FRIDAY, Nov. 14, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Want to avoid migraines? Stick to a boring routine, new research suggests.
A major disruption to a person’s daily life, called a “retaliation” event, is strongly associated with an increased risk of having a migraine attack within the next 12 to 24 hours, researchers reported Nov. 11 in JAMA Network Open.
Eating or drinking too much, staying up too late, stressful events, unexpected good or bad news, or severe mood changes can be a “surprise” for your body and prepare you for a migraine the next day, researchers say.
“Incorporating retaliatory measures into migraine prognostic tools may provide individuals with more effective and personalized strategies to manage their headache risk,” concluded the research team, led by Dana Turner, assistant professor of anesthesiology, critical care, and pain medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Indeed, the findings support a person-centered approach to migraine treatment that “goes beyond a static list of potential causes and considers the unpredictable and situational nature of everyday life.”
In the study, researchers followed 109 people with migraine from April 2021 to December 2024. Participants kept diaries recording migraine attacks and potential migraine triggers they encountered.
The researchers created an average of each person’s migraine triggers and looked for days with “surprising” deviations from that average.
In their words, they quantified “the unexpectedness of daily experiences and the subsequent onset of migraine attacks.”
The results showed that after adjusting for other factors and individual differences, a highly surprising event increased a patient’s risk of migraine by 56% within 12 hours and by 88% within 24 hours.
“The results of this study provide evidence that the extent to which an individual’s experience deviates from normal patterns can be used to identify migraine risk in the near future,” the researchers wrote.
Dr. Noah Rosen, director of the Northwell Headache Center in Great Neck, New York, reviewed the findings.
“Much of this is consistent with what many people and I have imagined migraine to be: migraine is often a hypersensitivity in response to changing stimuli,” he said in a press release.
“Our bodies maintain homeostasis: eating the right amount, getting enough sleep, staying hydrated. In a sense, migraines can set off an alarm system when any of these things are disrupted,” Rosen added.
This may be why only 70% of migraine sufferers can identify a specific trigger, he said. They are looking for something specific, not a deviation from the norm.
“Retaliation is when something deviates from normal activity or requires a different response than normal,” Rosen explained. “Sudden stressful events may include traumatic experiences or experiences such as fights; they may include unexpected bad news or even good news; interruptions in normal activities due to other events that may interfere with normal work, school, or home activities.”
The researchers said future studies should consider better ways to track retaliatory events to help migraine sufferers prepare for an impending attack.
Detailed information
The American Migraine Foundation provides detailed information on migraine triggers.
Source: JAMA Network Open, November 11, 2025. Northwell Health, News Release, November 11, 2025
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