John Fletcher

Triggers… Did you know that they may not be as important as you might think? We get a lot of questions asking why certain things trigger a person’s headache to begin. Most often we hear things like red wine, chocolate, stress or not sleeping enough. In the literature these things are called “triggers”. It’s common for patients to identify what their triggers are - so that they can avoid these triggers with the intent of actually not getting the headaches and migraines anymore. While this might seem simple, surely its easy going without a few things, but there's a problem with this approach… At some points, sometimes there are legitimate things that can cause headache and migraine to happen, like when a person has an allergy. So if you've got something like celiac disease or are allergic to some kind of substance, and genuinely allergic to it, then your inflammatory response may cause the headaches and migraines to happen. However, with triggers like red wine, chocolate, bananas, tomatoes.. it is common that sometimes the migraine happens and sometimes it doesn't. For example; We often hear people say “I can have half a glass of wine and I'm fine, but if I have one glass of wine I'm not” or “I can have half a glass of wine if I'm not tired, but if I'm really tired and have half a glass of wine then I'm wiped out for three days”. It’s really quite mystifying! Triggers that sometimes happen with patients leave them feeling baffled as to what's going on. So lets go back a step… what is the cause of the headaches and migraines in the first place? Headaches and migraines occur when you have a sensitization process happening at the back of your brain at the top of your spinal cord in what's called your ‘brainstem’. There is a lot of different areas that pass in through this special area. Such as the neck, jaw, face, your skin around your face, and a few things from your fight or flight response, your tongue and your ears as well. Also of course, the feeling of the blood vessels inside your brain also have an influence here. All of these things go into the same part of your brain. Then what happens is that part of the brain becomes sensitized. So, if there's anything that's out of the ordinary for any of those things, all of a sudden it starts to become a bit of a problem. If you've already got a sensitized system and then you have something that impacts the serotonin level that's going through your bloodstream or perhaps the blood pressure going up or down, then those are normal changes in serotonin, those normal changes in blood pressure, those normal changes in posture perhaps start to cause a headache and a migraine to happen when generally it shouldn't and normally it doesn't. So… knowing this, instead of looking at what triggers we can avoid… It may be more beneficial to look at what is sensitizing your system in the first place. What is the cause of a sensitized system? The most common one is the top of the neck. The top three joints of the neck can sensitize that system really, really nastily in some people (often, it's actually just one joint). When one or all of these joints are not moving nicely, it can cause a myriad of different problems like; headaches, migraines of nausea, vomiting, dizziness. Here’s our way of explaining it…. If, say for example, a parcel was being sent from overseas to arrive here in Australia. The parcel is a box, and in the box was a hat, sunglasses, shorts and a book inside. Now as it is ready to be sent… a person in the warehouse puts a bag of anthrax into the box. The next thing you know… it’s all packaged up in the one box and sent to customs in Australia. Obviously when it gets to customs in Australia, the alarms go off, it goes absolutely bananas. The red light starts to shake, the alarms go off, the dogs start to bark. The right squad comes in to work it out. You can agree that there's nothing wrong with the hat, sunglasses, shorts or the book in the box... But the whole box is being shown as being dangerous because there's anthrax in it, okay? So, on its own, the hat, the sunglasses, the shorts and the book are actually all pretty good, but because the box has anthrax in it, the alarm system says that it's actually really, really dangerous and that box should be treated with absolute caution. This is kind of what happens with headache and migraine. If you've got something that's sensitizing the system. Say for example, the neck is acting as the anthrax in this situation. When you have extra things going into that box, e.g. a bit more tired than usual, a bit more exercise than usual, a bit more hormones or less hormones than usual, a bit more serotonin or less serotonin than usual. Then those changes are being interpreted as a really big alarm signal when it comes to the headache and migraine. So, we need to find out what the anthrax is in your delivery box, I suppose. Majority of the time it's the neck that's causing that to happen. The advice I would give is to get your neck checked by someone who knows what they're doing. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who claim to know what they're doing. What we have created is an eBook that explains this part of the brain. This part of the brain is called the T rigeminal Cervical Nucleus , but we like to refer to it as ‘The Headache Hub’. If you're interested in getting a copy of that feel free to click the image below, and the PDF version will start to automatically download. Have a read through what it's all about. It's about finding out what's sensitizing the system in the first place so that we can get your headaches and migraines under control. Hope that has been helpful – if you have any questions at all – feel free to reach out to us here ! Cheers and bye for now.