1% Thursday: Relaxing Music
This week, buy a new CD, or download some new music, that is calming and relaxing.
When we asked our visitors about getting to sleep with migraine, Kim from the USA said this:
What I do to get to sleep is play a CD of relaxing instrumental music very very softly. If I haven’t fallen asleep by the end of the CD I know it is time to try something different.
Good idea! Now, during some migraine attacks you may not want sound of any kind. But at other times, the music seems to help – a LOT.
And I suspect it’s not just the calming effect, but the way music influences us neurologically and biologically. A recent study even suggested a difference between “happy” and “sad” music. Finding the right music really can make a difference.
Some calming instrumental favourites of mine include:
- Dan Gibson’s Rocky Mountain Suite (also in MP3) (amazon UK – CD
and MP3)
- Dino’s Classical Peace (amazon UK CD
)
- Emile Pandolfi’s By Request (also available at amazon UK
)
Of course there are many, many other classic easy listening type artists – such as Kenny G
– well, you get the idea.
Get something new to enjoy, make your own mix if you like, and have it handy on your MP3 player or by your CD player for the next time you need to rest.
What is 1% Thursday?
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Every Thursday at Headache and Migraine News (weather permitting) we’ll talk about one measurable, practical thing we can do to make our lives just 1% better. Usually it will be something very easy, sometimes it will be a challenge. Let us know if you try it, or share an idea of your own – and maybe a year from now we’ll see that things have really changed for the better!
18 January 2010 @ 7:40 am
I listen to pure white noise because I also have tinnitus. It helps a lot.
26 January 2010 @ 5:26 pm
Thanks, Aurora. That’s interesting. Does music help at all?
26 January 2010 @ 10:51 pm
Music does help in the psychological sense because with too many headache days, one gets depressed. But with pure white noise, I fall asleep as it masks the high pitched sound in my ears. I have this range of white noise CDs with the sound of bubbling brook; earth noise, blower, and washing machine. I listen to the bubbling brook during daytime and earth noise to help me fall asleep.
27 January 2010 @ 8:28 am
When I’m migrainey I want pure silence, so I have earplugs made by an audiology tech – they make them the same way that hearing aid moulds are made, so they’re very comfortable and I can wear them for ages.
I also have noise cancelling headphones because with some migraines (like today’s) the ear and ear canal get all sensitive and feel swollen (like your lip after the dentist’s put novocaine in it – it’s not really swollen but it feels huge) and the earplugs hurt. The headphones aren’t as good because they make a bit of white noise but it blocks out most other things so it’s a lot better than nothing.
I get a type of headache I am not sure you’ve ever written about here – half of *all* of me hurts, split down the middle left/right. I know you wrote that hemiplegic migraines require weakness but that only happens in the most severe migraines for me, with less severe ones I have the one-sided pain (one side of head and face, one side of body, one arm, one leg, etc. All the same side), often strong waves of tingling and altered sensation in that half, drippy eye and nose on that side, the usual sensitivity to light/sound (thank god for my 90% light blocking NoIR sunglasses!), nausea/anorexia, and the arm/leg on the side that’s affected feel … odd. I have to concentrate more to make them work correctly, I guess – it’s difficult to explain exactly what this feels like, but it seems to take all my brainpower to make the affected side work right, whereas the other side is the usual “move without concious thought” self.
I’m just writing all of this becasue I’ve never seen anybody else describe something much similar, let alone the same, although I did find one other person once with full-on hemiplegic migraines who said what I described sounded like what the onset of her hemiplegic migraines felt like, only mine usually don’t continue into the full-blown hemiplegia.
And yes I have doctors, specialists, etc. I also have a huge bundle of worse health problems (I’m bedridden with ’em) so the headaches usually get relegated to “we’ll deal with that later” unfortunately :/
r
29 January 2010 @ 7:19 am
Yes, I should emphasize that I’m not simply suggesting you listen to music in the middle of severe head pain. Music can be helpful at various stages of an attack, and also in between attacks.
Of course some people want absolute silence at the most painful or worst part of the attack. It may also be that the type of music makes a difference, and perhaps its familiarity.
Ricky, the pain down one side of the body is not that unusual. Of course, it’s more defined with some people than others. Actually, when you wrote this I was having an attack – with pain from head to foot on one side.
Depending on your symptoms and medical history, there’s more than one type of migraine you could be dealing with. For example, many of the symptoms you mention are familiar in basilar type migraine.
15 February 2010 @ 6:07 am
Wow, James. I’ve never heard of people with pain down one side of the body without associated hemiplegia! It’s not on any symptom list on your site either, for what it’s worth. Thanks for writing though – it’s nice to know I’m not quite as much of a freak as I thought! 🙂