I’ve got that information by taking notes for three months. The solution could be just trying to sleep eight hours but sometimes it’s inevitable because of the crunch time at work or personal project, going to a social event, etc. etc. I want to avoid any dependence of pharmacological drugs so what can I do? I tried different ways (founded in internet) to solve this problem: going to the gym, eating an ice cream after the aura, etc, etc. and nothing works for me.

In 2008, when I was thinking about my migraine problem I read Pragmatic Thinking & Learning by Andy Hunt. It’s a really good book and I like the way Andy explains how our mind works using computer metaphors. So I got an idea,… I’ve been involved in software development since I was ten years old so maybe if I thinking about the migraine as a software problem (bug) could help me to find a solution.

I spent a whole week thinking about the migraine as a bug. I used the trial and error method to verify my ideas for some months until I got this:

The migraine starts with 15 to 30 minutes with an aura, the problem is the amount of wrong information between the systems involved (brain and eyes) because I see something (aura) that doesn’t exist and my brain knows that so maybe it requests again and again information to the eyes. That could explain why after the aura disappears the headache is worse just behind the eyes because both systems were overloaded.

I can’t upgrade those systems (sadly) so I tried to find a way to filter the wrong information: closing my eyes, going to lightly room, etc, etc,… and one day I had a headache attack while I was reading a book and what I used to do is stop reading because reading with a little vertigo is quite complicated but this time I decided to continue and tried to concentrate in the reading and not paying attention to the aura. When the aura disappears I don’t have a headache!!!!

I was surprised about this event so I took my notes and write about it. Then every time I had an aura, I started to read anything and after the aura disappear most of the time I didn’t have a headache. My conclusion was:

To filter the wrong information I have to force my brain to pay attention to other thing (reading a book) instead of the aura.

The next month I tried to find other ways beside reading a book for avoiding the headache so with practice now when I have an aura I can pay attention to other things like the street, the computer, colors, etc. and don’t have headache. I have 15-30 minutes with the aura but I don’t have headaches for 6-24 hours and that’s improved dramatically my quality of living.

I hope to have time to write other post about this technique in detail. If you have the same type of migraine you could tried what I write here, maybe it could work maybe not but it could help you to find a solution for your case.

I don’t know why we won the game with a blind goalkeeper but that’s another story. When the game finished, I was feeling better because I can see normally but a terrible headache started. I felt like dying because it was so painful and lasted until the next day. I had two more migraines after that day with the same symptoms but I didn’t go to see a doctor because that was a headache and nothing more. My mother told me that she had something similar several years ago and she thoughts it was migraine.

When that happened, I was 15 years old and over the next years I had that terrible headaches only once a year so I forgot to think about it and try to find a solution. Sadly when I was 25 years old and I was working in a software development company when the headaches started again but this time they occur once a day during a week so I thought that something terrible is going to happen to me. I went to see a doctor and he ordered a lot of exams to find if something unusual was happening in my brain but he can’t find anything wrong so he told me: “You have migraine and you have to find what is the trigger“.

The doctor told me that pharmacological drugs can help me to avoid the terrible headaches but they are addictive so my body will need more and more to avoid the pain. I didn’t like that so I decided to find the trigger, I read a lot of information in internet and I started to take notes of what I ate, drank, weather, stress level, etc. After that terrible week, I have migraines more frequently from one to six times a month so after a few months I had enough data to see that my migraine trigger was little sleep or too much sleep and also the stress is an important factor.

I can try to sleep enough but work, my personal projects and also social events from time to time won’t let me sleep eight hours so what can I do? The migraine affects not only my productive time, it also affects my personal life so I decided to find a solution and in the next post I will share how I find a solution for my migraines.