In 1856, a young Oxford mathematician called Charles Dodgson went to have his eyes looked at. He had been having migraines, and they did strange things to what he saw. Nine years later, under the name Lewis Carroll, he published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in which a girl grows so tall her head hits the ceiling and then shrinks small enough to swim in her own tears.
In 1952, the American Caro Lippman was the first to suggest that Alice's changes of size mirrored Carroll's migraines. In 1955 John Todd described patients whose severe headaches made objects look wildly out of proportion, and the name stuck: Alice in Wonderland syndrome. We may not get a rabbit hole, but we know the dark room.
That is the thing about a migraine. It is not just a bad headache. It is something the whole brain goes through, often in stages, sometimes with warnings days ahead, and those stages are where we have the most room to act, and where natural migraine remedies do their best work.
What a migraine is
A migraine is more than pain. It often comes with a dislike of light and sound, nausea and sometimes vomiting, and it is usually worse when we move. It is a neurological condition: something happening in the brain, not just in the head.
An attack can run through four stages. First comes the warning phase, which can start up to two days before the pain. Some people then have an aura, often a shimmering patch or zigzag in their vision. Then the headache itself. And afterwards, the stage people call the migraine hangover, when the pain has gone but we feel wrung out. Like a garden the morning after a storm.
The aura has a fascinating possible explanation. In 1944, the Brazilian Aristides Leão described a slow wave of quiet that spreads across the surface of the brain, damping activity as it goes. The shimmering blind spot of a migraine aura may be related to that wave, which would fit the way an aura seems to drift across our field of vision rather than appearing all at once.
The aura may have shaped history too. Hildegard of Bingen, the German abbess born around 1098, is remembered for her visions. Oliver Sacks, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, concluded that they were migraine auras.
Children can have migraines that barely touch the head. Abdominal migraine usually shows up in childhood, as bouts of severe pain around the middle of the tummy with the other marks of a migraine: nausea, vomiting, headache and a pale face. If a child has tummy aches like that, it is worth naming.
The warning before
A migraine can often be felt coming before the pain arrives, and it turns out that feeling is worth trusting.
In one set of findings, 97 people with migraine kept electronic diaries for three months, logging how they felt at random times each day so nothing could be filled in later. When they recorded warning signs, they correctly predicted the headache 72% of the time. The commonest signs were feeling tired and weary, difficulty concentrating, and a stiff neck.
Food can be part of the warning too. The Hidden Science of Sugar Cravings has the sudden craving for one food that can be the first stage of a migraine, hours or even a day or two before the pain.
So if you know your own warning signs, treat them as a message. That is the moment to rest, eat properly, drink water, dim the lights, and clear the evening if you can. A warning is a gift, even when it does not feel like one.
The trigger that is a warning
Chocolate has long been blamed for migraines. When it was put to the test, it was cleared.
Sixty-three women with frequent headaches, half of them with migraine, ate either chocolate or carob made to look and taste the same, without knowing which was which, after two weeks on a diet low in the foods usually blamed. Chocolate was no more likely to bring on a headache than carob. It made no difference whether the women believed chocolate was a trigger or not.
Put that together with the craving, and a likely story appears. The migraine was already on its way. The craving for chocolate was one of its first signs, and the chocolate took the blame. Poor chocolate. It was only the messenger.
Triggers worth tracking
That does not mean triggers are a myth. It means they are personal, and they are easier to find when we write things down.
The usual suspects fall into a handful of groups: strong emotions and stress, food and missed meals, too little or broken sleep, hormones, weather, noise, smells and bright lights, and hard physical effort.
Missed meals have been measured. Before and after the 25-hour fast of Yom Kippur, 370 hospital staff were asked about headaches. Of those who fasted, 39% got one, against 7% of those who ate, and among people with a history of headaches it was 66%. The longer the fast went on, the more headaches there were, and caffeine withdrawal and oversleeping did not explain it. Most were dull, two-sided headaches rather than full migraines, but the lesson is plain: if you get migraines, a skipped meal is a risk worth knowing about, especially if you fast.
The weather is not just an excuse. When 28 people with migraine who lived near a weather station in Japan kept a headache diary for a year, migraines became more common when the air pressure fell sharply from one day to the next. Weather was linked to attacks in 18 of the 28, most of them to falling pressure. If your diary keeps pointing at stormy days, you are probably right. Lightning seems to play a part of its own. Among 90 people with migraine who kept diaries for three to six months, the odds of a headache were 1.31 times higher on days with lightning nearby, and still 1.18 times higher once the rest of the stormy weather was allowed for.
Exercise can cut both ways. Of 103 people seen at a headache clinic in the Netherlands, 38% had at some point had a migraine set off by exercise, and for them neck pain was more often the first sign of an attack. Regular movement still made attacks rarer in Natural Remedies for Headaches, linked below, where exercise did as well as a daily preventive drug. If exercise sets yours off, build up gently, eat and drink beforehand, and keep notes.
Stress has a surprising twist. Stuck in Survival Mode, linked below, has the let-down effect: people prone to migraine were more likely to get one in the hours after their stress fell from one evening to the next. In those diaries, a drop in stress went with 1.5 to 1.9 times the odds of a migraine over the next 6 to 18 hours, while the level of stress on its own made little difference. That is why the first morning of a holiday can bring a headache.
Caffeine plays a similar trick. Best Coffee Alternatives: What's Really in Each Cup has why about half of regular coffee drinkers get a headache when they stop suddenly, usually starting 12 to 24 hours after the last cup. That is why the weekend lie-in so often comes with a pounding head. If your migraines like weekends, look at your coffee first.
Hormones matter too. Migraines often start after a girl's first period, become more frequent over the years, and peak around the time before menopause. Some women have migraines that arrive predictably around their period, and knowing that pattern helps plan around it. It also explains who carries most of the load. From puberty onwards, women have migraines more often and more severely than men, and between the ages of 30 and 50, up to four times as many women as men have them. Attacks can ease after menopause, and in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy.
A simple diary does more than any list. Note the date, how you slept, what you ate and when, your period if you have one, your stress, the weather, and any warning signs you felt the day before. After a few months, your own pattern usually shows itself. Our bodies keep better records than we think, once we start reading them.
Light
During a migraine, light hurts. The dark room is the first refuge, and when one is out of reach, a light-blocking brings the dark to you. But not all light hurts equally.
When people with migraine were shown different colours of light during an attack, green light worsened the pain significantly less than white, blue, amber or red light. Their eyes and brains responded less to green, which gives a reason for the soothing effect.
A small test took it further. Twenty-nine people with migraine sat in white light for one to two hours a day for ten weeks, then in green light for another ten. White made little difference. On green, those with occasional migraines went from about eight headache days a month to about two and a half, and those with chronic migraine from about 22 to about nine. It was a small group, and nobody was kept in the dark about which light they had, so it needs repeating. But green light is cheap, and nobody reported harm. A green bulb is a gentle experiment.
Lavender
Lavender has a gentler kind of evidence behind it. In one test, 47 people with migraine breathed in either lavender oil or plain liquid paraffin for 15 minutes during an attack. With lavender, 92 of 129 attacks eased fully or partly. With the paraffin, 32 of 68 did. Not a miracle, but a kinder quarter of an hour.
Essential Oils: What They Can Do and How to Use Them Safely has how to choose a true lavender oil, why an old, oxidised bottle can irritate the skin, and why oils are best kept away from children. Plant Therapy's is the true lavender that article picks.
The tested remedies
For what to do when a migraine starts and how to make attacks rarer, Natural Remedies for Headaches, linked below, has the tested remedies with their sources: water and salt, peppermint oil, ginger against a standard migraine drug, magnesium and riboflavin, regular exercise, relaxation, acupuncture, food and sleep. It also has the plan for the first hour of an attack: a quiet, dark room, water, a cold pack on the back of the neck, and ginger tea if nausea allows. A soft does cold and dark at once.
When to get help
Get help straight away if a headache is sudden and the worst you have ever had, or if it comes with fainting, weakness, numbness, difficulty speaking, a stiff neck, a fever, or changes in your vision.
And if migraines are becoming more frequent, or you are reaching for painkillers on most days, have them looked at. Natural Remedies for Headaches, linked below, has why painkillers taken too often can start causing headaches of their own.
Through the looking glass
Lewis Carroll turned the strangest part of his migraines into a story that has outlived him. We can do something smaller with ours: notice the stages, trust the warnings, and stop blaming the chocolate for something that had already begun. Even Alice found her way home.
Consistency matters more than any single remedy. Be patient with yourself, and listen to your body. It usually tells us a migraine is coming before it arrives.
This week, start a migraine diary, and write down how you felt the day before each attack, not only the day of it.
Want the remedies with the evidence behind them? Natural Remedies for Headaches: Ways to Relieve Pain Without Medication — when painkillers start causing headaches, the oil that matched a standard painkiller, the spice that matched a migraine drug, and the signs a headache needs help today.
Is stress behind more than the headaches? Stuck in Survival Mode: What Chronic Stress Does to the Body — what long-running stress does to sleep, blood sugar, the heart and the gut, the let-down effect, and what sounds the all-clear.
Know someone who blames chocolate for every migraine? Send them this, and the story of Alice.
Disclaimer: This article is general information. For advice about your own health, talk to a qualified health professional. If a headache is sudden and the worst you have had, or comes with weakness, numbness, trouble speaking, fever, a stiff neck or changes in vision, get help straight away.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
Sources
Wikipedia. Alice in Wonderland syndrome. en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia. Migraine. en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia. Cortical spreading depression. en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia. Hildegard of Bingen. en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia. Abdominal migraine. en.wikipedia.org
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