“It’s just stress.” But then why doesn’t everyone with stress get migraine? In this article I explain what really happens in your brain and why that explanation falls short.
I once sat crying in my GP’s office. At the time I had migraine nine days a month, so severe that I lay on the floor hoping I would pass out. His answer: stress.
I don’t doubt that stress played a role. Chronic stress affects your body in measurable ways: cortisol, inflammation, muscle tension. That is all real. But “it’s just stress” explains nothing. It is an answer that closes the conversation without solving anything.
Why doesn’t everyone with stress get migraine?
If stress were the cause, everyone with stress would get migraine. But that doesn’t happen. You probably know people who have more stress than you and have never had a migraine. Meanwhile, you can have a calm week and still be knocked out by an attack for three days.
Your overworked colleague pulls all-nighters, lives on coffee and adrenaline, and at most complains about a tension headache that goes away with a paracetamol. You sleep eight hours, eat healthily, do yoga, and still end up nauseous in a dark room.
The “stress causes migraine” explanation raises more questions than it answers. Why does stress trigger migraine in you and not in someone else? Why do you sometimes get migraine during stress, sometimes after it, and sometimes in the middle of your holiday? Why does what works for one person not help another at all?
Stress is a factor, not the explanation
Chronic stress can undermine your health in all kinds of ways, and if you are reading this, you have probably experienced that already. But stress is a contributing factor, not the full picture.
So what makes your nervous system respond to stress with migraine, while someone else’s responds with stomach complaints, insomnia, or nothing at all?
The answer is not simple. Your migraine is the result of an interplay between how your neurons generate energy, the balance of electrolytes in your brain, your neurotransmitters, how your brain has learned to respond to certain triggers, your hormones, your immune system, your gut health, and yes, the stress you experience. One variable cannot explain a complex system. There are several underlying causes of migraine that together determine when your threshold is crossed.
Your migraine isn’t just about stress. It is about neurons in trouble.
The energy crisis in your brain
Your brain is about 2% of your body weight but uses 20-25% of your total energy. Neurons are incredibly demanding, and when they don’t get what they need (fuel, electrolytes, oxygen, the right neurotransmitter balance), they start to falter.
Stress can contribute to that shortage. It uses up your reserves faster, disrupts your sleep, unsettles your blood sugar, depletes your magnesium. But stress is not the only thing that can cause such an energy crisis. And more importantly: the same level of stress affects different brains differently, depending on how well supplied those neurons are.
This explains why two people can experience identical stress with completely different outcomes. Your colleague’s neurons have what they need to weather the storm. Yours don’t. That is not a character flaw, it is a system problem.
What you can do
“It’s just stress” makes it sound as if migraine is inevitable as long as you live a modern life, as if the only solution is to eliminate stress completely, which is about as realistic as eliminating gravity.
But as soon as you understand that stress is just one factor influencing the underlying vulnerability of your neurons, you suddenly have options. You can address the fuel shortage. The electrolyte balance. The neurotransmitters. The neuroplastic patterns that have built a motorway in your brain for migraine attacks.
You are not broken. Your neurons are missing something they need. And unlike stress, which you can’t fully control, there are concrete things you can do to support your brain’s basic needs.
Migraine is personal
The path to migraine is individual. Your migraine is not the same as mine, even if we have identical symptoms. The combination of building blocks contributing to your attacks is unique to your biology, your history, the specific vulnerabilities of your nervous system.
That is why standard solutions fail and why stress management alone is not enough.
Understanding your migraine means looking at the whole system. Not just stress, not just nutrition, not just hormones or genetics or trauma. Everything, and how it works together specifically in your body.
HEADSTRONG
Read all about it in my book HEADSTRONG: Understand Your Brain. Break Your Migraine Patterns.
