Some of those suspicions will be right, and some won’t. A migraine trigger diary is one of the simplest ways to tell the difference, and to bring something clearer than “I think it might be…” to your next appointment.
This guide covers what to write down, how long to keep going, and why some triggers are so hard to see without a little help.
This is a guide to keeping notes, not medical advice. If your headaches are new, changing, or worrying you, please talk to a doctor.
Three things make migraine triggers slippery.
They’re often delayed. A short night on Tuesday might show up as a migraine on Wednesday afternoon. By then, Tuesday is a blur, and the obvious suspect is whatever you had for lunch.
They often stack up. Many people find that one trigger on its own is fine, but two or three together (poor sleep, a stressful day, a missed meal) tip things over. That makes any single trigger look inconsistent.
Some “triggers” are early symptoms. Before a migraine, some people crave sweet things, yawn a lot or feel unusually tired. It’s easy to blame the chocolate, when the craving was actually the attack beginning.
A diary helps with all three, because it remembers the days before, not just the day itself.
You don’t need to log everything. Start with the migraine itself, and a few things you suspect.
Pick the ones you’re curious about. Common ones people track include:
Three to five of these is plenty. A short list you keep up is far more useful than a long one you abandon after a week.
This is the part people most often skip. If you only write things down on migraine days, there’s nothing to compare against. A quick note on ordinary days (“slept 7 hours, 2 coffees, fine”) is what makes a pattern visible.
Give it at least two to three months. Migraines don’t follow a weekly timetable, and a few weeks can easily be misleading, especially if your migraines are linked to your cycle or the seasons.
It’s fine to miss days. A diary with gaps is still far better than no diary at all. Nobody is grading it.
After a couple of months, look for things that tend to come before your migraines, on the same day or the day before.
Ask yourself:
Be gentle with what you find. Two things happening together doesn’t prove that one causes the other. A pattern is a good question to explore, perhaps with your doctor, rather than a final answer.
Any of them can work. The best diary is the one you’ll actually keep.
If you choose an app, check where your data goes. Health diaries are personal, and many health apps store what you write on their own servers.
We built Patterns to do the slow, careful part of this for you, privately.
There’s a ready-made starting setup on our page about understanding migraines and headaches.
You don’t need a perfect system. Tonight, write down three things: how you slept, how many coffees you had, and how your head felt. Tomorrow, do it again.
In a couple of months, you’ll know your own patterns a little better. That’s worth a lot, whether you use it to make small changes, or simply to feel a bit more prepared for the next appointment.
]]>We wanted to write a bit about what these sentences mean, and what they don’t.
Insights looks for a few kinds of links in your journal:
The more things you track, the more possible links there are, and some will look meaningful just by chance. Patterns tests every possible link, then applies a correction (called Benjamini–Hochberg, if you’re curious) so that a bigger journal doesn’t flood you with coincidences.
That’s also why it sometimes shows nothing at all. On purely random data, Patterns is designed to report nothing. An empty Insights screen isn’t a failure. It might just mean you need a few more weeks, or that the thing you suspected really doesn’t make much difference.
A pattern means two things tended to happen together. It doesn’t tell you why. Maybe late-night scrolling makes you anxious the next day. Maybe you scroll late because you’re already anxious. Maybe both follow a stressful day at work.
So we’d suggest reading every pattern as a question:
Is this something I’d like to understand better?
Sometimes the answer is to try a small change and see what happens. Sometimes it’s to bring it up with a doctor or a friend. And sometimes it’s simply to notice it, and let it be.
Self-tracking can tip into self-judgement. If a pattern feels hard to look at, it’s fine to close the app and come back another day. Your journal isn’t going anywhere, and it isn’t keeping score.
]]>You can set them up however you like. But if you’d like Patterns to find links, a few habits help.
Free text is wonderful for remembering, and Patterns keeps every word. But it doesn’t analyse it, because sentences are hard to compare fairly.
Choices are different. Each option is checked for patterns on its own. So if your Feeling tracker has “Anxious”, “Tired” and “Calm” as options, Patterns can notice that “Anxious” tends to follow late nights while “Calm” tends to follow walks.
A good rule: if you find yourself typing the same few words again and again, they probably want to be choices.
“Sad” and “Down” are probably the same thing for most people. Splitting them makes each one rarer, which makes patterns harder to spot. A shorter list of clearly different options usually works better.
If something varies in strength, like pain, energy or stress, add a 1–10 or 1–5 scale. The first scale on a tracker also sets the size of its dots in the Timeline, so heavier days stand out.
If you’re curious about sleep, steps, heart rate or the weather, consider turning on the Apple Health or Weather connection instead of logging them by hand. They import into your encrypted journal as their own trackers, and you can delete the imported data at any time.
Two or three trackers you’ll actually use are better than ten you’ll abandon. You can always add more. And if you’d like to see what’s possible first, Settings › Load demo data fills a journal with four months of example entries.
For more ideas, see how people use Patterns.
]]>Looking at that list, one thing became clear. A journal like this only works if you can be completely honest in it. And it’s hard to be honest if some part of you wonders who else might be reading.
Choosing privacy this way has trade-offs, and we’d rather be upfront about them.
If you set a password and forget it, we can’t help you get your journal back. We never had a copy of the key. That’s the point, but it’s also a real risk, so the app gently reminds you about it when you set one up.
It also means we can’t see how people use Patterns. We don’t know which features you like or what you track. So if something feels confusing or missing, please tell us. Your messages are the only way we learn.
Patterns is a place to notice things you might not say out loud yet. We think that deserves the same care as a paper diary in a drawer, only with a better lock.
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