What is the minimum I should record in a migraine diary?

Five things: when the attack started and ended, how intense it was, which side the pain was on, what medication you took, and whether it worked. That alone supports a diagnosis conversation and a doctor report.

Should I track every possible migraine trigger?

No. Long trigger checklists kill diaries within weeks. Track the core attack facts by hand and let context like weather, pressure and sleep be captured automatically, or note only one or two suspects you are actively testing.

Is a simple diary really enough for a neurologist?

Yes. Clinicians mainly need headache days per month, intensity, medication days and response to treatment. A consistent simple diary provides all of that; an abandoned detailed one provides nothing.

Guides

What to log in a migraine diary

Every abandoned migraine diary died the same way: too many fields, filled in during too much pain. The trick isn't logging more. It's knowing the small set of facts that actually gets used — and refusing to hand-track anything else.

Updated August 2026 · 6 min read

Start from how the data gets used

A diary entry is only worth what someone eventually does with it. In practice there are three consumers: your doctor, who wants attack frequency, severity and medication use; you, hunting for triggers; and future-you, deciding whether a treatment change actually helped. Work backwards from those three and the field list gets short fast. Anything that none of them will ever read is decoration — and decoration is what you'll be filling in at 2 a.m. with a throbbing head.

The minimal useful set

Five fields cover the clinical essentials:

Start time (and roughly when it ended). This one field generates your headache-days-per-month count, average duration, and time-of-day patterns. If you log nothing else mid-attack, log this.
Intensity. Mild, moderate or severe. Resist the urge for a 0–10 scale — coarse ratings are easier to give consistently, and consistency is what makes trends readable.
Side. Left, right, both, or switching between attacks. Unilateral pain is one of the features clinicians use when classifying headache types.
Medication taken. Just the name and the fact you took it. Counting the days you use acute medication is how medication overuse headache gets caught early.
Relief. Did the medication work — fully, partly, or not at all? Treatment response is often the first thing a neurologist asks about and the hardest thing to remember accurately.

That's it. An entry like this takes well under a minute, and a diary made of such entries answers the questions that drive real decisions: how often, how bad, what helps.

The nice-to-have layer

Everything else is context, and context is genuinely valuable — for trigger-hunting, not for diagnosis. Suspected triggers (what you ate, drank, how you slept), aura symptoms and their timing, where you were, your stress level, cycle day, the weather. The catch: this is precisely the layer that makes diaries feel like homework. Nobody nauseous and light-sensitive wants to reconstruct their day's meals or look up the barometric pressure.

The honest solution is to split the layer in two. Context that can be captured automatically — weather, temperature, pressure and its trend, last night's sleep — should be. Dim attaches all of it to an entry on its own, so the trigger-hunting data accumulates without costing you a single tap. Context that only you know — the skipped lunch, the stressful call — is worth a quick note if you're actively testing that suspect. Track one or two hypotheses at a time, not the whole universe of possible food and lifestyle triggers at once.

The friction rule

A diary's value is roughly its usefulness per entry multiplied by how long you keep it up. Adding fields raises the first number a little and collapses the second. When in doubt, cut the field — a modest diary you maintain for six months beats a thorough one you quit in week three.

Why less friction wins

Paper headache diaries handed out in clinics often have room for a dozen ratings per day, and completion rates show it: entries get sparse within weeks, then get backfilled from memory, which research on symptom recall suggests is exactly when the data stops being trustworthy. The NHS migraine guidance keeps its diary advice deliberately simple — when attacks happen, how bad they are, what you took — because a simple record kept honestly outperforms a detailed one kept sporadically.

There's a second, quieter reason to keep entries small: you log during attacks, and attacks are hostile logging conditions. A form you can complete in three taps on a near-black screen gets completed. A form with twenty bright white fields gets skipped, and the skipped attacks are usually the severe ones — biasing your whole record toward mild days.

A sensible default setup

Mid-attack: capture the timestamp and intensity. Nothing else is mandatory.
Same day, once functional: add side, medication and relief. Thirty seconds.
Automatically: let weather, pressure and sleep attach themselves.
Optionally: one short free-text note if something unusual preceded the attack.

Run that for two or three months and you'll have everything needed for a proper consultation — see our guide to the report your neurologist actually wants for how the numbers get read on the other side of the desk.

Quick answers

Do I need to rate pain on a 0–10 scale?

No. Mild/moderate/severe is what most clinical headache diaries use, and it's far easier to apply consistently mid-attack. Consistency beats precision.

What about logging food, stress and sleep?

Useful, but don't hand-track it all. Let sleep and weather be captured automatically, and only note the one or two suspects you're actively testing.

Should I log days without a migraine?

You don't need to write anything, but attack-free context matters — it's what your attack days get compared against. Automatic capture of sleep and weather covers this without effort.

Five fields. Three taps.

Dim asks for the essentials and captures weather, pressure and sleep by itself — on a near-black screen built for light-sensitive eyes.

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Dim is a diary, not a medical device. This article is general information, not medical advice — it does not diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition. Always consult a qualified clinician about your health.