What Is a Headache Diary and How Do You Keep One?

A headache diary is a running record of your headaches and migraines — when they happen, how severe they are, what symptoms come with them, what you took, and what might have set them off. You keep one so that patterns become visible over weeks, not guesses. It's worth starting if you get recurring headaches and want to understand your triggers, timing, or what actually helps. The main requirement is consistency: a few seconds per entry, most days, beats a detailed entry you only make once a month.

What a headache diary actually records

A useful diary captures the same handful of fields every time, so entries can be compared later:

• Timing — date, start time, and how long the attack lasted
• Severity — a simple 1–10 scale, or mild/moderate/severe
• Location and quality — one side or both, throbbing, pressure, stabbing
• Associated symptoms — nausea, light or sound sensitivity, aura
• Medication — what you took, dose, and whether it helped
• Possible triggers — sleep, stress, food, alcohol, weather, hormonal cycle
• Context — sleep hours, exercise, skipped meals, unusual stress

You don't need every field for every entry. The value comes from filling the same fields often enough that differences between attack days and non-attack days show up.

How to keep one without it becoming a chore

The failure mode of most diaries is friction: if logging takes minutes, you stop during an attack — exactly when the data matters most. Reduce the effort:

1. Log at the moment, not later. Start the entry when the headache starts, even if you only capture severity and time.
2. Use the fastest input you have. Tapping preset buttons or speaking a short description is faster than typing during pain. Claru, for example, uses voice logging: you say something like "throbbing on the left side since 2pm, about a 7," and the app transcribes it and extracts severity, timing, symptoms, and medication automatically.
3. Keep a low-stimulus mode for attacks. Claru's Migraine Mode is a full-screen, distraction-free log with larger touch targets and reduced stimuli — useful when screens are hard to look at.
4. Record the good days too. Sleep, exercise, and no-headache days are the comparison baseline. Without them you can't tell whether a "trigger" is actually more common on headache days.
5. Set one reminder. A daily prompt at a fixed time catches anything you forgot.

Turning weeks of entries into patterns

A single entry tells you nothing; a month of entries starts to show structure. Look for three things:

• Timing trends — do attacks cluster on certain days, after poor sleep, or around a cycle?
• Multi-variable triggers — many migraines come from combinations (poor sleep plus alcohol) rather than one cause. Claru's pattern discovery is built around surfacing these multi-variable and timing correlations for you to review.
• What helps — compare recovery time and severity across entries where you took different medications or acted early.

Claru also produces a 7-day risk estimate from your history, weather data, sleep patterns, and personal triggers. Treat this as a heads-up, not a forecast you can rely on — the app itself states these estimates are not medical predictions or guarantees.

Paper vs. app: which to choose

Choose paper if writing is genuinely easier for you and you're willing to do the analysis yourself. Choose an app if the bottleneck is effort or if you want correlations and a shareable summary. Claru generates PDF doctor reports with frequency analysis, severity charts, and medication logs — useful if your main goal is a better appointment.

Using your diary at a doctor's visit

Bring the record, not a summary from memory. A report that shows attack frequency, severity over time, and medication use gives a clinician something concrete to work from. Claru's reports are designed for exactly this handoff. Before the visit, skim your entries and note two or three questions the data raised — for example, whether attacks increased after a medication change, or whether a suspected food trigger actually lines up with attack days.

Getting started

Download the app (Claru is free on iOS and Android, no credit card required) or open a notebook, and log your next headache with at least time, severity, and medication. Keep it up for three to four weeks before drawing conclusions — that's roughly the minimum for timing patterns to emerge. If you want to see how the tracking, pattern discovery, and reporting fit together first, Claru's "How It Works" section walks through the track → learn → predict flow.