People with frequent headache are often excellent at remembering the worst day and terrible at remembering the other eleven. That is normal. Pain is a bad filing system.
A headache tracker exists to outsource the boring facts: when it started, how high the number went, what you swallowed, whether you slept four hours. It does not exist to “solve” headache.
Memory edits the month
After a good week, last month’s cluster of 8/10 days shrinks. After a bad week, you remember only the bad week. Either story can be true enough to feel honest and still be wrong as a count.
Clinicians hear both versions in the same afternoon. A calendar with intensity dots is a third version that neither of you has to invent.
Track fewer things than the internet suggests
Food diaries that list every ingredient collapse in three days. So do 40-symptom checklists. A tracker you abandon is worse than a crude one you keep.
Start with:
- Date and duration
- Intensity
- Type label you already use
- Two or three symptoms that change function
- Medication
Add trigger tags only if you will actually tap them during an attack. Weather, sleep, hormones, and stress are enough for most people at the beginning.
A tracker is not a personality test
You do not owe the app a narrative. “Migraine, 7, left, light, sumatriptan 50 mg, ended 3 hours later” is a complete entry.
If you want notes, keep them short and factual: “red-eye flight,” “skipped lunch,” “period day 2.” Save the interpretation for the appointment.
Paper vs phone
Paper works if it is in the bag you always have. Phones work if the first screen is “start attack” and not a social feed. The tool that is with you at 6 a.m. wins.
If you already log headache in Apple Health from an Apple Watch or another app, one place to review them is better than three. Auralis can optionally read headache samples from Health on the iPhone; it does not write anything back.
What a tracker cannot do
It cannot tell you whether a day was migraine or sinus or blood pressure. It cannot tell you to take a drug. It cannot forecast tomorrow from today’s hPa.
If an app’s marketing says it will relieve or cure migraine, treat that as advertising, not as a medical plan.
A practical weekly ritual
Once a week, open the last seven days. Fix end times you forgot. Delete a duplicate. That ten-minute pass is what makes the monthly PDF look like an adult wrote it.
The goal is not a perfect dataset. The goal is a headache log you still trust when you are sitting under fluorescent lights and someone asks, “How often?”