Start today to take action to understand your migraine and find ways to stop your attacks from happening.

The first thing to do is to start to keep a diary. 90% of doctors said that keeping a diary is the best thing you can do to help them to understand your migraine. Keep a very simple diary like this one just to show your doctor how often you have attacks, how long they last and how bad they are.

If you want to try to find out what triggers your migraine you can keep another a diary to write down everything that happens to you, what time you get up, what you eat, what you've done at school, if you've played any sport, if you watched television and so on.

You can use an ordinary diary (you'll probably need one with a whole page for every day) or notebook to do this.

Sometimes this gets very boring or you can easily forget to do it for a few days. Another way is to keep a chart like this one. As soon as you are feeling better after a migraine attack, fill in the chart about everything that happened to you before your attack started - you might want to add extra columns if there are other things you think might be causing your migraine attacks. You might want to ask your parents to help you with this.

When you have done this after several migraine attacks you might notice by looking down the columns that there is a pattern to your attacks, for example you might find that you always have an attack on a Wednesday evening after you have had a games lesson at school but don't have one on a Wednesday when you're not at school or if you don't have a games lesson for any reason.

Remember it can take more than one thing to trigger a migraine so watch out for things that often happen together.

If you do find things that might be causing your migraine try stopping them one at a time to see if it makes a difference. If it doesn't help, start doing that thing again and stop doing something else that you think might be causing your attacks. You will need to stop each thing for about a month before you know whether it is making any difference. For example if you sometimes get a migraine if you get up late, skip breakfast and go to school in the car instead of walking you might start by making sure you always have breakfast however late you are (even if it's just a cereal bar to eat on the way to school); if that doesn't help, try getting up at the same time every day.

DON'T STOP DOING ANYTHING BECAUSE YOU'VE HEARD IT CAUSES MIGRAINE FOR SOMEONE ELSE -IT'S PROBABLY NOT THE SAME FOR YOU.

Diary:

* Key to severity:

1= very slight pain up to 10 = the worst pain you've ever had

Chart: