When you develop migraine headache pain, your blood cannot circulate properly. This makes your blood cells engorge and your capillaries leak, which causes tremendous pressure contributing to symptoms and pain. Food sensitivities, menstruation, or stress may cause this. There may be other causes as well, but the end result is a painful headache. Doctors prescribe medication, but if you’d like a natural alternative, try autogenic training. This is a form of relaxation or meditation that you can find on YouTube or your favorite music app. When you are developing a migraine headache, your blood isn’t circulating to your extremities. The blood cells at the base of your brain swell up, pressing on nerve endings in the brain, which cause first aura symptoms (also called early warning signs) and later dreadful pain.
With autogenic training, you visualize your blood moving out of your core on your in-breath and to your extremities on the out-breath. For example, on the in-breath, you could imagine the blood moving from your core, up into your right shoulder, and on the out-breath, send it down your arm to your finger-tips. You might imagine you are sunbathing and your hands are getting hot as the sun shines on you. In reality, your hands are getting hot as the blood moves into them. You feel like the sun is heating up your hands when, in actuality, your blood is heating your hands.
When people are under stress or getting a migraine, their blood circulation is compromised, often causing their hands to get very cold. As you use the autogenic training techniques, the temperature in your hands will increase. When you’re relaxed, warm hand temperature with good circulation will be about 94 degrees (Fahrenheit). When the hands are cold from poor circulation, the temperature drops to about 90-91 degrees (Fahrenheit). When you use autogenic training, your hand and foot temperatures will increase.
In this technique, you are the conductor of your blood flow. All it takes are subtle directions through visualization, and your circulation will respond, doing exactly what you tell it to do. You’ll take 5-10 deep breaths on each arm independently, then you’ll do the same thing with each leg. Ideally, the whole technique will take at least 15 minutes so that the blood has time to flow into the limbs successfully. This will involve some visualization of being on a relaxing beach or in a field where you will visualize a warm, beautiful, peaceful place. You can find guided autogenic training meditations wherever you listen to music.
By practicing autogenic training meditations daily, you’ll be able to recognize a migraine coming on far enough in advance of the pain that you can learn to prevent migraines completely. Tracking your aura symptoms simultaneously (early warning signs of a migraine headache) will help since the earlier you recognize the symptoms, the easier it is to intervene with autogenic training. Eventually, you can switch to any kind of relaxation or meditation to continue preventing migraines. Eventually, you’ll stop having migraines completely. I haven’t had one in years. I think it took a few months to stop the migraines completely once I was meditating daily.
Meditation can help with any pain. Research shows that meditation can reduce pain by up to 50%. I’ve occasionally seen it reduce pain by significantly more than that. For beginners, I’d recommend a meditation that specifically teaches you how to stop focusing on the pain, but rather helps you tune into the parts of your body that don’t hurt. One example is done by UCLA MARC, a “meditation for working with difficulties”.
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