I suffer migraine headaches at times, as do my mother and sister. Luckily my headaches are no where near as bad as theirs but they still make me miserable. Every once in a while I’ll have one bad enough to stay in bed all day, but for the most part they are just annoying.

After a while, I learned what triggered my migraine headaches. For me it was either lack of sleep or lack of food (or a combination of both). There was not a magic formula for how much sleep or food I needed, but if I was noticeably lacking in one or the other, I was pretty sure I’d have a headache soon.

So a simple solution is to make sure that I have enough of both so that the number of headaches I have are reduced. Unfortunately sometimes I just don’t get enough sleep or I skip a meal and bam here comes the headache. The worst part is that nothing I do really makes it go away any faster. I take pills, take a shower, rest, but I know how it will still last until the end of the day.

So here’s where I get really out of balance. If my headache is brought on by lack of food, when it comes times to eat, I will over eat. I’m hoping that the extra food will combat whatever physiological process caused my headache in the first place. Of course it doesn’t, it just leaves me feeling overfull and with a headache. In fact, when it is dinner time and I have a headache, I must constantly remind myself to only eat until I’m full, not until I’m bloated.

I have no idea why I struggle so much with this simple formula. Sleep can sometimes be tricky, especially with two small children, but food should be simple. I eat three meals a day and my schedule is such that they almost always happen at the same time, but still sometimes I skip or put it off until it is too late. So then I am left overcompensating and trying to deal with the aftermath of my decisions.

Isn’t that how we tend to handle certain things, especially things that we don’t like to face? We put them off until it is too late and then we overcompensate in the aftermath, when if we just did what we know we needed to do in the first place, none of this would happen.

All of this talk about migraines is making my head twinge. Can you trigger a migraine by talking about one?