Dealing with headaches is something that millions of adults all over the world must do. While some are mild, many other people experience severe headaches, often known as migraines. These generally will affect one side of the head and can be so intense it makes handling your daily responsibilities impossible. In addition to headaches, there are several other symptoms of a migraine, including nausea, temple pain, and pain behind the eye or ear. As you could imagine, dealing with these can be a nightmare. Thankfully, there are a couple of things you can do to bring down this pain and make it a little easier to manage. With that in mind, this blog post is going to list a couple of helpful tips to reduce your migraine pain.
Take Some Pain-Reducing Medication
A simple and effective way to reduce pain in the short term while dealing with a migraine is to take some pain medication. This could be an over-the-counter painkiller, such as Aleve or Tylenol, or even a prescription pain medication if your doctor recommends it. These are generally quite quick to act and should help you feel more comfortable relatively quickly.
In addition to these types of medication that reduce pain, you could also take some that can get to the source of the issue. For example, some migraines can be brought on by magnesium deficiencies. So taking a magnesium glycinate supplement can sometimes do wonders for relieving the pain associated with migraines.
Be sure to consult with your doctor or, at the very least, become familiar with what you are taking before ingesting any type of medication. The last thing you want to do is to take a supplement or medication that could end up doing more harm than good.
Turn Down the Lights
When you experience a migraine, there is a good chance that you are also experiencing heightened sensitivity to light and sound. As a result, sitting in a bright room with a migraine is incredibly uncomfortable and even painful in some cases. So, once you feel the migraines starting to come about, it is a good idea to make your room as dark as possible, and limit all loud or abrasive sounds. Turn off the lights, close the blinds and potentially even close your eyes for maximum darkness.
In addition to turning off the lights, try to relax as well. This could be through meditating, utilizing some essential oils, or turning on some white noise in the background. Anything you can do to destress yourself should have a positive impact on your migraines. Sleep is also a good idea – if you’re able to. The more calm and relaxed you can be, the less painful your headaches will likely be.
Keep Your Body Hydrated
Another great tip to reduce migraine pain is to keep your body hydrated. Being dehydrated is a fairly common reason for migraines to come about. This means you should be drinking a fair amount of water every day, but also reducing the amount of caffeine you have. This is because caffeine can actually dehydrate the body, which can increase your chances of suffering a migraine.
Not only can drinking water help you experience less painful headaches, but it can also help you get fewer headaches. There are several other benefits to keeping yourself hydrated with a lot of water as well. These include clearer skin, better brain functioning, improved physical performance, and many others. You should be having around two to three liters per day in most cases.
Use a Compress
Using a compress has also been helpful for reducing the pain associated with migraines. Placing the compress on your forehead when experiencing a migraine can help to soothe the pain a little bit. Some will also put the compress on their neck, which can have positive results, too. While many people prefer a cold compress in these cases, you can also use a warm compress if that works better for you.
Using this tip has very few drawbacks, as long as you don’t keep them on for too long or make the temperature too hot or too cold. Of course, be careful when exposing your skin to extreme temperatures, and make sure you don’t have any skin conditions or other issues that this could have an impact on. If you don’t have a compress that you can use effectively, you could also consider taking a cold or hot shower.
Keep a Migraine Diary
If you suffer from migraines with any sort of regularity, it’s a good idea to start keeping a migraine diary. This will essentially be a log of all of the migraines you experience. It should include when they start, how long it lasted, how bad they were, what you were doing when it came about and what you did to help the pain.
The goal of these migraine diaries is to hopefully begin to see a pattern or trend when it comes to migraines. If you can begin to see a pattern in terms of when they happen or what you were doing when they happen, this could be helpful in reducing them from going forward.
While you could keep it in a physical book like a traditional diary, you could also simply use the Notes app on your phone. While this tip won’t help reduce the pain of a migraine while you have it, it can provide you helpful information to hopefully reduce migraine pain in the future. If you know the foods or behaviors to ignore, your migraines will likely be less painful and less frequent.
Without keeping a diary, it will be hard to see trends in your migraines and find out what is potentially causing them or making them worse. Identifying trends or trying to create patterns will be next to impossible.
Conclusion
In conclusion, dealing with migraines can be a nightmare, but these tips will help to relieve and reduce the pain associated with them. While no method is perfect for everyone at all times, these tips should help in many cases.