The migraine diary your neurologist actually wants. Free to print.

Most migraine diary templates online are bad. They’re either bloated with 30 fields nobody fills in, or so sparse they tell your neurologist nothing.

Here’s the template that survived 400+ logged attacks and three different neurologists. Free to print. The seven fields that actually move a diagnosis or treatment forward, and nothing else.

The template

Print this page (Cmd+P / Ctrl+P), or copy the structure into a notebook. One row per attack.

Field	What to write
Date	YYYY-MM-DD
Started	Approximate time pain became noticeable (e.g., 14:30)
Ended	When pain dropped below a 3/10 — leave blank if still ongoing
Peak severity	0–10. 0 = no pain. 10 = unable to function or speak
Location	Left, right, both, frontal, occipital, behind eye
Symptoms	Circle: aura, nausea, vomit, light, sound, smell, dizziness
Triggers (last 24h)	Sleep hours · stress 1–5 · alcohol · skipped meal · hormones · weather (pressure drop?) · screen time
Medication	Name · time taken · dose · worked? (Y/N/partial)
Notes	Anything else (≤1 sentence)

That’s it. Nine columns fit on one row. A 30-attack diary is one A4 page front-and-back.

Printable layout

A 3-month log fits on two pages of letter or A4 paper. Layout:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ MIGRAINE DIARY — Page 1 / Months 1-2                                    │
├──────┬───────┬──────┬──────┬───────┬──────────┬───────────┬─────────┬──┤
│ Date │ Start │ End  │ Pain │ Side  │ Symptoms │ Triggers  │ Med     │N │
├──────┼───────┼──────┼──────┼───────┼──────────┼───────────┼─────────┼──┤
│      │       │      │      │       │          │           │         │  │
│      │       │      │      │       │          │           │         │  │
│      │       │      │      │       │          │           │         │  │
└──────┴───────┴──────┴──────┴───────┴──────────┴───────────┴─────────┴──┘

To print just this page: Cmd+P (or Ctrl+P) and select “Save as PDF” if you want a digital copy. Most browsers preserve the table layout cleanly.

If you’d rather skip paper, Migra generates a personalized PDF report automatically from your logged attacks. The print template is for paper-only people.

Why each field matters

Skip this section if you just wanted the template. Read it if you want to understand what to write in each box, because that’s the difference between a diary your neurologist nods at and one they actually use.

Date and time

These exist for one reason: pattern detection. Your neurologist wants to see attacks clustered by day-of-week (work-stress migraines = Mondays), by part-of-month (hormonal = pre-period), or by season (pressure-sensitive = spring/fall storms).

A diary with date but not time is half-useful. Time of onset lets you correlate with sleep (“attacks always start in the first 2 hours after waking”) or weather (“started 4 hours after the pressure dropped”). You don’t need GPS-level precision — within an hour is fine.

Peak severity (0–10)

Severity is what determines treatment escalation. A neurologist deciding whether to put you on a CGRP inhibitor wants to know: are these 4 out of 10s that you push through, or 8 out of 10s where you can’t function?

The 0–10 scale is universal and is what the MIDAS test uses to grade disability. It’s also what’s used in clinical trials, so your data speaks the same language as the research.

Location

This is the field that often distinguishes migraine subtypes. Always-left or always-right may indicate a peripheral trigger (TMJ, occipital nerve). Behind-eye attacks raise the question of cluster headaches, which look like migraines but respond to entirely different treatments.

If your headaches are bilateral and pressure-like, you might actually have tension-type headaches misdiagnosed as migraines — common, and worth flagging. Location data over 30+ attacks tells the truth.

Symptoms

The four to track religiously are:

• Aura (visual disturbance, numbness, language difficulty): present in around 30% of migraineurs and changes diagnosis to “migraine with aura,” which has a different cardiovascular risk profile
• Nausea / vomiting: severity indicator, also changes treatment (oral medications fail when vomiting)
• Photophobia (light sensitivity)
• Phonophobia (sound sensitivity)

The presence of three of these four meets ICHD-3 criteria for migraine. Without them, your headaches may be tension-type or another category.

Triggers (last 24 hours)

This is the field where most diaries fail. People log “stress” with no detail and never look back at the data. The fix is to log specific, countable things:

• Sleep: hours, not “good” or “bad”
• Alcohol: yes/no, what kind, how much
• Meals: any skipped? any new foods?
• Screen time: high / medium / low
• Stress: 1–5 scale
• Hormonal: cycle day if relevant
• Weather: was there a pressure drop? (See our barometric pressure guide for thresholds.)

After 30 logged attacks, you can run correlation. The pattern that surfaces is rarely the one you guessed.

Medication taken (and whether it worked)

This is the field that proves to your insurance company that your current treatment isn’t working. Without it, you can’t escalate to expensive medications.

Track:

• Name of the drug (sumatriptan, rizatriptan, ibuprofen, etc.)
• Time you took it relative to attack onset (early intervention is more effective)
• Dose
• Did it work? Y / N / partial. “Partial” specifically means: pain reduced but not gone, or pain came back within 24 hours.

The “worked?” field is the one almost no template asks for, and it’s the one your neurologist needs most.

Common mistakes

Three patterns I see in poorly-kept diaries:

1. Logging the bad days, skipping the medium days. This biases your data toward severe attacks. A 4 out of 10 day where you took ibuprofen and pushed through still counts — log it.
2. Skipping the “did the med work” question. The answer is the entire point of the entry.
3. Trying to log mid-attack. Don’t. Log immediately after the attack ends, while it’s still fresh. If you can, jot 2 words mid-attack (“started 14:30”) and fill in the rest later. Mid-attack logging is the biggest reason people stop keeping diaries.

When to switch from paper to an app

Three months. Or the moment you notice you’re forgetting to log because you can’t remember whether you already did.

The advantage paper has — frictionless, no battery, no app to open during a migraine — fades after a few months because you can’t run correlation analysis on paper. You’ll have a stack of useful raw data and no way to find the patterns inside.

If you’ve made it this far through the article, you probably know which way you’re leaning. If you want the structured digital version with auto-correlation across weather, sleep, and meds, see our comparison of migraine tracker apps.

What to do tonight

Print this page (or write the seven fields into a notebook). Tomorrow morning, log the previous day’s headache or non-headache day. Even non-attack days are useful — they’re the baseline that makes attacks visible in the data.

Three months from now, you’ll either know what your triggers are, or you’ll know that your diary is missing the right fields. Both are wins.