Migraines are complex — they rarely have one trigger, and the same food can be fine one week and a disaster the next. Logging food, sleep, stress, and migraine details together is the only way to find your actual pattern.
Migraine triggers are notoriously hard to pin down because they're cumulative. Red wine alone might be fine. Red wine after a stressed week and a bad night of sleep is a different story. Without a log that captures all three variables on the same day, you'll never see that combination — and you might wrongly conclude that wine has nothing to do with your migraines.
The food-migraine connection also has a built-in delay. Tyramine, nitrates, MSG, and other common dietary triggers don't always cause a migraine immediately — the headache often hits 6–24 hours later. This delay makes it nearly impossible to connect cause and effect through memory alone. A log with timestamps closes that gap.
There's also the problem of false positives. Many people eliminate entire food groups based on a hunch, only to find their migraines are unchanged. Tracking lets you test those hypotheses with real data instead of guesswork — and sometimes discover that the real trigger was something else entirely, like disrupted sleep or dehydration.
Neurologists and headache specialists often ask patients to keep a migraine diary for exactly these reasons. The Good Tracker makes that easier: log your food, your sleep, your stress level, and your head pain in one place, then review the patterns together.
Rate pain intensity on a 0–10 scale. Also note whether you had aura, nausea, light/sound sensitivity, or other accompanying symptoms — these help distinguish migraine types.
How many hours did it last? Duration matters for treatment decisions and for understanding which episodes were true migraines versus other headache types.
Log what you ate in the 24 hours before a migraine. Focus on anything different from your usual — aged cheeses, cured meats, alcohol, caffeine changes, MSG, artificial sweeteners.
Both too little and too much sleep are well-known migraine triggers. Log hours and quality. Weekend sleep-ins triggering Monday migraines is one of the most common patterns people discover.
Dehydration is a trigger for many migraine sufferers. A simple daily hydration rating (poor/okay/good) is enough to see the pattern in your data.
Stress doesn't just trigger migraines — stress letdown (relaxing after a high-stress period) is its own trigger. Log your stress rating daily, not just during migraines.
Log what you took and when, including whether it worked. This is essential for preventing medication overuse headache and for honest conversations with your neurologist.
Migraine triggers only reveal themselves in contrast to non-migraine days. If you only log when you have a headache, you have no baseline to compare against. Daily food and sleep logging is what makes the pattern visible.
Add foods individually so you can search for them across your history. Use a voice note to describe anything unusual about the day — skipped meal, more coffee than usual, a stressful work situation — that the sliders don't capture.
Tap the flare/crash flag on any day with a migraine. This makes them easy to find in your history and lets you look back at the preceding 1–2 days for shared patterns across multiple episodes.
Log the name, dose, and time of any headache medications. If you're using acute medications frequently, your doctor needs to know — and so do you. The log makes that visible without judgment.
After a month of logging, ask "What do my migraine days have in common?" or "What foods appear most often before a bad headache?" The Ask tab analyzes your entries and summarizes what it finds.
Most neurologists recommend at least 4–6 weeks of consistent logging to see meaningful patterns. If your migraines are infrequent (once or twice a month), you may need 2–3 months. The more consistently you log every day — not just migraine days — the faster the picture emerges.
Research points to aged cheeses, red wine and other alcohol, cured and processed meats (nitrates), MSG, caffeine changes, artificial sweeteners, and chocolate as common dietary triggers. But triggers are individual — some people react strongly to one and not at all to others. Tracking your own data is more useful than a generic list.
Yes, and you should. Neurologists rely on patient diaries to make treatment decisions — how often you're having migraines, what patterns they follow, how medications are working. The Good Tracker gives you a log you can summarize and bring to any appointment.
No — The Good Tracker records your data and surfaces patterns; it doesn't make dietary recommendations. Decisions about what to avoid should be made with your doctor. The app gives you the evidence to have that conversation on solid ground.
Free to use. Add food, rate symptoms, flag bad days. Patterns appear in weeks, not months.
Open The Good Tracker →