How I mostly fixed my migraine, weather and sports-induced headaches

It all started with the early signs of developing a "migraine brain": many nights of my childhood, I had to wake up several times to vomit. Combined with a terrible headache, of course. In adolescent years, I would often come home from school, just wanting to lie down in a dark room until the headache pain, light sensitivity and sometimes sound sensitivity ended the next morning. Surely, I missed out on lots of fun in my childhood. I don’t remember when the puking part ended, but the rest never did… until I found the solution which drastically helped within a matter of weeks.

Doctors couldn’t do or understand much about migraine back then. At the age of 18 or so, I still had no remedy at all. I remember a general doctor telling me: "Strange, aspirine should work after 30 minutes". Of course, aspirine can be effective in some common headache types like tension headache, but barely for migraine headaches. Why would nobody ever tell me? I still tried that medication all the time to no avail. The term "medication overuse headache" only became well-known later. At that age, I already had some theories what’s triggering the illness for me, such as weather and air pressure changes, but my pure observations wouldn’t help because I couldn’t change the weather.

My main symptoms are a headache developing over several hours, then in case of very strong migraine also a neck strain spreading usually on one side of my head. Once developed, I wouldn’t get rid of it until waking up the next morning. Luckily, I have never experienced cluster headaches or migraine lasting several days. A visual aura happened only once, and scared me. Migraine can have many prodromes (early sign of migraine onset), symptoms with and without pain, and is therefore studied as multifaceted, allegedly hard-to-fix sickness.

For a while in my youth, I subjectively believed that drinking coke works against headaches. Even in later years, I tried a few caffeinated and other drinks in this faith. My parents and me never collected any data. It could have proven that the sugary drink didn’t help at all. I was too young and naive to get this idea, and no doctor recommended a headache journal either. All I got was two dead teeth and several root canal surgeries from all those drinks. They were available because my parents bought them all the time. Moms and dads, stop this crap!

Doctors had no idea of migraines back then. My parents also had the average health knowledge for that era: none. And who’s to blame them ‒ the 1990’s were still a time in which you had no other chance but to trust experts: doctors and unfortunately also newspaper and magazine articles. The internet, open science and wide-spread, free health information by governments or even influencers all happened much later. And despite the existence of these great sources of information, many people, not just our parents' generation, still don’t make use of them. So as I solved my migraine by a convincing extent, I also set out to tell others about the story, and clearly document my case on this public, free website. I believe that free information is a cornerstone of modern science. There are too many commercial interests and corruption conflicting with science and its subsidization. The solution is to simply override scientific malpractice by single people’s experience-based, anecdotal, and in my case data-backed, solutions. That’s my personal rationale behind this article and also behind the things I’ll write about next: free information gives people the power to fix their health.

Obviously, my solution may not work for everyone else. But you’ll read below that salt supplementation wasn’t my own idea. A whole Facebook group is dedicated to a related protocol and has helped an unknown number of people. There are forums and groups for many illnesses, which is a great way to discuss your specific symptoms. These groups are usually structured by questions and comment threads and, only if you’re lucky, clear instructions on what to try against the respective illness. They are however not an easily, publicly accessible and searchable way to find information about migraines. I’m therefore trying to put together the major parts in a concise way, even if I only have data and proofs for my single case.

By the age of 25, I hadn’t tried much apart from aspirine and triptans, in the hopes that some unproven "blood pressure in the brain vessels" theory plays out somehow. No medication really worked, and regularly buying a pack of 2 (stupid package size!) triptan pills at a horrendous price therefore wasn’t justified. Instead, I toughened up, so-to-say, not letting migraine days ruin my activities. They of course still did, because you can’t fully focus on work or hobbies, nor do sports with a full-blown migraine. The acceptance however worked somehow on the psychological level to weaken its position as a miserable part of my life.

In 2021, four years ago, me now aged 34, I somehow got the idea of writing down daily symptoms in a spreadsheet, as an attempt to get the headache and other symptoms solved. Not long after, my mouth ulcers were gone after trying out several interventions (hint: use SLS-free toothpaste). So I considered data as a great way to correlate symptoms, interventions and with that, potentially solve health issues. I continued, switched from paper spreadsheets to a huge Google spreadsheet, tried out more and more supplements and stuff in order to solve my main concern at the time ‒ the migraine headache and accompanying neck pain.

My strongest migraine attacks would usually come with strong neck pain, slowly spreading into my head. Many migraineurs have prodromes as first symptoms, and the headache appearing as last, most severe symptom. Prodromes let you predict that you get a headache, so the typical advice "know your triggers" should be extended to "know your triggers and prodromes". The nausea and light sensitivity from my youth are also well-known prodromes. "Feeling" weather changes is another one. I’d know in most cases if a strong headache develops over the next hours, but simply didn’t know how to prevent it.

Before having tried any interventions, when I started to write down how strong my headache was each day, I had a headache (of any severity) every third day, 120 out of 365 days! Life sucks, eh? Many of those were also full-blown migraine attacks. The way I wrote them down in my log was easy: 0=no headache, 1=weak headache, 2=medium and already quite painful, 3=ruining my day. With this data, analyzing the monthly/yearly count of headaches, and their average severity, was the next logical step. As a software developer, I wrote my own small program to analyze my spreadsheet data. That gave answers about whether I have more or less headache if I drink apple juice, take supplements, do sports, had alcohol, etc.

I also got enthusiastic about reading scientific studies around the topic. Which remedies exist? What supplements and dietary interventions could I try? I became focused on trying vitamin D, magnesium, eating enough food because skipping meals is a trigger for me, etc. And indeed, the year 2022 turned out to have 22 headache days less than the year before. Or in words: from every third day to roughly every fourth day! Quite a success, I thought, not yet knowing that long-term health issues can be solved much better.

In 2023, I tried many more supplements from scientific literature and ideas from the internet. For migraine, you quickly find a plethora of things to try. Apart from r/migraine’s top recommendation of salty McDonald’s fries, you’ll find quite some substantiated evidence in favor of several supplements, for instance coenzyme Q10, vitamin B2 (riboflavin), vitamin D or magnesium. And of course modern medication such as triptans or monoclonal antibody medications like Erenumab. Food triggers are also listed for a small percentage of migraineurs, but I hadn’t considered that at the time. Of those data-backed suggestions from science, and countless comments from other people on Reddit, I picked the ones which made sense to me. Since either or both of Vitamin D and magnesium seemed to help, I was eager to find other supplementary or lifestyle interventions to help my pain. Regular sports was one of the things I kept evaluating. I did neck stretches, neck strengthening with weight training, avoiding the valsalva maneuver (breath-holding) during training, different magnesium supplements and higher dosage, caffeine and electrolyte drinks, other supplements. My improvements from the previous year remained, likely because I was still using vitamin D and magnesium, but boy did this take a vengeance…​ higher doses of vitamin D (2000-5000 IU/day), taken over a long time, left me with permanent, severe dizziness over several months, useless neurologist appointments, their new distracting theories of "vestibular migraine", and so on. By looking into my spreadsheet, I could luckily see that I had raised the dosage before this occurred, and fully tapered off vitamin D to get rid of the dizziness. The body buffers vitamin D, so even after taking a small daily dose, I kept seeing symptoms. If you check online information, vitamin D is hyped as the world savior and high doses often mentioned as safe. That’s simply not true for everyone! This definitely made me trust N>1 science (studies on many subjects) less in the future, now equally taking single case studies and experience reports ("N=1 science") more into account. Reddit in particular turned out as great source for real people reporting about their health problems and solutions. Unfortunately, the average internet user doesn’t really detail their story at all, and health still remains individual. Anyway, internet answers can be great hints of possible illness causes that you didn’t consider before.

My research on migraine-related neck pain also misled me: my neck training sessions turned out as potential trigger of migraine, mostly since I was lifting heavy weights (up to 15 kg / 33 lbs). DOMS in the neck is a one-of-a-kind experience that not everybody gets in their life, and it surely made me stronger, but it didn’t make the headache much better in the long run, and definitely worse on training days. Another wasted effort to follow this idea, as so many before. The below section on the scientific theory will explain why migraine doesn’t originate in the neck. I consider neck pain as secondary symptom or prodrome of my migraine.

But I insisted to follow the obvious observations: intense sports were still triggering my headache. A common term for this is exercise-induced headache and it can have various causes. After a lower back injury in the gym end of 2023, I reconsidered how I do my training. I wasn’t really following common advice, even though it was known to me. I was weak in my back, but luckily smart enough to use the safety bars. Therefore, I didn’t destroy my life but was able to recover the muscle which just shut off during squats. Upon resuming strength training, I now always warm up for 5 minutes on the treadmill. I switched to exercises on safer machines and did Andy Galpin’s "3 by 5" protocol (as advertised by Andrew Huberman), meaning 3-5 repetitions, sets, minutes of break, etc. On top, I started with real progressive overload training, increasing the weight whenever I was ready to do more than 5 reps of the previous weight. Writing down the weights in a spreadsheet was again a good solution. A digital spreadsheet makes it easy to change exercises, hide the ones currently not in my plan, and so on. Google Spreadsheet comes with a good mobile app, so that’s my preferred tool. With the warmup, breaks and safety changes, the average headache severity reduced even more. Hard to quantify how much, since just a few months later, beginning of 2024, I had finally found the best-yet fix ‒ the salt intervention. Overall, in 2023, I was down to 83 headache days, i.e. one every 4.4 days.

Electrolytes were an often mentioned topic on the internet and in some studies about exercise-induced headache, so I researched it further. I tried apple juice soda and other rather natural sources which didn’t help, and later sports mixtures containing sodium, potassium and sometimes magnesium. Unfortunately, here comes a crux of analyzing preventative drugs or supplements: if you only take them when there’s a trigger (for me: sports) or you feel a prodrome (for me: noticing a weather change), you can’t really find out if it helps unless there’s a super-significant difference. Interventions must be tried in a preventative fashion over the course of at least some weeks. Headache frequency without electrolytes after sports was 20.1% in 2023, but with electrolytes it was worse at 36.8%. This proves nothing. In order to look at long-term effects, I also looked at "with/without supplement on at least X out of the last Y days". And indeed, if I took electrolytes after sports on 3 out of the last 7 days (this also means sports 3x a week), the risk of a headache (20.8% in 2023) would even be slightly less compared to not taking them (23.1%). Fine, those results wouldn’t make anyone jump and say that electrolytes are any effective. Such a small difference just isn’t significant.
However, I was lucky to also have analyzed only the highest headache severity separately ‒ and of those debilitating days, I had zero when taking electrolytes after sports in 3 out of the last 7 days. Getting rid of the worst days of my daily life was a big finding, end of 2022. This was the first time when I had a clear hint about electrolytes being involved. The finding was in a small time frame and only on sports days, though. It yet didn’t prevent migraine overall.

Regarding weather-induced headaches: the triggering weather pattern never became clear to me until I analyzed air pressure information of my location. What if it was air pressure change? That would turn out as true in my data: days with pressure increase had somewhat higher risk of headache. But it doesn’t matter, as attacks could happen on days with sunshine turning to rain, rain turning to sunshine, air pressure changing in any direction. Only the probability is different, but every day is a potential migraine day! I stopped writing down the useless weather information at some point. We can’t change the weather.

Those years of reading scientific papers, social media reports of real people trying interventions took a lot of my private time. It became a full-blown hobby. The average severity (my daily headache score between 0 and 3) went down from 0.57 in the year 2021, to only 0.38 in 2023. Significant, but not life-saving. However, I wouldn’t know how to do it differently. Doing nothing would have changed nothing at all. Was it all a failure? I don’t think so. Learning about a hundred failed attempts that don’t work taught me a lot about scientific methods, real-world statistics, making logical conclusions, following the obvious instead of miniscule and pseudoscientific hints, and that apple juice isn’t really a working electrolyte even if I had the feeling that it works. Subjective feelings all turned out as false or even negative, so writing down and objectively evaluating and graphing my statistics was a good course of action. As of 2023, my homegrown analysis app had to analyze many symptoms against many conditions and produced a huge table of correlation percentages that I starred at for hours to see significant effects of supplements and other attempts. This made no sense anymore. Each analysis took 10 minutes already as the program was poorly developed and slow, not meant for long-term usage. I set out to rewrite it in another programming language, add a web page to control what I want to analyze, and to visually show graphs for correlations of symptoms vs. interventions. I’m going to publish that application in the next months, and believe it’s a quite good biohacking and health optimization tool for people who are happy entering daily data into a spreadsheet.

Despite the failure to fix headache in those previous years, I consider these years a success. They turned me into a hobby scientist dedicated to my own health, and I became interested to use this for the good of other people, too, resulting in this blog article, for instance. The fix for migraine came in 2024, and later, in 2025, I would even be able to put a decades-long mental disease into remission with the help of health data collected in my ever-growing spreadsheet. But that’s for a later blog post, if I ever dare to share that story.

The results in the years 2021-2024:

The graph doesn’t show the severity of the headache days, only the count. You can see the dip from 83 headache days in 2023 to only 32 headache days in 2024, the year in which I started supplementing salt. That’s only one headache every 11.4 days! The average severity, not shown here, reduced from 0.38 to 0.15 (as mentioned above, I wrote down severity as score between 0 and 3 where 0=no headache, 1=weak headache, 2=medium and already quite painful, 3=ruining my day). In 2024, I only had 7 days of full-blown migraine. Numbers, numbers…​ they are critical to health science, but don’t nicely translate to what they mean for my life. The successful change in 2024 allowed me to finally consider migraine fixed to an extent that doesn’t make me fear it anymore. I am so happy and thankful for that.

I can only imagine what this could mean for people who have a really strong migraine problem. I have almost never experienced multi-day migraine. Mine mostly resolved overnight, but some folks even have episodes lasting weeks! Whether this solution works for you or not, I think it’s well worth the little effort to try it for a few weeks.

As mentioned, the main change is to drink a tiny amount of salt each day. If the scientific explanation holds true, there’s a good chance that certain types of migraine may have a root cause related to sodium-potassium imbalance in nerve cells and therefore supplementing with a safe dose of table salt could work for many people. There are unfortunately many types of headache in the International Classification of Headache Disorders (ICHD) for which I cannot provide any insights. There’s however enough information on the internet to distinguish the vastly different "regular" tension headache from migraines, so I don’t explain that here. This article is about migraines, and headache as their most typical and most painful symptom. I’m not a doctor and not giving medical advice here, so treat and try all information at your own risk. Below, you’ll find a section about safety, for good reasons.

Science provides many theories and even more recommendations for migraine, with some of them making obvious sense (such as weather changes and exercise inducing headache), but no clear "cause X? use remedy Y!" findings, or explanations why there are so many different triggers. Most people with migraines are left with barely working medicine such as painkillers, aspirine, triptans or supplements (e.g. magnesium, CoQ10). With those, they get a few percent of improvement in headache days, as I experienced in my own story above, but no life-changing outcomes. And most importantly, those treatments aren’t preventative, but curative and often applied only on pain days, usually too late after the root cause has already developed in the body. Funnily, if you do statistics like me, you may get surprising results such as headache being worse on days when you took ‒ for example ‒ aspirine. That’s easily explained: you don’t take aspirine as preventative measure (I hope you don’t; ever heard of medication overuse headaches??!), but only when you feel pain already. So statistically, headache severity will very likely be higher on those days, making the statistic totally useless because the data can’t answer if aspirine worked for you. You need to try a preventative, at best cause-treating intervention over a longer period of time, and can probably ditch medication at some point.

This is the intervention that works for me now, long-term:

At first, it took some weeks to notice much fewer days with headache or headache onset. I started the intervention in January 2024 and still got 7 headache days in that month. In March and April, I was down to only 2 headache days each month. Incredible! Since the effect doesn’t come from one day to another, it doesn’t feel like a miracle cure but I only realized after some weeks that something was strongly improved in my life. This wasn’t the end of the story though, so please read on about the safety research I did. And if you’re still interested by then, there’s a section at the end explaining what the theory behind this solution is, and how a large group of people may already have known, and benefited from this for over 10 years. It felt bad for me that the knowledge was out there on the internet all the time, me having no clue about it. My migraine could have been solved many years ago.

A common recommendation is to drink lots of water together with electrolytes, but my own data says that drinking too much is bad for my headaches:

For the probability of feeling any migraine prodrome on a day, the results are similar:

For me, 2000-2500 ml of water might be optimal, with more water making it worse. I can only guess that dilution could be the problem. Important: I only analyzed the same-day water intake. For example, if I analyze headache vs. yesterday’s water intake, the results are similar, but less pronounced. Also, I only consider salted water here and not which other electrolytes I did or didn’t take with it, such as magnesium. Significant linear-looking relationships in my data however often turned out as meaningful, so I go with roughly 2500 ml as my optimal amount, with more on sports days.

Intense sports or a full-day in a sauna and thermal spa can still evoke rather strong headaches for me. I haven’t figured this out fully and can’t claim a great remedy just yet. I’m wondering if electrolyte imbalance could explain those triggers as well.

Here are some additional recommendations:

That’s it ‒ some changes are simple, especially the salt part, and some take more effort and knowledge, like the dietary part. Mind that the intervention does not cure your migraine illness; it only prevents it, sorry!

The so-called Stanton Migraine Protocol, one of the sources recommending salt ingestion in water as migraine remedy, prescribes a larger amount of salt. I initially salted each glass of water as suggested. At some point though, dizziness symptoms started. With my previous dizziness phase caused by vitamin D (see my story above), I was already aware that the attempted interventions could be the likely culprit. And indeed, it turned out as too much salt which triggered the dizziness! (I’m not taking vitamin D anymore, so that was ruled out.)

Eating more potassium, or supplementing with a 2:1 sodium-potassium salt mix instead of table salt, didn’t change that.

Regarding the safety of sodium salt in general: too much and too little sodium both correlate with higher mortality. The WHO recommends reducing salt intake from the statistical average to less than 5 g/day salt (= 2 g elementary sodium). With processed foods, it’s easy to get over that threshold, with fresh foods not at all. You’ll need to judge your individual intake and read food labels.

Since experiencing dizziness, I tried a few variations of salt dosing. For a while, I turned back to not salting my water while still drinking 2.5 to 3 liters of water a day and keeping other things roughly the same as well. I tried without salt supplementation several times, as a crossover experiment, and it seems that my body has roughly a 10-day buffer. After that, my headaches come back, but dizziness subsides. These repeated, identical results also prove that the salt really works as preventative intervention. I didn’t want dangerous side effects like dizziness, so I reckoned that taking much less salt, or every second day, might do it as well. So what works for me right now, as written above, is to dissolve only a pinch of salt per liter, several times a day. Less than a quarter tea spoon of table salt.

I’ll keep testing this. In contrast, I’m not writing down and analyzing dietary salt intake, but that’s an option, too. Overall, my recommendation is to not treat the salt intervention as a perfect, final solution, and to observe whether it works for you without side effects.

By the way, very intense gym sessions still give me temporary dizziness, independent from salt intake. It’s a complex symptom.

When I found electrolytes as possibly related to my headache, I didn’t know much about brain neurology yet. That changed quickly. Angela Stanton, with her neuroscience background, pioneered both in creating a reasonable scientific theory and in bringing awareness to people about what works. Being a decades-long migraine sufferer herself, she’s much more believable than strange healing stories on the internet. Creating a Facebook group for healing migraine, in which, as of 2025-05, around 19000 people have joined, takes dedication.

That said, I particularly like the neurons' electrolyte imbalance theory as described in her book and articles. Here, I’m summarizing a few resources:

The sodium-potassium homeostasis explanation makes sense to me. But I can’t tell if it’s the correct explanation. And it doesn’t matter. The result ‒ getting rid of migraine pain ‒ is more important, as long as the intervention is safe to use. That said, I’m not ruling out other explanations. Just like I’m not excluding that I might have multiple causes for headache and other symptoms.

The whole endeavor was worth the effort. I became a hobby scientist, fixed more health issues afterwards, and invest even more effort into free and open science now: I’ll publish my free data analysis program soon. I learned that some of my observation-derived ideas turned out to be true: I had my own theory that electrolytes were involved, and that’s the case. Those observations should be followed first rather than trying hundreds of likely unrelated ideas from the internet or from studies that average out effects on a large population. Most importantly, my life improved a lot by solving migraine. And even though it’s not cured, and also not 100% fixed, the pain I have remaining is definitely something I can live with. And I’m happy being able to help others now by sharing my story, solution and specific instructions, fully backed by my own efficacy and safety data.

With the problem now solved closer to the cause, rather than only treating symptoms, certain triggers are fully gone: Flights usually gave me nausea and headache; even before a flight, I would already have a bad feeling in my body. Also high-speed train rides used to give me a high headache risk, likely due to the fast and countless changes of air pressure and weather along the route. With the salt intervention, these are no longer a trigger.

The result is incredible. According to the recommended treatment goals, I’m under "optimal control" with 1-2 monthly moderate-to-severe headaches (mid of 2025, much over a year into the intervention).

Thank you for reading, and best of luck to all sufferers!

My research on migraine will continue. I’ll probably try again to sustain a strict low-carb diet for a longer time. This article will definitely be updated once I have new insights.