How to Keep a Migraine Diary on iPhone

Migraine memory is unreliable. During an attack you want darkness and quiet, not spreadsheets. Days later you guess at severity, forget which medication helped, and walk into appointments with “it’s been bad lately.” A migraine diary on your iPhone turns fragments into a timeline you can search, chart, and export.

This guide is for personal tracking—not diagnosis. Your neurologist or primary care clinician interprets the story; the diary supplies dates, frequency, and detail.

What to log for each migraine or headache episode

You do not need a novel. A strong entry usually includes:

Start and end time (or “ongoing” until you can close the attack)
Severity on a simple visual or numeric scale
Location (one-sided, behind the eye, neck, whole head)
Symptoms (nausea, light sensitivity, aura, neck stiffness, dizziness)
Triggers when you know them (sleep, stress, weather, hormones, food, screens)
Medications (name, dose, time taken, whether relief came and how long it took)
Relief methods you tried (dark room, ice, caffeine, rest)
One line of context (travel, deadline week, skipped meals, new supplement)

“Moderate migraine, left temple, nausea, took sumatriptan at 2 p.m., relief in 90 minutes” is enough to be useful.

Log during the attack when you can—and finish later when you cannot

The best data is captured while symptoms are fresh. If that is impossible, start with one tap: mark that an attack began, then add severity and meds when you are able.

Ongoing-attack workflows matter because migraines are not instant events. Duration and medication timing often explain why a treatment “did not work” (too late, wrong dose, or wrong attack type).

Use severity consistently

Pick one scale and stick to it all month. Whether you use mild / moderate / severe or numbers 1–10, consistency makes charts meaningful. A week of “7, 7, 9, 6” beats four entries that all say “really bad.”

Note functional impact in plain language: missed work, canceled plans, needed to lie down. Clinicians care about disability as much as pain level.

Track medications like experiments

For each acute treatment, log:

What you took and when
Whether symptoms improved (yes / partial / no)
Time to relief when you notice it
Side effects worth mentioning at the next visit

Over two or three cycles you see whether a triptan works better early, whether NSAIDs help only mild headaches, or whether you are hitting medication-overuse patterns—topics you bring to your doctor, not conclusions you make alone.

Review weekly: frequency beats single bad days

Once a week, scan your history:

How many headache days this week vs last week?
Any cluster around menstruation, travel, or poor sleep?
Did preventive meds change before a spike?

Search and filters help when you are preparing for an appointment instead of scrolling months of memory.

Prepare exports before neurologist or headache clinic visits

Many specialists ask for attack count, average severity, and acute medication use over 30–90 days. A PDF or CSV summary with dates and structured fields saves appointment time. Bring your phone, but a shared document reduces back-and-forth.

Be ready to say what you want from the visit: fewer monthly migraine days, faster acute relief, help with triggers you suspect, or clarity on preventive options.

Privacy on a health journal

Migraine notes are sensitive. Use app lock (Face ID) on a shared device, read privacy policies for backup and analytics, and export only when you choose to share with care teams.

Start with one month of honest logging

Commit to logging every headache day for four weeks—even incomplete entries count. Patterns show up faster than most people expect, and your next conversation starts with data instead of guesses.