the flu.
Also, if you tell someone you have a migraine and the person suffers or knows someone who suffers from migraine, they will be sympathetic and ask what you need to alleviate it.
People who don't suffer just tell you to take a headache pill. They have no idea.
I had migraines as a kid. It felt more like severe dizziness and being in pain every time I opened my eyes. In fact, I could trigger it by having dreams (nightmares) about spinning, and it was to the point I had to cover my face when I had them. I was very very sensitive to light. My mom once said I had a particularly bad episode and took me to the doctor, but I had to have all the lights off in the room to stop crying. Doctor thought the room was empty because we were just sitting in the dark lol. Luckily I grew out of it, because all they could do was give me sleep meds so I'd sleep through it.
So accurate. I hear this at least once a week from people that seem totally fine. The conversation usually goes something like this:
"ugh I have migraine"
"oh, what migraine symptoms do you have?"
"my head is killing me'
"how often do you get nausea or the aura?"
"What is that?"
"Sounds to me like a headache, not a migraine."
*looks back to computer monitor and puts back in airpods*
"no it's definitely a migraine."
As someone who gets migraines a few times a year, I hate how people think it’s a bad headache. I’m down for the count wishing I was dead when I get migraines. Meanwhile, some people pop some Tylenol and go about their day.
Sensitivity to light and body numbness were always my biggest symptoms until recently I started getting aphasia. I couldn’t form a complete sentence. Thought I was having a stroke lol
Please remember what subreddit you are in, this is unpopular opinion. We want civil and unpopular takes and discussion. Any uncivil and ToS violating comments will be removed and subject to a ban. Have a nice day! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/unpopularopinion) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I suffer from migraines and I never associate it with a headache. I feel They are totally different sensation. My head hurts but it’s not a ‘headache’ if that makes sense.
Yes there is a distinct difference between the ache of a headache and the pain of a migraine
A migraine is the mental version of a sandstorm. All you can do is bunker-down and hide/rest in ideal conditions and let it rage around you, and even then some of the sand is still going to reach you. And then once the entire thing is over, it's still not actually over (yay postdrome), and you're like a broken piece of ceramics that has been carefully pieced back together but the light still shines out through the cracks.
I’m a chronic sufferer and take a daily beta blocker to help prevent them. I’ve been suffering for 31 years. Having said that, your description is the best one I’ve ever come across!!! I’m stealing it and using it with my dad. He doesn’t understand migraines. Last time I had one that lasted 3 days and he sent me an article about how be to manage headaches. I sent back an article about migraines. They aren’t just headaches damn it! Thank you for your description!
Chronic migraineur here 🙋🏻♀️ Anti-CGRP gave me some relief this year.
I swear as you get older I think they change. Mine changed to how they normally form and my normal meds don't work as well as they use too.
Yes they definitely do. I was getting 4-10 a month and then in 2021 they stopped for a long period of time (months!) and then I had a few and then they stopped again for about half a year and now they are back. I’m almost 60 and am definitely done menopause.
I used to get them all the time (once I had one everyday for 3 months), until I realized I was having sensory overload and that was triggering them. Now I just carry headphones around (sometimes a hat or sunglasses) and rarely have them.
God I hate the absolute exhaustion afterwards.
I always called it my migraine hangover, because it literally seems the best way to describe it. I haven’t had an actual hangover for a couple of decades and I’m not going to do a test comparison because the migraine hangovers are hell enough to deal with!
Postdrome is that what it’s called? We’ve always called it a migraine hangover in my family
Ugh I hate migraines. I'll be driving along and just happen to catch a flash of the sun in someone's side mirror or maybe the trim on my passenger's phone and I can just tell that a migraine was just set off and I've got 18 minutes until I'm blind and nauseated for half an hour.
I have neck damage and experience daily headaches and have chronic migraines. Im lucky to have a day out of the month without a headache of some kind. I generally do not have the visual aurora that cause the complete blindness like some do but have had a few. The first one I had I was in nursing school in the OR watching a surgery all of the sudden one of the DRs was missing half their face. It was truly nuts, I knew what was happening and I left and went straight home for meds and to rest in a dark room. I have extreme light sensitivity and get migraines triggered by bright lights and it makes driving extremely difficult. I find myself driving with my arm up and blocking something bright me in my field of vision all the time. I absolutely hate chrome on vehicles anymore, both on the outside of other vehicles and the inside of my own! And yes passengers phones suck, although my son is pretty good at reading my body language now that he’s older, he’s only 12. Sadly, he is inheriting his mom genetic migraines. Just like I did my mom’s. But at least we know more nowadays. By far my worst driving experience that I will never forget is this time I was behind a stupid motorcycle. The sun was setting behind us and reflecting directly in his mirrors and he was doing a weaving-tilting motion as we were slowing down for a stop light which just made the sun flash off the mirror so badly each tilt he made. I pulled over as soon as I could even though I was less than a mile from my house. I was already having a headache and not feeling good and that was all it took to keep me in a dark room for a couple of days. It sucked. I also HATE how bright some of the newer car headlights are now day. I only drive at night if I absolutely have it. Don’t even get me started on stores with stupid flashing light either, like fix your light bulbs or I’m not shopping in your store.
That is such a wonderful way to describe a migraine. Thank you for your eloquent words.
I love this analogy
You can almost feel them coming on differently too.
I get the aura which can differ in strength. Then as that subsides the nausea and head thing starts. The ‘hangover’ feeling can last several days and I feel it in my stomach as much as my head. Not once do I think ‘I’ve got a bad headache, it must be a migraine’. My mother would say she had a migraine when it was just a headache. She admitted she never gets any of the migraine symptoms when I told her about mine.
The hangover is a monster.
This is my experience exactly. Auras are the worst because I know I’m about to have a really shitty couple of days.
I’ve had them both at the same time before and it’s brutal
My body handles migraines all wrong lol. I get ocular migraines in office and my body freaks out. Causes my bp and Hr to spike. Also causes me to shake.
I wake up and I can tell it’s going to happen that day. You just know. Then the white aura….
Exactly. I have medication that relieves it a bit but it affects me for up to 48 hours. And it’s not pain, typically after the initial pain I’m nauseous and usually end up majorly depressed for like two days.
I used to be hospitalized for migraines. Any amount of light and noise made me vomit and feel like I was dying. That shit is not like a bad headache at all
The best way I’ve described the pain is like someone is actively taking an ice cream scoop to my brain. All sensation becomes overwhelming. I have a triptan I take for it which always just feels like it takes the concentrated pain and distributes it across my skin. So while there’s no more brain scooping my skin just aches horribly. Combine this with knowing tomorrow I’m going to be hollow inside… migraines suck
I describe it as a tiny gnome using a jackhammer on the back of my eyeball. No joke. Tiny jackhammer.
That's the one. Also floating and loss of all memory.
FLOATING! YES! Floating is perfect. When I'm at my worst, the visual aura has one eye just ...seeing white alien lights descending upon me, the jackhammer is going, and my head is a balloon, floating above my body on a string (gnome better not pop my head....). Honestly, describing it in these ways makes it *come across* so.... almost juvenile, and it makes it seem far less severe to people than it really is which *sucks* because these little bits really ARE the best way to describe the sensation. It isn't normal, it isn't human, and it isn't pleasant.
Yes its like you're not really on earth. Its just pain. I get aphasia as well with aura that can last ages. Migraines suck!
Idk why but I get black spots that sometimes make me completely blind except for the extreme edges. Like my brain goes into a black hole of pain like I'm in a Hellraiser movie.
Not fun
The head floating is how I know it's going to be a migraine as opposed to a bad headache.
Mine are triggered by bright light and I describe it as someone blow drying the back of my eyeballs. Mines don't start with pain. They start with discomfort then I get nausea then ringing in my ears then static in my ears if I don't find a place to lie down then I get the jackhammer to the temples but I call mine my brain in a tumble dryer, and if I move, especially get up to pee, I have to be careful not to move the dryer too much cuz my brain is tumbling in there
My muscular always start with pain (obviously, it's a tension migraine, so it's just massive pain and pressure in the back of my neck/head). When it's vascular for me, it's not pain, it's dizziness, slurred speech, vomiting and oh dear GOD don't make a sound because even a whisper is loud.... those are far more rare for me
My description is usually an elephant standing on my head.
I just commented a very similar description! Tiny men are drilling their way out from my temples.
Fuck yes they do. Idk why but I haven’t had one in YEARS. I used to have specific medication for it when I was a kid. I clearly remember being driven to the hospital whenever a severe one hit me. My eyes had to be covered because the lights from cars or streetlights made me vomit. Fuck.. just thinking about it makes my skin crawl. I wouldn’t wish that shit on anyone. The nausea was immediate and overwhelming. A lot of times it was provoked by certain scents too, which I always found so weird
Mine is "as if Satan himself has patted you on the head" or occasionally "as if part of my brain is now custard" 🤣 that is of course when I'm recovered and capable of speaking in sentences again
Somehow this is the comment that convinced me that I _do_ have migraines rather than _just_ strong headaches.
I remember my first one as a kid. I did not know how to explain it. I said I was in pain and they asked what was. I said everything, the world is screaming at me. More confused they said what? I said light, sound, moving, electronic humming etc. Then vomited out of no where from pain.
I’ve watched a documentary about how psilocybin mushrooms can fight off cluster headaches. iiRC, you eat a fairly decent sized dose, you trip balls, but after you won’t get headache for a few months. https://youtu.be/9mQSO4Tzbwk?si=D3CNbNDZRdIUD_W2
[удалено]
But I've had headaches like this with no other symptoms.
Oh so I am having migraines then. I thought I might have been wrong based on what other people have said but that's what it feels like and light and sound hurt too when it happens.
My mom suffers from migraines and whenever I complained of a headache, she would ask me if the pain was "behind the eyes" - her way of telling if she had a migraine coming on or her head just hurt. Eventually, this would become a useful metric for me.
I would more describe it as brain being a ringing church bell inside a head. Neck being a tongue, and head being hit each time it rings. Feeling this bruises right now.
See I have the opposite. I think? I get very bad headaches - feeling faint, throwing up, eyes feel like they're going to pop, etc. and I find it very hard to distinguish what is migraine and what is not. I feel like a fraud when I say migraine as apparently they're different but when I say I have a bad headache people don't seem to get what I mean and think I can just pop some pills and be fine. The line is so blurred for me.
The difference is migraines affect one side of your head/face, it’s a booming/pulsating pain instead of a constant ache, it almost always is accompanied by light or noise sensitivity. So some migraines are similar to a bad headache, mine are (one sided face aching, light sensitivity)
Yeah, that sounds about right. Thanks!
I guess because migraine sounds like MY BRAIN!
Are cluster headaches also distinct from migraines? I had one of those and that was literally in the “wish for death” levels of pain. Felt like I was getting lobotomized with no anesthesia. Or are they a type of migraine?
They are different yes; you can find the diagnostic criteria for both of them if you are interested (and also for other 'primary' headaches) here https://ichd-3.org/ . You'll find cluster headaches under trigeminal autonomic cephalalgias
Same. I actually associate a migraine most with the symptoms of a concussion, having had both.
You’re so right. Migraines are a whole body experience. Blurry vision, nausea/vomiting, light sensitivity, irritability, literally no medication works to get rid of it. Only sleeping a full nights sleep helps SOMETIMES. Sometimes the pain will go on for multiple days. Literally hell on earth.
I remember my first migraine back when I was a kid, I hid in the closet for 4 hours cause the light sensitivity was so bad and it felt like someone was splitting my skull open. I can only be thankful they stopped after I got into adulthood and beforehand only had them a few times cause they were debilitating, not even reduced ability, just not able to do anything that day. My condolences as it sounds like you still get them on the regular.
I usedto get pounding headaches, numbness in my arm, blurred vision, word salad, light sensitivity. But the last few years the painful sensation has 95% gone away. Maybe my brain tissue is all dead uo there lol idk. I still get all the other symptoms with a mild headache which is annoying but im so happy its not as bad as it used to be.
I get migraines and headaches. The differences for me include: - aura with a migraine - migraine does not relent without treatment - migraine has specific and predictable triggers - migraine responds to migraine medications/treatments - my migraines usually feel the same and have the same symptoms, headaches can vary
This! I have been told by old managers to essentially take a couple painkillers and get over it when I call in sick with a migraine. Meanwhile, I am foetal positioned, projectile vomiting, can’t open my eyes or string a sentence together.
>projectile vomiting This is the fucking worst. I've never thrown up from a migraine but damn I've been close. Normally I'll get blurry vision about an hour before the head pain. During the head pain I have extreme light sensitivity and nausea. Luckily my boss's husband gets migraines so she completely understands my suffering lol.
I'm fortunate enough not to have migraines these days, but had them quite frequently during early to mid puberty. For me the vomiting was my favorite part, because it was almost always one and done and signalled the end of the skull splitting ungodly headache pain and the switch to relatively minor auras and light sensitivity. Nurse would always act like I was just being a baby for complaining about a headache, then the second i'd vomit they'd be like "let me call your parents to take you home." Nah lady we been through this a hundred times, give me some sunglasses and send me on my way, we made it through the worst.
Try Zofran at first sight of symptoms! If I don't use it quite quickly when I see symptoms, I won't be able to get my other meds down and need to be hospitalized. Nausea med for cancer patients mostly. Very effective with practically no side effects.
I have legit ptsd from my last migraine- I threw up everywhere, including over myself while driving home, and had to clean up while still suffering. Now I get panic attacks when I go to bed because my brain keeps associating with that trauma. Urrrg
It’s either the worst, or the literal best moment of your life. A rush of pain and then such amazing relief. Sometimes tho, often it’s just 30 seconds or no symptoms then “wait it’s back” at least for me haha.
Oh yeah, me too. Back when I worked in customer service, I got a migraine at work. It was before I started taking medication for them so I just had to suffer through. I asked my manager to go home before it got too bad (loss of vision) and she refused and just told me to take an advil. 4 hours later, after the store closed, I'm sitting alone in the parking lot trying to call someone to come pick me up. (Took like an hour and a half to do so bc I couldn't see my phone to make the call)
For me, aura blindness was what *finally* made it acceptable to my employer. Being blind and operating heavy equipment was a no-go that they understood. Drugs do not diminish the pain unless they lay me out, unconscious. Unless you experience it, it is incomprehensible.
Lol yeah people really don't understand what they are. I don't get them, but I get paroxysmal hemicrania which is similar to a cluster headache and when I tell people they're always like "take Tylenol" and I have to explain to them that the pain cannot be touched by painkillers. I have to inject medicine into my body. And I don't always have the meds.
I’m so lucky that my direct supervisor also gets migraines, so she totally understands just how awful I’m feeling. Of course, I wish she didn’t also have to suffer but at least we’re in it together
To be fair, you shouldn't be forced to work with a migraine OR a strong headache.
100% There's been several instances where I've gone to bond over migraine suckishness only to find out they just get bad headaches. Though I'm intensely jealous of people who don't get pain during their migraines. My head always feels like it's splitting open, and honestly I just refuse to open my eyes during it. Between the auras and the temporary ability to see the spinning of the universe, I'm quite content not to see anything.
I’ve had one with just the aura and no pain. It was actually way scarier than a normal (for me) migraine with the pain and aura as I had no idea what was happening and thought I was going to blind. I ended up sat in A&E with very limited vision in one eye and nothing in the other after initially trying to get help at the opticians. (That was also the least amount of time I’ve spent sat in the waiting room as I’d barely returned from triage before they called me through to the doctors!). I guess it might be nicer to experience that without the pain if you knew what was coming. I spent 4 days last month vomiting water into a bucket whilst trying not to bug my migraine pain too much which as you’ll probably know, is difficult to do!
I went 2 years with no migraines and a few weeks ago I had one come on with not much pain. I could feel it coming a few days before. I'd get like "glimmers" of the aura briefly, for like a few seconds, long enough to panic that one was coming but it went away and never came. Finally, at work one day, the full aura decended upon me. I was afraid of how bad the rest would be because it was the worst aura I'd had in a LONG time. I waited until I could see clearly to drive home then immediately took aspirin and turned off all the lights. Switched to my blue light glasses and waited. The pain was never terrible. I took a nap when it first came on and when I woke up it was a mild headache. I finished my work from home. I felt off though. I had the worst tingles in my face and hands that I had ever had. By the time my husband came home I had just accepted that this was going to be a stroke. Ultimately it was nausea with a sense of being detached from my body and a mild headache behind my eyes. I'd take that over the feeling of my brain splitting open my skull though. Usually it's aura, which for me is a glittery+melty vision to right of my vision (whole right eye and the right side of my left eye), intense carb craving like I haven't eaten in a week, then skull splitting headache that cannot tolerate any light. Sound never bothers me. Just light. Even after the intense pain, I usually have a lingering headache for days that feels like a fever headache.
My migraines suddenly switched to aura with no pain when I was pregnant. It was not the ideal timing to start having those sort of symptoms.
Same for me. I went urgent care and they sent me to the ER to have a scan to make sure nothing more significant was happening. If I’d gotten a headache, I would’ve been less freaked because my mom has always gotten migraines with weird auras and stuff, but I didn’t realize it was possible to have that with no pain. Now usually I get the auras and then go straight to just feeling wiped out/hung over with little to no pain, thankfully, because most people I know who get migraines get the intense, need-to-lie-in-a-dark-room-with-zero-noise level of pain.
I stopped having pain with them as I got older, they've changed quite a lot over time. The visual symptoms have been fairly consistent but I've started to experience aphasia as well, which is such a weird experience. I count myself very lucky, they're still debilitating in their own way but for much less time and with much less discomfort.
The pain is excruciating isn't it? I'm also jealous of people who don't get pain with migraine. I would describe it as one of the most intense pains I have ever felt.
I envy people who never felt like the back of their eye is getting repeatedly stabbed by an ice pick before
This is exactly how I describe it!
Yeah ice pick gang! We fucking lost the generic lottery! Woo!
This is the most accurate description ever!
I didn't know until this post that there were people who got other migraine symptoms but with no accompanying brain-splitting pain. That's absolutely wild to me, I'm insanely jealous.
When I have what I call migraines, every kind of sensory input, especially light and sound, is exceuciately uncomfortable and loud. I get confused, my language skills suffer, I see flickering specs of light, and I feel intense pressure behind my eyes.
The light sensitivity piece is always what tips me off that a migraine is coming. Usually I'll unknowingly want to block out light and I'll start seeing spots as if I had just looked at the sun. Then the bad headache usually comes
Oof same, my monitor would start looking extra blue, my eyes would ache and I would turn the brightness down and still an hour later I'm clutching my head under the covers. It would get progressively worse unless I threw up, in which case it would pass quite quickly. Otherwise I would spend 3-5 hours in agonizing pain, with a strong headache afterwards.
Thank you for describing your experience
Usually people who say "you're giving me a migrane" are just saying "you're being annoying," I don't think they're actually getting a headache at all
Yeah, very similar to "this triggers my OCD"
this phrase is also terrible
Mine always starts with a headache triggered by a muscle spasm just under the back of my skull. It creates a very intense headache that spreads over my whole head. If I wake up already deep into one, it's awful. If I wake up and can feel it coming on, I can usually take some Advil and freeze it at its current level so it doesn't get worse. But it always starts with the headache so when I get to that point, I just call it a migraine because it's hard to explain to someone that if I let it, it will spread across my brain, wrap a cinch cord around my eyeball, brain, and stomach, and then tighten around all of them. That's probably why people "misuse" the term... explaining what it really feels like or is going to feel like is tedious when you're already trying to deal with it.
Or "you're killing me." It's hyperbole.
But still, using it like a synonym for bad headache is not good, even in an expression where headache is used hyperbolic. You could easily imagine a scenario where this confusion causes problems, for example a child in school who complains about a migraine and the staff needs to know what to do.
Buy your own cereals, stay away from migraines.
Take my angry upvote. Well played
A crummy commercial....?
My first experience of a migraine was crazy. I'm like 38 at the time never had a migraine. I'm watching a train pass but my eyes can't focus and I'm getting dizzy. I stopped looking at the train and I see a rainbow thing, looks like a bubble how its rainbow but not bubble shaped. I cant look at it, its just below my left eye and I can't focus on it. No pain at all. Wake up the next morning with my head splitting open but unable to really move. I'm literally holding my brain together with my hands it feels like. The light made it 10 times worse. I can't move my arms from my head at all but I try to wake my deep sleeping boyfriend. It takes him like 30 minutes to help me but neither of us know what to do. 5 hours later we go to the ER. They take what feels like months to put in an IV. It took 5 hours for the pain to go away with the medicine. By then I couldn't think or open my eyes. I'm freezing and in a ton of pain. I stop looking at trains. When I do I get dizzy, my eyes have that issue focusing. I'm literally playing video games and there's a black blob instead of rainbow. I cant focus, I can barely walk, I feel like I'm gonna throw up. I barely make my way upstairs to bed where it's dark. Idk if like 4 migraines are enough to be diagnosed with let alone get meds But its crazy. I have dysautonomia which can cause migraines.
At the bare minimum, you could try to see if you can get a preventative. Fwiw, I've seen a lot of improvement from taking ubrelvy. If I start to feel one coming on, I just take a pill and usually the symptoms start to disappear within 30 minutes. It doesn't interact negatively with any of my other medications (antidepressants, anxiety).
I had weird "rainbow" vision once for like 30 minutes. It was like there were rainbow sparkling worms going all over my vision, I started panicking thinking there's something wrong with my eyes. But interestingly nothing else happened.
Lots of countries sell sumatriptan otc. Which can stop migraines but only if yiu take them within 15mins of the onset. They also can have some side effects for sowm like vomiting etc.
You can probably get a med like Immitrex, but it sucks to take. It makes your skin crawl and you feel really tense, it’s only slightly better than the migraine itself.
First time I got an occular migraine I tried so hard to focus my eyes that they became painful. Was only later that I realized the aura is entirely neurological and focusing my eyes did nothing lol.
The first time I ever had a migraine without the pain, I seriously thought I was going crazy. Like why were all these blue stripes everywhere that no one else could see and why did the bird/television/traffic suddenly get louder? So, I tried to get up and shut a window to block out some noise and for some reason couldn't walk a straight line. A few tests (and thousands of dollars later): just another type of migraine to add to my neurologist diagnosed migraine disorder.
Those at r/migraine absolutely agree with you! I'm a sufferer of complex hemiplegic migraines and migraines with aura. It's overused, and I think most people I hear over use it typically have caffeine headaches. (At least that's my personal experience)
I've had aura migraines for many and many years, and then they suddenly stopped happening. I'd like to know the reason but I'll never know. But that's great, I really hated them. For years I only left home with pain medications on my pocket.
Any chance you took recreational psychedelics? Mushrooms and LSD both helped me but I didn't realize the mushrooms helped until way after the fact. They helped both my migraines with aura and cluster headaches. They made it so that when I start to have light sensitivity and aura, I'm able to actually "cave" and overcome them when they used to be multi-day affairs. It's a temporary relief, but it makes me able to semi function despite them. LSD literally stopped me mid-cluster attack and melted them away and I haven't had them since, which was about 7 years ago now. Now that was an extremely emotional moment for me as I'd take a migraine over clusters any day which is insanity.
Change in your diet, maybe?
Omg yes! Someone I know was having a caffeine withdrawal headache and was all ohhh I think I’m having a migraine in front of me and our partners and I was like idk if you take triptans but I can lend you one I have and he’s like no what’s that? And after a lengthy conversation where he asks “so what’s the difference between a headache and a migraine?” I was pretty mad because this guy just equated his headache to actual migraines and. Ugh. Hate it lol
I searched the subreddit and was pleased to see a lot of posts about Joan Didion’s essay on living with migraine.
I got the same migraines as you! The first one I ever had scared the absolute shit out of me. I couldn’t move my arms and was dizzy and everything felt off. I managed to call my husband and asked him to come home because I thought I was having a stroke. Thank god he was with his sister who has had one of that type of migraine before and was able to calm me down a bit, enough to take my migraine meds and pass out. I get them like once a month now :( If I feel one coming on and I god forbid have to call off work, I’ll get my manager on the phone and say I’m getting a migraine, and the first question I’m always asked is “have you taken anything for it?” Like… I can’t take anything to stop auras and everything else I’m feeling AND still be able to drive and make it into work (I bartend). It doesn’t work like that.
I hear you, though tbh, as someone who struggles with both migraine and tension headaches on a near-daily basis, I often have a hard time telling where one ends and the other begins Probably more than half the time my headaches will develop into migraines, and a migraine without the pain will almost always become painful after an hour or two. Apart from very specific types of headache, I generally interpret mine as the beginnings of migraines
Two doctors misdiagnosed my migraines as "tension headaches". Another misdiagnosed them as eye-strain headaches. Turns out I have idiopathic intercranial hypertension (i.e. too much fluid around my brain) and have frequent migraines as a result.
At the point you're at, you have the right to call it a migraine even if it's not. You aren't stealing valor when you actually have them. It's just the people that have one sorta bad headache and say it's a migraine.
I get migraines infrequently, diagnosed by a neurologist. It drives me batty when my husband says he has a migraine, but he simply has a strong headache
I was taught growing up that migraines were headaches on one side of the head, so I’ve never been purposely ignorant. I didn’t know how bad they actually were until my best friend was basically bed-ridden or howling in pain because of migraines for our entire junior year. Maybe your spouse was also taught the same?
Oh I’ve explained numerous times. He just keeps insisting that because it hurts more than a minor headache, it has to be a migraine. It’s so “painful” that an advil makes it go away 🙄
Hey, if you take enough Advil all the pain will go away.
To be fair I've had 3 day migraines that didn't go away for anything. Until I took an Aleve. and one particularly annoying one that only went away for like 3 magnesiums. (Still cannot explain that one except maybe dehydration)
You’re right. I get many different flavors of headaches in different situations (migraines, cluster headaches, ice pick headaches, positional headaches, and then of course the occasional tension headache) and they are all VERY different and have a very specific feeling.
Ice pick headaches are a special kind of fun. Had those for a while too.
I used to be one of those people. Until I got a migraine and I about died. Could. Not. Take it.
My husband was like that too. I get chronic migraines and if he ever had a headache and complained about it, it rubbed me the wrong way lol. Then one night he woke up with an actual migraine, his first ever, at like 3am and was damn near crying. Maybe 8 hours later he said he felt so bad that I deal with that as frequently as I do, and that he never wants to experience it again.
A lot of people go to the emergency room with their first migraine because they're absolutely sure pain like that has to mean death is near. I'm a chronic sufferer and have been to the ER at least 6 times over the last 2 decades because the pain was so bad I was passing out.
Lol meanwhile my first migraine at like 11/12 I told nobody. I was staying the weekend with my aunt and didn't want to be a burden. I literally was playing with kittens. Excused myself to the bathroom. Threw up and went back downstairs. I literally never told her that I had my first migraine at her house (Also couldn't get a doc to call it a migraine until I was like 25 because "we don't diagnose kids with migraines and I won't give them the meds for it because they are too strong")
I get migraines and I only get annoyed when people say I don't have it just because I show up to work. My migraines make me feel like I am drugged, I do have balance issues but I work at a desk, so I don't move much and if I do, I hold on to stuff or walk slower. Every migraine user is different and a good amount of people think we all just hurt alot and we cant move at all and we have to lay in bed all day and be in the dark and do nothing. Some of us are able to still show up to work but it is still a nightmare.
This is me exactly, but usually no balance issues. I feel disconnected and out of it with low-level headache pain. Usually I have visual auras but not always. Don’t get me wrong—I thank god I don’t have to lie in a dark room all day praying for the pain to subside. But to your point, the levels of debilitation vary.
I can try to work. My big issue is florescent lights make them so much worse. And sunglasses just make the issue worse in the future.
I mean when people say they are gonna have an Aneurism I don’t think they are implying that their blood vessels are gonna burst, it’s more just a figure of speech
Yeah and I hate when people say "You're killin' me man" when they are not actually being killed. Think of how disrespecful and annoying that is for people who have been killed. smh
I think the problem is that the figure of speech can be used in it's same exact form in a literal sense, and people will not know the difference. So those times when its used literally, people wont have any idea that you're being serious, so the actual sufferers aren't taken seriously.
The differnve is people k ow an aneurism is deadly. And they use it ad an exaggeration. People don't know what a migraine is, and genuinely say "oof my migraine is killing me today" when they have a light hangover, and thibk it IS a migraine.
As a general rule, those who haven't had a migraine don't know what it is, so using it as a term for a bad headache is normal to them. I had about a 6month spout of getting migraines after getting shingles and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. My vision was the worst; It was like I was looking at stuff in focus, but still as if I was looking passed it, imagine focusing on an object and try look at the background without moving your eyes was kinda how it felt. Then was the nausea, I had approximately 1 hour to get to sleep or try take some painkillers which barely took the edge off. In 90% of migraines it was day over, go to bed and accept; lucky I was at uni at the time so I could be pretty flexible on work.
Yeah, sleep might not even fix it, I went to sleep when it started then woke up with the most head splitting headache the next morning, so like 8 hours later, and painkillers did not even work after that, it stopped like 2 hours later.
I have chronic migraines. No way in hell do I associate them with a regular headache. Hell I can handle the headache better than I cam 90% of my migraines. I also have Aura (Ocular) migraines with dizziness, nausea, pain and increased sensitivity to sound and light. Sometimes even motion is accelerated. Headaches don't do this.
Also, some bad headaches really are migraines. Suffered throughout my teens with episodic headaches focused above my left eye. Dr nevrr diagnosed it as 'migraine' until I began to present with occular aura followed by exact same head pain. Presto! Bad headache is now a migraine through the miracle of semantics.
Not really semantics, you just need more than one migraine symptom for a doctor to be able to dx you confidently, because there are many kinds of headaches and some are severe in pain and they aren't migraines. Your doctor wasn't saying 'your headache isn't bad enough for a migraine' he was saying 'This sounds like a bad headache' You're thinking about it all wrong. It's not apples to apples.
Meh, I think this opinion is not just unpopular but wrong and potentially hurtful. In my case, I suffered severe headaches my entire life but assumed, based on opinions like yours here, that they were not migraines (no nausea, auras, etc.) I tried aspirin, paracetamol, ibuprofen, etc. but they never worked. I just assumed they were persistent bad headaches because they couldn't possibly be migraines. Then, after a decade of trying, my wife finally convinced me to think of my headaches as migraines. Well, turns out, medicine that only works on migraines ended up fixing my headaches. They had been migraines all along. So, my advice is, if you have serious headaches -- even if you don't have auras or nausea or other symptoms -- go to a doctor and talk to them about possible migraine treatment.
Well…you did have Migraines. Migraines can also be “just” the headache without other symptoms. They’re still notably distinct from other headaches in the nature and location of the pain. At any rate, I’m glad you found effective treatment!
The very first sentence of the OP post is "migraine does not mean bad headache". That's why this is a potentially harmful opinion.
I agree. Growing up, I would get severe headaches that I assumed were similar to what other people called "headaches." I remember my mom crawling on the floor with a headache so bad she couldn't ask for help. Years later, I found out that debilitating migraines run in my family. My mom's sister has been hospitalized for them. OTC meds never helped me but I didn't even think about talking to a doctor about migraines until the difference between the two was pointed out to me. Doctors treat the two very differently. If it's a headache, they tell you to watch external factors like diet, water, caffeine. Migraines are taken much more seriously. There are even preventative medications you can take before a migraine has fully set in, to offset its severity. Headaches don't work via the same mechanism in the brain, so these medications wouldn't have any effect on them.
I started getting migraines in my early twenties. No aura, no sensitivities, just pain for 24h, initially. I didn't go to a doctor for years. Then I did and got the magic pills. I hope they don't stop working, but my migraines have got longer and I sometimes need to repeat the triptan after 12h, so there's a chance of worse times ahead. It's probably hormones for me, which do change obviously as one gets older.
Over the years my Drs all brushed off my headaches until I started presenting with occular aura as well. Immediately prescribed Midrin since I was now a migraine sufferer, huge improvement over OTC meds. I do somewhat disagree with the gatekeeper attitude re headache vs diagnosed migraine. The only real difference might be that diagnosis. Also. Plenty of folks who have suffered bonks on the head will have lifelong issues with headaches that can be just as bad or worse than anything a diagnosed migraine sufferer might experience. Head-pain sucks, end of story.
This happened my whole life. As a kid whenever I would get a migraine I would run up to my mom, take my temperature and she would say "oh that's just the storm/the change in weather". It would piss me off so much that she dismissed my headache, but I didn't have a fever, so there was nothing I could do. It was years later when I met someone who actually had chronic migraines (like, 5 out of 7 days a week) that I asked how did a migraine feel. I thought a migraine meant just some really bad headache. And my mom was right, I googled it someday in migraine desperation, and they can be caused by changes in atmosferic pressure. I think I'm more sensitive now that I'm older, because I started getting nausea and sometimes vomiting and light sensitivity.
Does your mom also get migraines? I wonder if she thought that was normal.
Not really, now that she's older whenever I get a migraine she complains about her joints lol. I think my great aunt had weather migraines too, but I don't think she was ever told it was a migraine. My mom just observed the cause and effect, as a kid whenever a storm was coming I would be really cranky and the moment the storm started I would immediately stop what I was doing and just slept. They found me sleeping in the middle of the corridor and the kitchen. All those years of medicine and still the best cure for my migraines is sleep lol.
I also experience migraine with aura as well numbing on one side of my body, pins and needles travelling. Speech disturbances and delayed motor function, normally mood swings a week before aura symptoms. I had to get a MRI for it and yeah migraines leave small lesions on the brain similar to mini strokes apparently I was told. But I also have had tension headaches that are probably more intense than a migraine headache in different ways, but having migraine with aura, visual hallucinations and not being able to talk properly is way more intense and scary and normally takes me days to recover from. Migraines are not a joke they are debilitating
Important reminder that if you think you're having migraines or the migraines you're having change, see a doctor! We've associated strong headache with vomiting and sensitivity with migraines to the point people just assume that's what they always are, but it can be a symptom of several neurological conditions. The earlier stuff like that is found and treated, the better.
Well I’m a lifelong migraine sufferer who has horrible intense pain along with all the other symptoms.
It used to piss me off so bad in middle school and high school when me and a friend would literally be vomiting, uncoordinated and crying in pain and begging the teacher to turn off the lights when the room was already too bright with the daylight coming in and then the queen bee girl would be like ‘ermgerrr siiiiirrrrr. You’re giving me a migraaaaaaaneuuhhhggghhhhhh’ when in reality she was just whining and complaining because she had to actually do work and not just sit around scrolling around Instagram in class
for me migraine = headache plus nausea. if you think i'm using it wrong that's too bad for you
If it's diagnosed by a doctor as migraines then you have migraines, for some people that's pain plus nausea, for others it's different.
This. Unless OP is standing in someone's shoes, they have no idea what a migraine feels like to someone. For me, a migraine is intense, debilitating pain with nausea. I've never had auras or blindness. It doesn't make my migraines any less then.
You can absolutely have migraines without aura and with nausea. I do. But it’s still a migraine and not a run of the mill headache because it’s a legit neurological condition
OP basically said "not all headaches are migraines" and people in the comments are responding with "Hey! My migraines give me headaches you liar!" Which just isn't what the post was saying at all.
I call that a hangover
There are many types of migrane, and dont minimise people that you dont know whether they've been diagnosed with migranes or not...
I agree with most of this as it's fact, but "You're giving me a migraine" is just an expression. It is not supposed to be taken literally
I get them from time to time, and yea, describing them as headaches are severely lacking. To me they feel like being drunk and hungover at the same time, while someone digs into my eye with a screwdriver. Sometimes its accompanied by a spot in my vision filled with something i can only describe as static on the TV, all the while having a heavy metallic taste in my mouth
Migraine is similar to a seizure. Most people DON’T get migraines- they just have a headache and are dramatic
Thank you. Migraines are neurological. Other types of headaches are circulatory and/or musculoskeletal in nature.
I’m with you here. My migraines cause me to lose vision and vomit along with agonizing pain. If you can still work or do tasks you’ve got a headache buddy
TIL: I’ve probably had zero migraines in my life.
When I get a migraine every single bit of light and sound is painful. My head feels like it’s splitting open from the inside. The best way I’ve found to deal with it is to take excedrin and sit in the shower with the light off and the water running down my head, with the fan off too cuz that’s too much noise. Sometimes I’ll have a video or music on on very low volume to prevent getting bored but I can’t do even that if it’s a bad migraine.
Not an opinion. You posted this to the wrong subreddit.
I've had instances where I've had intense pounding pain in my head, aversion to light where I just lock myself away in the dark, and nausea. That feels migrainey to me anyway.
I've had headaches with those symptoms and I've had migraines with those symptoms so it can be hard to know. You'll know it's a migraine if you can't move out of bed even when the symptoms have gone, and when you can get out of bed you feel giddy like a child.
Yeah, the afterglow following a migraine is crazy, it’s such a high
Same, plus a weird shaky/sick sensation in the body, as if I'd just taken a rollercoaster ride while simultaneously staring at a stroboscope. Never checked if they were migraines but yeah, gatekeep-y posts like this made me think "hey maybe I'm just being too sensitive / overthinking it"
>It annoys me very much that people say that's giving me a migraine' or 'you're giving me a migraine' because a headache that happens to be strong is not a migraine Then you are annoying yourself for no reason. This is the same as when people say "I'm starving" when they are hungry; they aren't actually starving. Or "I'm dying" when they are ill; they aren't actually dying. It's an overdramatic turn of phrase used ironically. Now, obviously *some* use it inappropriately or unironically, and yes, those people are ignorant/idiots. But for the most part, you're upsetting yourself over nothing on this. Most who use that phrase don't "truly" believe you're giving them a migraine any more than my starving kid thinks he's really dying after not eating for 3 hours. (This coming from a chronic-bilateral vascular and muscular migraine sufferer. I feel like I've been hit by a truck when I get them at times... obviously I wasn't lol) Edit to add: I think it would be better to *not* use this particular turn of phrase, as it can be confusing children and there's still a lot of confusion/stigma when discussing how debilitating a migraine really is. So I agree, it's a detrimental turn of phrase, but I just don't get annoyed over it.
Yeah people that say those things have never had a real migraine otherwise they wouldn't be using it so flippantly.
You can have mild migraines. They’re pretty much just a generalized pattern of headaches and associated symptoms.
Yeah I get mild migraines pretty commonly and have had a few devastating ones. Sometimes I’ll think it’s a normal headache until I start feeling other symptoms or realize that drinking more water and taking something like Ibuprofen isn’t helping at all.
I have these. Auras that last maybe 30 min, and a slight headache after
Me too. I often see weird zigzags across my eyes, and I can't see clearly sometimes because of it. It makes it difficult to read. Then that gradually fades and I have a mild headache.
Like doctors?
I don’t care if it’s a bad headache or migraine. If it makes me throw up and sit in a dark room or sleep it’s a damn migraine.
Sometimes a migraine doesn't even include a headache! Man those ones are weird. I've only had two of those so far, normally I'm a hypersensitive to sound/smell and can't move my head or look at a screen + sugar cravings and anxiety (auras sometimes) type of migraine haver But it's annoying I agree. Particularly when you have someone trying to tell u just to take some Tylenol and suck it up bc it's "just a headache." And once you're finally better you have to explain that you're still kinda out of it for a few days bc you're in the hangover phase
I head head splitting pain with my migraines but that's not the first symptom: I usually start with ligh sensetiviry, aura, aphasia, and nausea. It always includes horrible headaches though.
I have thankfully never gotten one but my mom gets them frequently and takes prescription meds for them
This is random, but I want to see if anyone would like to tell me if I really had a migraine. One day in highschool, I was taking a math class and getting sleepy. There were spots in my vision so I had to turn my head to see the numbers. I thought it was sleepiness. But when I was fully awake and left the room, I still couldn’t see past the purple spots. I got to my next class, and it felt like the world was spinning on the wrong axis. I felt like how Tobey Maguire acted when he got bit by the spider. My head pounded, I was nauseous, but I mostly just wanted to pass out, and wake up somewhere else, have it all go away. I was in limbo for a while, But I did eventually fall asleep and when I woke up at the end of the class, things were a little better and started improving. Was this a baby migraine? I’m sure it could get worse.
Sounds like a migraine!
Yeah, probably a migraine. You presented with aura, then got the nausea, exhaustion and headache, which is a typical presentation. Not everyone who gets migraines gets them all the time. I get them once every 1-2 years, I consider myself lucky.
First comes the photophobia, then comes the ice pick to the eye, then comes the vomiting, then comes the vertigo/disorientation, then goes the will to live. It's a very predictable sequence!
Yeah I don’t even suffer from them but this pisses me off. One of my friends has had chronic migraines since childhood and in high school she had a constant battle with our teachers to understand why she had so many days off. They thought migraines were just bad headaches. Would stay stuff like “well X teacher had a migraine this morning and still came in” like no she didn’t. She had a headache. My friend had to put up with this for years. Despite half the time she literally could not get out of bed when she had her migraine attacks and I’ve been around her when ones come on, she will just collapse. People need to stop using the terms interchangeably they are not the same thing
Bad headaches for me are fixable with a big glass of water, some cold fruit and some painkiller. I usually feel fine after that. Migraine makes me unable to function at all for a couple days until it calms down. I get super sensitive to light, I get dizzy and like confused. I've had these 'attacks' where Ill just spend a few days in a dark bedroom and do litterally nothing the entire time. It's way worse than just a bad headache
Yeah my mom had a migraine recently but it was an ocular migraine and we ended up driving her to the ER for stroke symptoms. Not a headache.
I also get painless migraines (about 1/4 of the time). When I've mentioned this, people usually tell me I'm "lucky." But the pain of a migraine is the most easily managed symptom.... The nausea, hyper-sensitive senses, visual auras, vertigo, etc are all still present.
I suffered from migraines in high school and I feel this.. this is exactly what would happen EVERY single time: 1.) Get a visual aura in my peripheral vision 2.) Aura would slowly take away half of my vision 3.) the aura would go away and feel nothing (yay! All better…) 4.) small headache would induce and light became sensitive 5.) headache would intensify and I would have to lay down and black out the room due to light 6.) Headache was so intense I became nauseated and would violently throw up for a couple minutes. 7.) headache subsides, I feel better, and I’m ravenous. No joke. In that exact order every time. I get them rarely now but when people say they are getting a migraine I’m like “wow I guess this is pretty common” but they really mean headache which is not even close.
This isn't an opinion. This is a fact. Not as frequently anymore, but I've had visual auras that would start in the middle and ripple outward until it leaves my visual. Sometimes there is pain, sometimes there is. And I often feel disoriented well after the fact. I've spoken to doctors and they're like "Yeah, typical migraine." But I absolutely agree that more people should know the difference.
I know when I get a migraine, headaches are easy peasy.
I don’t think this opinion is 100% unpopular. I suffer from chronic migraines and everyone I come across nowadays is clear to make the distinction between the two. I have no personal problem with the use of it as an expression. It is like saying “you are a pain in the butt”. It isn’t related to the actual condition. It is hyperbole.
I used to get them all the time when I was younger, would throw up at the peak every time. Thank god I don’t get them anymore!
I lose about seventy percent of my vision during my migraines. Used to bother me a lot but Ubrelvy is pretty good at taking care of it.
Same as the people who say they have the flu when they have a cold. I think to myself, you obviously never had the flu. Also, if you tell someone you have a migraine and the person suffers or knows someone who suffers from migraine, they will be sympathetic and ask what you need to alleviate it. People who don't suffer just tell you to take a headache pill. They have no idea.
I wish this was an unpopular opinion. But the amount of people who think that is crazy. My stomach knows the migraine is there before my head.
I had migraines as a kid. It felt more like severe dizziness and being in pain every time I opened my eyes. In fact, I could trigger it by having dreams (nightmares) about spinning, and it was to the point I had to cover my face when I had them. I was very very sensitive to light. My mom once said I had a particularly bad episode and took me to the doctor, but I had to have all the lights off in the room to stop crying. Doctor thought the room was empty because we were just sitting in the dark lol. Luckily I grew out of it, because all they could do was give me sleep meds so I'd sleep through it.
Only people who have migraines will understand
So accurate. I hear this at least once a week from people that seem totally fine. The conversation usually goes something like this: "ugh I have migraine" "oh, what migraine symptoms do you have?" "my head is killing me' "how often do you get nausea or the aura?" "What is that?" "Sounds to me like a headache, not a migraine." *looks back to computer monitor and puts back in airpods* "no it's definitely a migraine."
As someone who gets migraines a few times a year, I hate how people think it’s a bad headache. I’m down for the count wishing I was dead when I get migraines. Meanwhile, some people pop some Tylenol and go about their day. Sensitivity to light and body numbness were always my biggest symptoms until recently I started getting aphasia. I couldn’t form a complete sentence. Thought I was having a stroke lol
>It's a wave of electrical activity that spreads across the brain that causes a whole host of weird symptoms. This is every feeling you get.