June 18, 2026

How to identify your migraine triggers

"Just avoid your triggers" is the advice everyone gives and almost no one can act on — because before you can avoid a trigger, you have to be sure it's actually yours. Migraine triggers are famously slippery: the usual suspects appear on lists everywhere, but the list that matters is short, personal, and often surprising. Finding it is less about willpower and more about method. The Migraine Trust makes the key point plainly — triggers vary enormously between individuals, and identifying your own takes consistent observation over time, not a generic checklist.

Why triggers are so easy to get wrong

Two traps catch almost everyone. The first is the coincidence trap. You had red wine, then a migraine, so wine goes on the blacklist — even though you've had wine a dozen times without incident and simply didn't notice. One vivid pairing convinces us of a rule that the full record wouldn't support. The second is the threshold effect. Migraine often isn't triggered by one thing but by several stacking up: a poor night, a skipped lunch, and a stressful afternoon may each be survivable alone but together tip you over. That's why a "trigger" seems to work some days and not others — it was never acting alone.

Both traps have the same antidote: stop trying to reason it out in your head and let a written record do the arithmetic.

The usual suspects — as candidates, not conclusions

It helps to know what's worth watching, as long as you treat the list as hypotheses to test rather than facts about you. The commonly reported migraine triggers, echoed by Mayo Clinic, include:

Poor or changed sleep — too little, too much, or an irregular schedule
Stress — and notably the let-down after stress, not just the stress itself
Skipped meals and dehydration
Caffeine — both too much and abrupt withdrawal
Alcohol, especially red wine
Hormonal changes around menstruation
Bright or flickering light and long screen time
Weather, particularly barometric pressure shifts

Notice that some of these are controllable and some aren't — which is exactly why identifying yours matters. Effort spent avoiding a factor that isn't actually your trigger is effort wasted, and worry spent on one you can't control is worse than wasted.

The method that actually finds your triggers

The reliable approach is unglamorous: log the attack, and tag the day around it. Every time you have a migraine, note the obvious details, then add a few tags for what preceded it — short night, missed meal, high stress, drank alcohol, pressure dropping. The essential and most-skipped half is tagging the days you don't have a migraine too. Without the calm days, you only ever see the hits, and a trigger that appears on 8 of your 10 bad days looks damning until you notice it was also present on 40 good ones.

Over two or three months, a real trigger reveals itself as a factor that shows up disproportionately before attacks compared with your baseline. That comparison — bad days versus all days — is the whole game, and it's why patterns beat impressions. How do I track my migraine triggers covers the tagging discipline, and what triggers migraines gives the plain-language overview.

Protect the controllables, make peace with the rest

Once your personal shortlist emerges, the response splits neatly. For the controllable triggers — sleep timing, hydration, regular meals, caffeine consistency — small, steady habits genuinely lower your overall load, which can matter most on days an uncontrollable trigger is also in play. For the uncontrollable ones — weather, hormones — the value isn't avoidance but understanding: a bad stretch feels less random and less like your fault when you can name the pressure front behind it. Remember that identifying a trigger explains a tendency; it does not predict any given attack, and no diary can. Knowing your triggers is about lowering the odds over months, not forecasting tomorrow.

Temple is a tracking tool, not medical advice — consult a healthcare professional.

Temple is coming soon to the App Store — it tags the days around your attacks so real triggers separate themselves from coincidences.