Using MigraLog

How tracking works in MigraLog

MigraLog is built around a simple idea: a migraine is not a single moment, it is a course of events over time. Rather than asking you to summarise an attack after it is over, MigraLog lets you record what is happening as it happens and assembles those moments into a continuous timeline.

Why a timeline

A migraine changes from hour to hour. The pain may begin in one place and move, intensity rises and falls, symptoms come and go, and the medication you take has an effect that unfolds over the following hours.

A single end-of-day note cannot capture any of that. A timeline can. By recording each change with its own timestamp, MigraLog can reconstruct the shape of an attack — when it started, how it built, what you did about it, and how it responded. That shape is what reveals patterns, and it is what a clinician can actually use.

The three layers of tracking

MigraLog records your health at three levels of detail. They work together, and each answers a different question.

1. Episodes — the detailed record of an attack

An episode is a single migraine, tracked from start to finish. It is the heart of the app.

• Start Episode begins tracking. You can start an episode the moment one begins, or backdate the start time if you are catching up later.
• While an episode is ongoing it has no end time and is shown as Ongoing. The main action on the dashboard becomes Log Update, inviting you to keep adding to the record as things change.
• End Episode closes it and sets the final time. If you close one by mistake, you can reopen it and carry on.

An episode can span more than one day — for example beginning late one night and ending the following afternoon. MigraLog handles this correctly across the whole duration.

2. The episode timeline — moments within an attack

Inside an ongoing episode you can record events as they occur. Every event is timestamped independently and merged into one chronological Timeline:

• Intensity updates — your pain level on a 0–10 scale, logged as often as it changes. These also drive a sparkline that shows the attack's intensity trajectory at a glance.
• Symptoms — recorded with an onset time, and marked as resolved when they pass (for example, "Nausea — onset" and later "Nausea — resolved").
• Pain locations — where the pain is, and how that changes during the attack.
• Medications taken — rescue and other doses logged against the episode, so you can see exactly when you treated and how the attack responded afterwards.
• Notes — free text for anything else worth remembering.

Because everything shares a single timeline, you can see medication timing, symptom changes, and intensity peaks all in relation to one another.

To correct or update an entry, press and hold it on the timeline and choose to edit it. Nothing is set in stone — if you logged the wrong time, intensity, or detail, you can fix it after the fact.

3. Daily status — the day-by-day overview

Not every day contains a full migraine, and the days between attacks matter too. Daily status captures each day at a glance:

• Days with an episode are recorded automatically as migraine days.
• Other days can be logged as Clear or Not Clear — the latter covering states such as prodrome (warning signs), postdrome (recovery), or anxiety about an attack.

This is the layer you see in the calendar, and it is what turns scattered episodes into a long-term picture of how often you are well. See The calendar for how day status is shown and logged.

What you are encouraged to capture

You do not have to log everything, and partial records are still useful. But the app is most valuable when you treat an episode as a living record:

• Log the start as early as you reasonably can.
• Add an intensity update whenever the pain meaningfully changes.
• Record medications at the time you take them.
• Note symptoms as they appear and resolve.
• End the episode when it is over.

Captured this way, your history becomes something you can genuinely learn from — and something your clinician can read in minutes. The patterns that emerge are covered in Trends and analytics.

A note on your data

MigraLog treats your records as sensitive health information. Tracking is for your own insight and for sharing with your care team on your terms; it is not a diagnostic tool and does not replace medical advice.

Medications

MigraLog keeps a record of the medications you use, lets you log each dose, and can warn you when you are taking a medication too soon after the last one or too often over time. This page explains how to add a medication and how to set up cooldowns and safety limits.

Adding a medication

Open Add Medication (you can reach it from the Log Medication screen). As you type a name, MigraLog suggests common medications for you.

Required details

• Name — what you call the medication.
• Type — one of:
  • Rescue — taken to treat an attack in progress.
  • Preventative — taken on a schedule to reduce how often attacks occur.
  • Other — anything that does not fit the above.
• Dose amount and unit — for example 500 and mg, or 1 and tablet.

Optional details

• Default quantity — how many you usually take at once (for example 2 tablets). This is used for quick logging.
• Category — the medication class: OTC, NSAID, Triptan, CGRP, Preventive, Supplement, or Other. The category is important: it is what allows you to apply class-wide cooldowns and overuse limits (see below).
• Minimum time between doses — a per-medication cooldown, in hours.
• Notes — anything else you want to remember.

For preventative medications you can also set a schedule (daily, monthly, or quarterly) and a reminder time, and turn the reminder on or off. Reminders can be sent as time sensitive, and optionally you have have a critical follow up notification set that will alert you even if your phone is in do not distrub.

Logging a dose

From Log Medication, each medication appears as a card. You have two ways to record a dose:

• Quick log — tap the dose button on the card to record your default quantity at the current time.
• Details — open the sheet to adjust the quantity, set the time (you can backdate a dose you forgot to log), and add notes.

If you log a dose while an episode is ongoing, MigraLog associates it with that episode so it appears on the episode timeline.

Cooldowns — spacing out doses

A cooldown is a minimum amount of time you want between doses. It never prevents you from logging a dose; it simply shows a clear warning so you can make an informed decision. There are two kinds.

Per-medication cooldown

Set the Minimum time between doses (in hours) on an individual medication. When you have taken that medication recently, its card shows how long ago the last dose was and, if you are still inside the cooldown, how long remains — for example "Last dose 2h ago — wait 4h", highlighted in amber.

This is set on the medication itself and is independent of the category rules in Settings → Medication Safety Limits — it neither appears there nor is affected by them.

Per-category cooldown

You can also require a gap between any medications in the same class — useful for triptans, for instance, where the concern is the class as a whole rather than one specific drug.

Set this in Settings → Medication Safety Limits: add a rule, choose a category, choose the Cooldown rule type, and enter the minimum hours between doses. MigraLog suggests common defaults (for example, two hours between triptans) which you can accept or change.

When a category cooldown is active, the warning names the medication that triggered it — for example "Last Triptan (Sumatriptan) 1h ago — wait 1h" — even if you are about to log a different medication in that class.

Safety limits — avoiding overuse

Taking acute (rescue) medication on too many days can, over time, lead to medication-overuse headache. MigraLog can track this for you against the class guidelines used in clinical practice.

Set a limit in Settings → Medication Safety Limits: add a rule, choose a category, choose the Period Limit rule type, and set "max days taken" within a rolling window of a given number of days. Suggested defaults follow common guidance — for example, NSAIDs no more than 15 days in any 30, and triptans no more than 10 days in any 30.

The suggested defaults are general starting points, not a recommendation for your situation. Consult your neurologist to determine the right limits for you — the appropriate thresholds depend on your medications, your history, and your care plan, and your clinician's guidance always takes precedence.

A few things worth knowing about how limits are counted:

• Limits count days of use, not the number of doses. Two doses on the same day count as one day.
• The window is rolling — "the last 30 days" from today, not the current calendar month.

As you approach a limit, the medication shows an amber warning (for example "NSAIDs used 13 of 15 days in last 30"). At or over the limit, the warning turns red.

These warnings are informational only. They do not block you from taking or logging anything, and they are not medical advice. They are there to help you notice a pattern and to give you something concrete to discuss with your doctor. Always follow your clinician's guidance over any in-app warning.

Where to see it all together

Each medication has a detail screen showing its information, its schedule and reminders (for preventatives), recent doses, and any active safety warnings. Your medication use over time — including overuse-risk trends and how quickly each rescue medication tends to work — appears in Trends and analytics.

The calendar

The calendar gives you a month-at-a-glance view of how you have been. Each day carries a colour that summarises its status, so over time you can see clusters of good days and difficult ones without reading a single entry.

You will find the calendar in the Trends area, under the Calendar view.

The day colours

Every day is shown in one of four states:

Colour is always paired with the day number and, where relevant, a label, so the states remain distinguishable regardless of colour vision.

Red days are automatic

You never mark a day as a migraine day yourself. Whenever an episode covers a day, MigraLog marks that day red for you — and if an episode spans several days, every day it touches turns red.

Because a logged migraine is the strongest signal about a day, episodes take priority over manual status. If you had marked a day as Clear and later log an episode covering it, the day becomes red. If that episode is later removed, the day reverts to whatever you had logged manually (or to grey if nothing was logged).

This is why you only ever log the other days by hand — the migraine days take care of themselves the moment you track an episode.

Logging a day as Clear or Not Clear

For any day without an episode, tap it to open its details and record how it went:

• Clear — a good day, no symptoms or concerns.
• Not Clear — something was off, but it was not a full attack. You can optionally choose a type to be more specific:
  • Prodrome — early warning signs before an attack.
  • Postdrome — the recovery period after an attack.
  • Anxiety — worry about a possible attack.
  • Other — anything else.

You can add a note, then save. To change a day later, reopen it and edit it, or remove the status to return it to grey. Future dates cannot be logged.

Keeping the in-between days up to date matters as much as logging attacks. The ratio of clear to not-clear to migraine days is what shows whether things are improving overall — see Trends and analytics.

What a day shows when you open it

Tapping a day opens its details, which may include:

• Its status and any note you have added.
• Any episodes that overlap the day, with their time range and duration — tap one to open the full episode and its timeline.
• Any overlays that span the day (see below).
• Buttons to log, edit, or remove the day's status — except on red days, which are governed by their episode and cannot be edited directly.

Overlays — adding context

Overlays let you mark stretches of time that might be relevant to your migraines but are not migraines themselves — for example travel, illness, a period of high stress, a menstrual cycle, or starting a new medication.

An overlay spans a date range and appears as a small marker beneath the affected days, so you can visually line life events up against your attacks. You manage overlays from the Calendar view: add one with the + button, then tap it later to edit its dates or notes.

Overlays are kept separate from your statistics. If you want, you can flag a period to be excluded from stats — useful for stretches like travel or illness that would otherwise distort your trends.

Trends and analytics

The Trends area turns your day-to-day logging into a longer view: how often attacks happen, how severe they are, when they tend to strike, which symptoms recur, and how your medications are working. It also produces a one-page summary you can take to a medical appointment.

Nothing here requires extra work — it is built entirely from the episodes, medications, and daily statuses you already record. The more consistently you log, the more reliable these figures become.

Trends is organised into three views, selected at the top of the screen: Calendar, Insights, and Med Response.

Calendar

The monthly calendar with its colour-coded days, plus overlays for life events. This is covered in full in The calendar.

Insights

The main analytics view. Choose a time range at the top — 14, 30, 60, or 90 days, or a custom range — and the charts below update to match.

At-a-glance counts

• Day statistics — how many days in the range were migraine, not-clear, clear, or unlogged.
• Duration metrics — your shortest, longest, and average episode length.

Warning signs

MigraLog highlights patterns that may be worth attention, based on widely used clinical thresholds. These can include:

• Headache days reaching the chronic range — 15 or more headache days in a trailing 28-day window (the ICHD-3 definition), or 10–14 days as it approaches.
• Medication-overuse risk — rescue-medication use approaching or exceeding class guidelines (for example, triptans on 10 or more days, or OTC/NSAIDs on 15 or more days, in a 28-day window).
• Rising rescue use — a notable increase compared with the previous period.
• Increasing intensity — average peak intensity trending upward.

These are observations to help you and your clinician spot trends. They are not diagnoses.

The charts

• Headache burden — headache days in a rolling 28-day window over time, with a reference line at 15 days (the chronic-migraine range).
• Medication overuse risk — for each acute medication class, the trend in the number of days used, against its guideline line.
• Severity by week — episodes each week, stacked and coloured by peak intensity (mild, moderate, severe, very severe), so you can see whether attacks are getting harder independently of how often they occur.
• Time of day — when your episodes tend to begin, grouped into three-hour bands. A consistent onset time can point at causes such as sleep, caffeine, or medication wearing off.
• Symptom frequency — your most common symptoms and the share of episodes each appears in.
• Pain location frequency — where pain is recorded most often across your episodes.
• Preventative adherence — the percentage of your scheduled preventative doses you actually logged, by week.
• Monthly summary — a month-by-month table of episodes, episode days, rescue doses and days, and per-medication use, for a precise reference.

A note on counting: most trends use a rolling 28-day window rather than calendar months, and a "day of use" counts a day on which you took a medication at least once, regardless of how many doses. This matches how overuse guidelines are defined.

Med Response

This view answers a practical question: which of my rescue medications works, and how quickly?

• Time to relief compared — a ranked chart of how long each rescue medication typically takes to bring your intensity down, measured as the median time from a dose to the first drop in pain. Faster medications appear at the top.
• Per-medication detail — a card for each rescue medication showing its class, how many doses fall in the range, and its median time to relief.

For this to be meaningful, MigraLog needs enough data: a medication needs at least three doses with measurable relief before it is rated. Logging your intensity during an attack, and the medications you take, is what makes this view possible.

The Doctor Visit Summary

From the Insights view you can tap Export Doctor Visit Summary to generate a one-page PDF designed for a medical appointment. It always covers the last 30 days and the 6-month trend, regardless of the range selected on screen, so it presents a consistent, clinically useful snapshot.

The summary brings together:

• The last 30 days at a glance — headache days, episodes logged, and rescue-medication days.
• Headache burden over six months — a month-by-month table of headache days, flagging months in the chronic range.
• Acute / rescue medication — each rescue medication with its type, dose count, days used, and average dose over the last 30 days.
• Preventatives and compliance — each scheduled preventative with its schedule and how many doses you took against how many were expected.

You can share or print the PDF like any other file — a concise, neutral handout that lets a clinician understand your recent history quickly.

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These views are for insight and for conversations with your care team. MigraLog does not diagnose and is not a substitute for medical advice.