A migraine diary is only useful if someone else can read it in ten minutes. That someone is usually a neurologist, headache specialist, or primary-care clinician who has already heard “I get them a lot” and needs dates, intensity, duration, and what you took.
This is not a guide to treating migraine. It is a logging checklist.
Write the same fields every time
Pick a short list and stick to it. Changing the format every week makes patterns impossible to scan.
Useful fields:
- Start time and end time (or “still going”)
- Type, if you have a working label: migraine, tension, cluster, or other
- Pain from 1 to 10, even if the number feels crude
- Side and place: left, right, both, front, back
- Symptoms that changed what you could do: aura, nausea, light, sound, smell, dizziness
- Possible triggers you noticed that day — not a confession, just a tag
- Medication name, dose, and time
- One sentence of context if something unusual happened (travel, fever, night shift)
If you skip a field, leave it blank. Do not invent a trigger to fill the box.
Log during the attack when you can
Memory after a severe day is terrible. A two-tap “start” when pain begins, and an “end” when it stops, beats a Sunday reconstruction of the whole week.
If you cannot look at a screen, a voice note or a paper scrap with the start time is enough. Transfer it later. The timestamp is the part that usually disappears.
Thirty days is a story; ninety days is a record
One brutal week can look like a new disease. A quarter of dates shows whether that week was an outlier. Bring the longer range to a first specialist visit if you have it.
Counts that help in the room:
- How many discrete episodes
- How many calendar days had any attack
- Average intensity
- Average duration for attacks that ended
- The three most common trigger tags
- A medication list that is not “I take stuff”
None of these numbers diagnose anything. They stop the visit from being a fog.
Pressure and weather belong as context, not as proof
Some people notice attacks on falling barometric pressure. If you capture pressure when you log, bring it as a column, not as a theory. “Here are the hPa values on attack days” is easier to discuss than “weather always does this to me.”
Do not treat a barometer as a warning system or a treatment.
What not to write
Skip cure language. Skip “this oil fixed it.” Skip other people’s diagnoses of you. Skip hour-by-hour mood novels unless your clinician asked for them.
Also skip screenshots of five different apps. One export, one date range, one disclaimer that it is a personal diary.
Bring a file, not a phone unlock
Clinicians will not scroll your social apps. A PDF or printed table with the date range on the first line is what survives a busy clinic. Put your name and the generated date at the top.
If you use Auralis, the optional report is generated on the iPhone from what you already logged. Logging the diary itself does not require a subscription.
After the visit
Ask what they want more of next time: sleep hours, menstrual dates, caffeine, a specific medication. Add those fields. Delete fields nobody looked at. A migraine diary that shrinks is usually a better diary.