We Asked Women With Migraines What They’re Tired of Hearing — Here’s What They Said

There’s a script we’ve all read from, sometimes without realizing it. A friend mentions migraine, and a near-reflexive response slides out: “Oh, I had one of those once.” Or “Maybe it’s stress.” The intention is almost always good. The effect, women on the other end of these conversations will tell you, usually doesn’t land the way it was meant to.

Migraine sits among the most well-documented neurological diseases in modern research. Twin and family studies have estimated heritability at 30% to 60%, and a 2022 genome-wide association study in Nature Genetics identified 123 distinct genetic risk loci in more than 100,000 migraine patients. It is also one of the most common diseases in women: close to 20% of pre-menopausal women have it, says Dr. Seemant Chaturvedi, a neurologist with the University of Maryland Medical System and professor of neurology at their School of Medicine. Despite all of that, it remains widely misunderstood in everyday conversation.

For Migraine and Headache Awareness Month, we asked three women living with it about what they’re tired of hearing, and what they’d rather hear instead. Together, their answers sketch a quiet portrait of how a complex neurological disease still gets flattened into a problem its sufferers should be able to fix with magnesium, a glass of water, or a little less stress.

“It’s just a headache.”

For Claire B., the most aggravating version is the word swap: She says “migraine,” and the listener responds with “headache,” as if they were synonyms. “It minimizes my experience and makes me feel stupid for saying I’m in that much pain,” she says. Her standby description — for those curious — is a clamp on the brain, a flashlight in the eyes, every sound sending pulsing zaps through her nerve endings.

Kelly H. hears a different version. “‘Oh man, I had a migraine once,’” she says. “What they describe isn’t actually a migraine, just a bad headache.” Kelly has had migraines monthly since second grade; when they hit, she can’t move, can’t open her eyes, and can barely keep anything down. Kayla P. puts it more plainly: A migraine is more than a headache; her whole body is affected, and a flare can last days.

The clinical picture supports them. Dr. Madisen Olson, a headache specialist at Cleveland Clinic, notes that migraine has four distinct stages: a prodrome that can start hours or days before the headache, an aura for some patients, the headache itself, and a postdrome that can leave patients fatigued and foggy for another day or two. A patient who casually reports four migraine days a month, Olson says, often turns out on closer questioning to be affected for closer to ten.

“Have you tried [X]?”

The unsolicited fix is its own genre, often imported from social media. “My typical reaction is annoyance, especially since it’s usually something they saw floating around Facebook, like ‘hang sage in your shower,’” Kelly says. “I’m not just casually waiting for my migraines to disappear. I’ve spent my whole life actively trying to ‘solve’ them.” Her preferred swap is small but telling: “Have you found anything that helps you manage them?” The phrasing recognizes migraine as ongoing rather than a problem with an answer. Claire says her initial reaction is annoyance, too, but she softens if the person has tried the suggestion themselves.

Chaturvedi notes that neurologists frequently see patients who’ve been misdiagnosed for years — as sinus, tension, or stress headaches — before reaching the correct diagnosis. Which is part of why “have you tried” can miss the mark: By the time a woman is formally diagnosed, she has usually been navigating this for longer and with greater clinical depth than the suggestion assumes.

“Maybe it’s stress.”

This one bothers people for a clinical reason — because it’s wrong.

“Migraine is clearly not a psychosomatic disorder. It is a neurobiological disease,” Olson says, noting that the psychosomatic framing “causes significant stigma that is harmful.” The evidence is hard to argue with. Migraine clearly runs in families, and researchers have also mapped the specific network of nerves and blood vessels in the head where attacks originate. Plus, modern brain scans can actually watch a migraine unfold in real time, from the early warning signs to the lingering postdrome fog.

That clinical reality does not always reach the doctor’s office. Claire has been told by a clinician that her migraines were “most likely stress-induced.” Friends and family deliver lighter versions (“Maybe it’s what you’re eating or all the coffee you’re drinking.”), which reads less as concern and more as judgment about how she manages her own body.

Chaturvedi reinforces the point. Sleep, diet, and stress can provoke a migraine, he says, but they aren’t the main cause. “Migraines are a biological condition,” with measurable differences in brain function visible on MRI.

Here’s What They’d Rather Hear

The good news is that the right line exists, and these women have all heard it at least once. For Kayla, it came from a family friend (also a mom and migraine sufferer) who DM’d her on Instagram after she reposted a migraine meme, just to say she was sorry, that she knew how hard some days were, and that Kayla was doing a great job. “It was so validating because most days I don’t feel like I’m doing enough.”

Kelly found her version at the gym, in a conversation with another migraine sufferer that left her thinking, “Wow. She really gets it.” For Claire, it was the start of a 20-minute exchange that opened with, “Ugh, I get them too. I’m sorry. What are yours like?”

The common thread isn’t a fix. It’s recognition. The lines that work don’t try to solve the migraine. They just make space for it.

Presented by BDG Studios