Should I stop tracking my food triggers?

For most people, logging every meal produces more false leads than real ones. Cravings for foods like chocolate are often part of the early premonitory phase, so the app records a correlation that was actually the attack starting. Track only the specific foods you have already confirmed, and drop the rest.

Is it worth tracking the weather or barometric pressure?

Rarely, because even if pressure is a real trigger for you, you cannot act on it. Your logging time is better spent on things you can change or that change your treatment, like time-to-relief after medication and whether you could function that day.

What should I actually track after the headache is gone?

The recovery window: when you truly felt like yourself again, not just when the pain stopped. For many people fatigue, residual photophobia, and brain fog run a day or two past the headache, and that after-phase is the most under-recorded and most clinically telling part of the attack.

How much detail does my neurologist really want from my tracking?

Less than most apps collect. Specialists act on medication response, attack frequency, cycle timing, and functional impact. A short, trustworthy record of those beats a dense log full of guessed-at entries from your worst days.

Five things you can stop tracking, and what to track instead

Article · 4 min read

The five migraine trackers worth keeping, and the five to drop.

The fix for tracking burnout is not a better app with more fields. It is logging less, and logging the things your neurologist can actually act on.

Fifty questions, one working brain cell

It is 9pm. The worst of the headache has finally loosened its grip, and you are lying in a dark room answering fifty questions about a day you can barely reconstruct.

What did you eat. How many ounces of water. Barometric pressure. Screen time. Stress, one to ten. Neck stiffness, yes or no. By question thirty your thumb is on autopilot and you are guessing, because the brain fog that arrives after an attack does not care that an app wants precision. So you tap something. Anything. And the record you just built is fiction dressed up as data.

This is the part almost no tracker admits: the moment you are least able to log accurately is the exact moment it asks the most of you.

The logging tax

Most tracking apps run on one quiet assumption: more data is better data. Log everything, the thinking goes, and a pattern will surface on its own.

We call the cost of that assumption the logging tax. Every field you agree to fill is a small debt you repay on your worst days, when the after-effects are still sitting on you and self-report is at its least reliable. Pay it long enough and one of two things happens. You quit the app entirely. Or worse, you keep going and quietly stop trusting your own entries, which means the whole record becomes noise you cannot use in front of a doctor.

The way out is not a slicker interface. It is deciding, on purpose, what deserves a slot and cutting the rest loose.

Why tracking everything finds nothing

Volume feels like rigor. It usually produces the opposite. When you log dozens of variables against a handful of attacks, coincidences pile up faster than causes, and you end up 'discovering' triggers that were never triggers at all.

The classic trap is the food you crave right before an attack. You reach for chocolate, or a salty snack, the migraine follows, and the tracker faithfully records a correlation. But that craving is frequently part of the premonitory phase, the earliest hours of the attack itself. The migraine did not follow the chocolate. The chocolate followed the migraine, which had already begun somewhere you could not feel it yet.

Eliminate a food that was never the cause and you get nothing except a smaller diet and a false sense of having solved something.

The craving that looks like a trigger

Foods most often blamed for attacks, especially chocolate, tend to show up in provocation studies as premonitory cravings rather than causes. Chocolate cravings are likely a prodromal symptom of migraine onset rather than a dietary trigger, with double-blind provocative trials failing to confirm chocolate as a trigger. ([source](https://www.facebook.com/headacheaustralia/posts/happy-easter-while-chocolate-is-often-cited-as-a-migraine-trigger-there-is-no-cl/989962676604420/)) Before you cut a food for good, ask whether the urge to eat it was the attack announcing itself.

Five things you can stop logging tonight

None of these are useless in principle. They are just low-yield for most people, high-friction to capture, and rarely the thing that changes what a clinician does next. Unless one of them is your confirmed personal pattern, let it go.

Every meal and snack. Water down to the ounce. Sleep duration measured four different ways. Hourly pain scores. The weather. The table below is the trade: what to drop on the left, what earns the slot instead on the right.

Lower-yield, high-friction data on the left; the lower-effort signal that replaces it on the right.
Stop logging in detail	Track this instead	Why it matters more
Every meal and snack	Only your confirmed personal triggers	Food is over-blamed; cravings are often the attack starting
Water intake to the ounce	Dehydrated that day, yes or no	Only useful if dehydration is actually your pattern
Sleep duration, four ways	Whether your sleep schedule stayed regular	Irregular timing tends to drive attacks more than total hours
Hourly pain scores	Time from dose to meaningful relief	Tells your neurologist if the drug and dose are working
Barometric pressure	Functional impact: could you work or drive	You can act on function. You cannot act on the weather

Five signals actually worth keeping

Here is what survives the cut. Each one is a single answer, not a form, and each one is something you or your doctor can act on.

The recovery window. Not just when the headache stopped, but when you felt like yourself again. For many people the fatigue, residual photophobia, and fog run a full day or two past the pain. That gap is the most under-recorded part of the whole attack.
Time to relief after medication. Did the triptan or gepant work, and how fast? This is the single data point most likely to change a prescription.
Cycle timing, if you menstruate. Perimenstrual attacks are one of the best-established patterns in migraine, and they are actionable in a way weather never will be.
Sleep regularity, as one question. Did you keep roughly your usual schedule? Yes or no beats four competing duration numbers.
Functional impact. Could you work, drive, or care for your kids? This is the language disability paperwork and specialists actually use.

Where the after-phase fits

Notice that the first thing on the keep list, the recovery window, is the one almost no tracker asks about. The record usually ends when the pain does, as if the day the headache lifts is the day you are fine. You are not, and you know it.

We built Postdrome around that missing stretch, because the apps the people in our lives tried all stopped at the headache and left the next two foggy days blank. The point was never to add more fields. It was to make the few that matter easy to reach on a day when you cannot see straight, which is why Aura Mode exists and why the timeline keeps running through the after-phase instead of closing out at zero pain. It lives on your device, and the price is once, for good, with nothing metered behind a monthly charge.

Less to log. A record you can hand to a specialist without apologizing for it.

See what the after-phase looks like when you track it. Get Postdrome.

Postdrome tracks the 24 to 72 hours after the pain, the part most apps leave blank, with a logging flow built for days when reading a screen is the hard part. On-device, portable, and priced once for good.

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