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How to track migraines: the complete guide

A migraine diary is the single most useful thing you can bring to a neurologist — and the cheapest experiment you can run on your own health. Here is how to track in a way that actually produces answers.

Updated August 2026 · 8 min read

Why tracking works when guessing doesn't

Migraine is a pattern disease. Attacks cluster around sleep changes, hormonal shifts, weather fronts, stress cycles — but each attack, seen on its own, looks random. Your memory can't hold thirty attacks with their surrounding circumstances; a diary can. When clinicians talk about diagnosing migraine, choosing preventive treatment, or spotting medication overuse, the raw material is almost always the same: a record of when attacks happened, how bad they were, and what you took. Guessing gives you anecdotes. Tracking gives you a dataset.

What to record

A useful entry answers five small questions:

• When did it start and end? Timing is the backbone of everything else — headache days per month, attack duration, and trigger lag all come from it.
• How bad was it? A simple mild/moderate/severe rating is enough. Consistency matters more than precision.
• Where was the pain? One side or both, and whether the side switches between attacks — useful for classification.
• What did you take, and did it help? Medication name and whether you got relief. Counting medication days protects you from the slow drift into medication overuse headache.
• What was going on around the attack? Sleep, stress, food, weather, cycle day. This is the trigger-hunting layer — valuable, but only if capturing it is nearly effortless.

If that list feels long mid-attack, it should. The fix is not discipline; it's splitting the job. Log the attack itself in seconds, and let details wait until you're functional again.

When to log: immediately, then annotate later

The single habit that separates useful diaries from misleading ones is logging at attack time, not at the end of the day. Two reasons. First, pain memory is unreliable — by evening, a severe afternoon reads as "pretty bad, I think," and yesterday's attack start time is a guess. Second, trigger analysis depends on timing: if you're testing whether pressure drops or short nights precede your attacks, a log that's off by half a day quietly breaks the correlation. So capture the timestamp the moment you notice the attack, even if it's a single tap, and fill in intensity, medication and notes once the worst has passed.

How long until patterns emerge

Shorter than people fear, longer than they hope. One or two attacks tell you nothing — any coincidence looks like a cause. Around ten to fifteen logged attacks, which for most people means two to three months, real patterns start to separate from noise: attacks stacking up after short nights, clustering in the days before a period, or landing on barometric pressure drops. Three months is also the window neurologists typically want to see before making treatment decisions, which is why it's the standard length of a doctor report. If three months of honest logging shows no pattern at all, that is a finding too: it steers the conversation away from trigger avoidance and toward prevention.

The mistakes that ruin diaries

Retro-logging. Reconstructing the week every Sunday feels like tracking but produces fiction. Studies of symptom diaries consistently show backfilled entries drift toward whatever story the person already believes. If you missed an attack, log it as approximate and move on — but make missing rare.

Overtracking. The opposite failure: a form with twenty fields that takes ten minutes per entry. It works for a week, then the diary dies, and a dead diary has zero diagnostic value. Track five things forever rather than twenty things for a fortnight. Our guide to what to log in a migraine diary draws that line in detail.

Single-factor blame. Two attacks after red wine and the verdict is in: no more wine. But alcohol, stress, poor sleep and social evenings travel together. Convicting one factor from two data points leads to shrinking your life without shrinking your attacks. Let the pattern accumulate before you act on it — and be equally willing to acquit a suspected trigger.

Only logging bad days. A diary of attacks with no attack-free context can't tell you what's different about the good days. The context — sleep, weather, routine — needs to exist for both.

How automation changes the math

Most of what ruins diaries is friction, and most of the friction is the context layer. Nobody with photophobia and nausea wants to look up the barometric pressure or count last night's hours of sleep. This is exactly the part software can do for you. Dim logs an attack in three taps on a near-black, glare-free screen, then automatically attaches local weather, temperature, pressure and its trend, and last night's sleep from Apple Health. You supply the timestamp and the intensity; the context arrives on its own, for attack days and calm days alike. When it's time to see a clinician, the whole history exports as a doctor-ready PDF.

The American Migraine Foundation recommends keeping a diary as a first step for anyone with recurring headaches. The method matters less than the habit: log immediately, keep entries small, let the context capture itself, and give the data three months before drawing conclusions.

Track without the homework

Dim logs an attack in three taps and captures weather, pressure and sleep automatically. Dark, quiet, private — no account, no ads.

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