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Guilt and migraine walk hand in hand for many sufferers who often find the emotional burden as upsetting as the pain and other symptoms. Guilt comes from various sources, and left unattended can escalate into much more serious problems, damaging relationships at work and at home.
People are often surprised to hear that anti-depressant medications are offered in the treatment of migraine headaches. New migraine sufferers can feel a little shocked if their doctor recommends anti-depressants, especially when they have no depression symptoms or feelings.
For migraine sufferers, early warning signs are a godsend that often enable them to sidestep the pain through early medication. Everyone with migraine eventually learns their own patterns and triggers, how to adapt their behavior to avoid known triggers, and what to do when presented with recognizable warning signs.
Whilst it’s not totally out of the question for migraine to develop as you get older, it’s not that common either. Migraine sufferers often experience their first attack in their teens or early twenties, although the majority of sufferers tend to be in their thirties or forties. According to the Migraine Trust, 90% of people have their first headache before they reach age forty.
Sometimes it feels as if your migraines have no cure and you’ll suffer like this for the rest of your life. It’s a complicated condition with a myriad of causes, so the process of finding out exactly what triggers yours, what type of migraines you have and then hitting on the correct solution can drag on for a while.
Over decades of intensive research into migraine pain and its causes, knowledge of this debilitating condition has improved greatly. There’s still lots to do to fully understand what happens in the brain to cause so many diverse symptoms, but thankfully it’s now widely accepted that migraine is not simply another term for ‘headache’.
One of the most common migraine triggers is the weather. In a recent study, 75% of sufferers reported headaches brought on by changes in atmospheric pressure. It’s a simple matter to avoid something like red wine if you know this is one of your personal triggers, but what can you do about headaches brought on by fluctuations in barometric pressure?
The first step is to understand what the term means, and how it can potentially affect you.
If there’s anything migraine sufferers can do to prevent a full on attack, chances are good they’ll do it. We’ve identified four useful websites that provide tools that, while not created specifically for addressing migraine, address some of the common triggers and issues that provoke headaches on a daily basis.
In many migraine patients, the exact cause of the headaches is unknown. Individually, sufferers can discover their (often unique) pain triggers and learn to avoid them as far as possible, but this doesn’t explain why flashing lights, for instance, will cause a migraine in one person and leave another completely well.
We sit too long, use computers for hours, work in unhealthy buildings, and get too little fresh air. If everything else in health and life is equal, we cope even though those things are bad for everyone.
For migraine sufferers, conditions at work can escalate an already hard-to-manage condition. The good news is there are some things you can do at work that will help and, if those fail it’s possible co-workers or bosses can step in and make necessary changes.
