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40 Migraine Symptoms You Need to Know

Woman laying on couch looking off into the distance.
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Migraine is much more than just a really bad headache. You might be surprised to learn all the ways it can affect your body. In fact, some people with migraine disease might not even know how much it’s impacting their life. Read on to learn the migraine symptoms you need to know.

What Is Migraine?

The classic definition of migraine is a pulsing, unbearable headache that may also occur with nausea or sensitivity to light and/or sound. Today, healthcare providers know that migraine is a neurological condition that has wide-reaching effects on the body and the mind.

Several bodily systems from head to toe — from sight and memory to the digestive tract to cold feet — can be affected by migraine.

Chronic Migraine Can Impact Your Senses

Our five senses are hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch. In many cases, migraine can cause unpleasant symptoms in all senses except taste. However, sensory symptoms most often occur in people with migraine with aura.

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People experiencing chronic migraine with aura report a series of changes to their senses just before and during an attack. These changes, collectively called “aura,” are often warning signs that a migraine attack is on the way. Migraine aura symptoms typically appear 10 to 60 minutes before the onset of headache pain and last no more than an hour.

Migraine Can Affect Your Brain and Mood

In addition to affecting your senses, chronic migraine can also disturb other brain systems and skills controlled by your brain. These systems and skills include balance, body temperature, cognition, memory, perception, and speech.

  • Researchers estimate that 30 percent to 50 percent of people get migraine-related vertigo with their attacks. Some people who experience recurring episodes of dizziness and imbalance during a migraine attack may be diagnosed with vestibular migraine.
  • Migraine messes with your autonomic nervous system, which regulates body temperature. Because of this, you may experience hot flashes and/or chills. People living with migraine may also feel chilly in the hands, feet, and nose due to a disturbance in the autonomic nervous system that constricts blood vessels.
  • During any of the stages of migraine, you might confuse one object for another, misunderstand directions, have difficulty finding words, or be unable to process information easily. Cognitive tasks that might typically take one minute can take much longer during a migraine attack.
  • Memory lapses can happen to anyone, but they happen a little more frequently to migraine warriors. Brain fog appears before, during, and after a migraine attack. It’s incredibly common. For many, it’s more concerning than the migraine pain itself.
  • Two unique symptoms of migraine that affect perception are Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AWS) and depersonalization. AWS changes the way you perceive the size and distance of objects. Depersonalization causes you to feel outside yourself — separated from your body, sensations, emotions, and behaviors.
  • A 2019 study in Cephalalgia reported that nearly 50 percent of patients experienced changes in speech before and during their migraine attacks. This included slowed speaking and slurring. Sometimes the impact is more severe, and a person experiencing migraine unwittingly speaks gibberish or migraine babble.

Mood Symptoms

With all these bizarre things happening to your mind, you’d expect migraine to affect your mood, too. But sometimes, mood changes are in fact a symptom — and not a byproduct — of living with migraine.

Here are some mood migraine symptoms.

  • It’s a classic chicken-or-egg quandary: Did anxiety trigger migraine or did migraine give way to anxiety? According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, migraine may precede the onset of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). GAD is characterized by excessive, persistent, and unrealistic worry about everyday things like family, work, money, or health. Worry and fear creep in around how long the attack might last or how to cope at school, work, or home. These anxious thoughts may even give way to catastrophizing, where you imagine the absolute worst-case scenario in the face of debilitating pain.
  • It’s not just adults who can feel grumpy and irritable. Researchers think colic, the pain and excessive crying that affects up to 20 percent of babies, may be a childhood form of episodic migraine.
  • Migraine attacks can also give way to bouts of pronounced depression. Researchers believe this has to do with fluctuating dopamine levels (the feel-good neurotransmitter) during an attack. Depression can affect as many as 40 percent of people living with migraine. Migraine and depression may coexist due to cause and effect or pure chance. The link is clear, but the reason for the link is not clear.
  • From the premonitory phase of a migraine attack to the post-migraine hangover, fatigue is ever-present in life with migraine. In children, fatigue and mood changes are the most common warning signs of an impending attack. Parents should watch for unexpected fatigue in their little ones, especially after a good night’s sleep. Inexplicable exhaustion versus everyday tiredness could also be a sign of migraine in adults.
  • Feeling a little irritable or easily annoyed? Are your “hackles” up? Irritability often presents before a migraine attack, even a day before, as your responsiveness to sensory input increases. This is your brain’s way of telling you it’s time to slow down and retreat to a dark and quiet place.

A Note on Cognitive and Memory Symptoms

Given the brain fog and confusion that come with migraine, you may worry about the long-term effects on your mind. The good news is that people living with migraine are not at an increased risk for cognitive decline. One 2007 study published in the journal Neurology showed people who experienced migraine headaches actually performed better on cognitive tests than people without migraine.

Migraine Can Upset Your Stomach and Digestion

Migraine can wreak havoc on your gastrointestinal system, causing some major tummy troubles. During all four phases of a migraine attack, the digestive system slows down significantly, and the stomach takes its time to pass its contents into the intestines. Delayed stomach emptying, known as gastric stasis, leads to a number of unpleasant symptoms, including nausea and vomiting.

However, note that the nausea, vomiting, and tummy troubles commonly associated with migraine are different from abdominal migraine. Abdominal migraine typically presents in children, with abdominal pain near the midline or around the navel. The pain is a dull or sore ache of moderate-to-severe intensity and is accompanied by a loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, and a pale pallor. It can appear with or without migraine headache.

Migraine and Cravings

With nausea, pain, and vomiting, how could anyone possibly be hungry if they are living with migraine? The condition works in mysterious ways, and sometimes you can develop strong cravings for foods that are often labeled migraine triggers. Do you need chocolate, sugar, carbs, or salty snacks right this minute? Your body may be signaling that a migraine attack is on the way.

Migraine Causes Pain and Even Muscle Weakness

Headache is the most common symptom of migraine (however, not every migraine causes a headache). But did you know that migraine can also cause ear, jaw, neck, or sinus pain?

And a rare form of migraine called hemiplegic migraine can also cause muscle weakness and temporary paralysis on one side of the body. It looks like a stroke, but the paralysis is temporary, lasting from a few hours to a few days.

The Complete List of Migraine Symptoms

Now that you know all the ways migraine attacks can affect your body, take a look at our definitive list of the 40 symptoms of a migraine. You might be shocked to learn that some of the symptoms you’ve been experiencing are tied to migraine. Many people experience “silent migraine,” or migraine without headache symptoms.

  1. Abdominal pain
  2. Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AWS)
  3. Anxiety
  4. Balance problems and dizziness
  5. Cold extremities (feet, hands, and nose)
  6. Colic (in babies)
  7. Confusion
  8. Constipation
  9. Depersonalization
  10. Depression
  11. Diarrhea
  12. Difficulty concentrating
  13. Earache
  14. Extreme food cravings
  15. Extreme motion sensitivity
  16. Fatigue
  17. Frequent urination (combined with other symptoms)
  18. Headache
  19. Hot flashes and chills
  20. Irritability
  21. Jaw pain
  22. Lack of mental clarity or sharpness
  23. Memory lapses
  24. Migraine babble, or struggling for words
  25. Muscular fatigue and weakness
  26. Nausea
  27. Neck pain and stiffness
  28. Olfactory hallucinations, or smelling something that isn’t there (phantosmia)
  29. Ringing or buzzing in the ear (tinnitus)
  30. Sensitivity to light (photophobia)
  31. Sensitivity to smell (osmophobia)
  32. Sensitivity to sound (phonophobia)
  33. Sensitivity to touch (allodynia)
  34. Sinus pain and pressure
  35. Stuffy or runny nose (autonomic nasal dysfunction)
  36. Temporary paralysis
  37. Tingling in the limbs or face, a pins and needles feeling, or numbness (paresthesia)
  38. Visual disturbances (blind spots, dots in the vision, double vision, flashing and flickering lights, floaters, tunnel vision, visual snow, or zigzags), some of which are called retinal migraine
  39. Vomiting
  40. Yawning when you aren’t tired

Have You Experienced These Symptoms?

If you’ve experienced any of these symptoms of migraine, you may be living with migraine disease and not even know it.

Talk to your healthcare provider about all your symptoms to ensure you’re getting proper migraine treatment. And keep coming back to Migraine Again for the very best in educational content about migraine care and treatment.

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