What is a migraine diary?
A migraine diary is a dated record of your attacks: how often they happen, how severe they are, the symptoms involved, the medication you take, and any possible triggers you notice. Kept consistently, it turns a vague impression of 'a lot of headaches' into a clear pattern you and a clinician can actually work with.
What a good diary records
The core of a useful migraine diary is small: the date of each attack, a rough severity, how long it lasted, the main symptoms (nausea, aura, light and sound sensitivity), and — importantly — whether you used acute medication that day. A few optional factors help too: sleep, meals, stress, hydration and hormones. The aim isn't to record everything; it's to capture enough, consistently, that patterns and monthly counts become visible.
Why it's worth the habit
A diary answers the exact questions a clinician asks: how many headache days a month, how many are migraines, how long they last, and how many days you use acute medication (which bears on medication-overuse headache and on whether migraine is episodic or chronic). It reveals possible triggers as repeated associations rather than one-off guesses, and it lets you see whether things are improving or worsening over time. Memory simply can't do this reliably for something as variable as migraine.
How tracking helps
The value of a diary is entirely in consistency, so the best one is the one you'll actually keep — quick, low-effort, and always to hand. Reviewing it every few months, ideally with a clinician, is where the insight comes from. Temple is built to be that low-friction diary and can export a doctor-ready summary; it records your pattern and doesn't diagnose or predict attacks. Temple is a tracking tool, not medical advice — for anything specific to you, consult a healthcare professional.
Temple is a low-friction migraine diary that records attacks, symptoms and medication in a few taps and exports a doctor-ready summary.
Common questions
- What should I write in a migraine diary?
- At minimum: the date of each attack, its severity and duration, the main symptoms, and whether you used acute medication. Optional extras like sleep, meals, stress and hydration help reveal triggers. Consistency matters more than detail.
- How does a migraine diary help my doctor?
- It supplies the exact information a clinician relies on — monthly headache and migraine-day counts, attack duration, symptoms and acute-medication days — plus any trigger patterns. That's far more accurate than trying to recall months of attacks in a short appointment.