My sister suffers from migraine headaches. Do you have nature sounds to help relieve them?

Question:

Answer:

Migraine headaches are painful throbbing headaches related to blood vessel sensitivity inside of the brain. Triggers include stress, lack of sleep, particular foods or drinks, hormones, weather changes, caffeine withdrawal, or fatigue. While you can't really control hormones and weather changes, it is certainly possible to manage stress, food, caffeine, fatigue, and sleep.

I personally have an occasional migraine from not eating or sleeping regularly. Lights and loud noises would annoy me, and one side of my head would start to pound. That's when I know I've pushed my body to its limits, and I need to just take a break. I take some over-the-counter pain medication as soon as a migraine starts and try to go to bed.

The two key things to managing migraines is to take pain-relieving medications early on and sleeping it off. Most of the time, the medications will help stop the pain for a few hours — long enough to doze off and fix the problem at its source — stress and fatigue.

Soft soothing sounds like nature sounds help to drown out outside noises and surround your senses in a comforting world in bed, allowing for restful sleep. Most of our music is very soothing already. In particular, I would recommend sounds involving water, since that's not as sharp as bird chirping, is more predictable, and is better at drowning out random noises.

Newport Waves on our free downloads page works well.

We also recorded a small peaceful stream at a park next to the Long Island Sound in Rowayton, Connecticut. It's on our Nature Sounds CD.

Here's a link to SleepPhones SleepPhones.

Disclaimer: Written by Wei-Shin Lai, MD. This should not substitute for medical advice from your doctor. Please call your doctor if you have questions about migraines.