What Is a Migraine Tracker and How Do You Use One?

A migraine tracker is a log for your attacks and the days around them—when pain started, how severe it was, what you took, and what might have preceded it. You use one by recording entries consistently, reviewing the patterns that build up, and bringing that record to a doctor. It's most useful if you get recurring migraines and want evidence rather than guesswork about your triggers. It is not a diagnostic tool, and any risk estimate it shows is a statistical guess from your own data, not a medical prediction.

What a migraine tracker actually records

A complete tracker captures more than "headache at 2pm." The useful fields fall into a few groups:

• Attack basics — onset time, severity (often 1–10), and location (for example, left side).
• Symptoms — throbbing, nausea, light sensitivity, aura, and anything else you notice.
• Medications — what you took, when, and how much, including over-the-counter drugs.
• Possible triggers — sleep quality, alcohol, weather or pressure changes, skipped meals, stress.
• Recovery — how long it lasted and what helped.

Claru's tracker also lets you log sleep, exercise, and custom events alongside migraines, so the trigger data and the attack data live in the same place. That matters: a trigger is only visible when you can line it up against the days it preceded.

How to log without it becoming a chore

The failure mode of any headache diary is that you stop filling it in. Two design choices reduce that risk.

Voice logging. Instead of tapping through a form, you speak a sentence. Claru's example: "Throbbing on the left side since 2pm, about a 7." The app transcribes it and extracts severity (7/10), location (left side), onset (2:00 PM), and any medication mentioned. The input is your speech; the output is a structured entry. This is fastest when you're mid-attack and don't want to type.

A low-stimulus mode during an attack. Claru's "Migraine Mode" is a full-screen, distraction-free logging view with larger touch targets, reduced stimuli, and one-tap access to an emergency contact. If screens make your symptoms worse, this is the feature to check for in any tracker you consider.

A practical habit: log the attack when it happens (voice is easiest), then spend a few seconds the next morning adding sleep and anything unusual from the day before. Consistency over weeks is what makes the data readable—a handful of entries won't show a pattern.

How apps turn entries into possible patterns

Once you have weeks of entries, the tracker looks for relationships you'd struggle to spot manually. Claru's pattern discovery analyzes entries to surface possible triggers, timing trends, and correlations, including combinations of variables rather than single causes.

The honest framing: these are possible patterns and correlations, not proven causes. A correlation between poor sleep and attacks might reflect that both are driven by something else. Treat the output as a set of hypotheses to discuss with a clinician, not conclusions.

Reading a 7-day risk forecast

Claru shows a 7-day migraine risk estimate built from your history, weather data, sleep patterns, and personal triggers—for example, flagging a specific day as elevated, with contributing factors like poor sleep (16%), alcohol (16%), or a pressure drop (13%).

Two things to keep straight:

• The percentages describe how much each factor contributes to that estimate, not your chance of getting a migraine.
• The app states plainly that these estimates are not medical predictions or guarantees. Use them to decide when to be extra careful with sleep or hydration, not as a reason to change medication.

Turning your log into a doctor-ready report

The payoff of consistent tracking is a record you can hand over. Claru generates PDF reports with frequency analysis, severity charts, and medication logs—the three things a clinician typically wants: how often, how bad, and what you've been taking. Its example report covers a three-month window with 18 attacks.

Before an appointment, a report like this saves you from reconstructing months of history from memory, and it gives the doctor concrete numbers to work from. Ask what format your provider prefers; a PDF is usually fine, but some practices want specific fields.

Choosing a tracker: what to check

Claru is free on iOS and Android with no credit card required, per its site. If you want to compare options, test the logging flow first—if entering an attack takes more than a few seconds, you won't maintain the habit, and the patterns never materialize.