Self Help

The notion that certain foods and drinks contribute to headaches are not recognized by most headache sufferers. Sometimes individuals notice that a few items, such as chocolate, red wine and 2 cups of coffee, occasionally though not always trigger headaches. These items are the tip of an iceberg. If certain dietary triggers have stood out in your experience, you might assume that all dietary triggers would be so obvious, which is not the case.

One reason why headache sufferers do not more fully recognize dietary triggers is the potential delay of hours, which is sometimes up to a day or two, from the time an item is consumed until its impact is felt. It’s as though the migraine control center has a temporary “memory” for recent exposure to dietary triggers and can store their influence beyond their actual presence in your body.

Although sometimes dietary triggers act quickly, within minutes, most of the time they do not. Another reason dietary triggers go unrecognized is that even when you notice that sometimes a certain food is followed by headaches, you also notice that sometimes it’s not, leading you to believe that it must not be a factor. It’s kind of logical to think that a trigger would cause a headache every time you ate or drank it, but that logic fails to take into consideration the fluctuating level of all other triggers.

Imagine that one day your total trigger level is just below your threshold. You’ve been under a lot of stress, you didn’t sleep well last night and there’s a storm approaching. You’re on the verge of migraine activation and its consequences, including headache, but you don’t realize this since you don’t have a meter that warns you of the upcoming headache! That day you indulge in chocolate. It is also a trigger, and that day it raises your total trigger level from just below threshold to well above.

Sooner or later you get a nasty headache, and especially if it’s relatively soon, you may think, it is because you realized that chocolate can trigger headaches and maybe it just did. But because you enjoy chocolate so much and you don’t want to acknowledge the fact that you should avoid it in order to control your headaches, you give it another try a few days later. This time you don’t get a headache!

The difference is that this time you had a lower level of other triggers beforehand. You were feeling less stress, you had a good night’s sleep and the weather was better. But you don’t realize that the reason you didn’t get a headache that day is that you had plenty of margin for error. The addition of chocolate raised your trigger level, just like before, but this time there was a lot of room below the threshold to start so you did not cross the margin.