Is there a migraine personality type?

So, I’ve been having a chat about this with a couple of clients this week, and it’s pretty interesting stuff, so I thought I’d write a bit about it.

The migraine personality type.

Is there such a thing? Well, according to some studies – plus also my personal and clinical experience – there is.

In fact, it was previously thought that migraine had a psychological cause. Of course, these days we know that migraine is quite a bit more complex than that, but it is still worth looking at how our personality and emotions can influence migraine.

Research has found that those with migraine tend to have perfectionist and people-pleasing tendencies. This might look like gaining approval through hard work, or aiming for excellence in everything, even at a high energy cost. This can be accompanied by anxiety, or maybe frustration – because achieving perfectionism is damn near impossible. Even resentment can build as others don’t appreciate or recognise our efforts.

Plus, these tendencies mean that we can often diminish the impact migraine is having on us. We might just push through and downplay how we are really feeling.

Does this sound familiar to you? It sure does to me.

And it makes a lot of sense.

Being a perfectionist, or not saying no to other people, can drain our vitality and our energy, increase our stress levels in a massive way. And this all means that our resistance to migraine triggers is lowered.

So, what do we do with this information? Well, awareness is the first step towards change. And being aware that sometimes we need to be comfortable with imperfection, add less things to our to-do list and even – say no when someone asks us to do something – can help us manage our stress levels and ultimately, reduce our migraine attacks.

Drop me a comment or email on clinic@josiecarin.com and tell me if you can relate to this.