6 reasons why coaching is key to better migraine management

Introduction – why is coaching gaining traction

Various forms of coaching, such as life and health coaching, are gaining respect and traction in medical circles and among patients alike. It was recently discussed at the 2023 Migraine World Summit as one of the key complementary strategies to traditional treatments.

Coaching for migraine management is gaining momentum because it looks at how different aspects of a person’s life, like their habits and behaviors, can affect their health. This gives the migraine sufferer an opportunity to take an even more active role in the management of their condition. It also helps headache specialists work together with patients to find solutions that consider the whole person and not just their migraine symptoms, leading to better results.

This post outlines what coaching is and isn’t, the benefits of it for migraine management, and my recent personal experience with coaching in managing my health for the last two months.

What is coaching?

Coaching, in simple terms, is a supportive and collaborative process where a trained professional, called a coach, helps you set goals, develop new habits, and make positive changes.

However, coaching is different from therapy in 3 major ways.

Therapists manage mental illnesses and provide diagnoses. Coaches do not.

The coach actively listens to the client, asks open-ended questions, and helps the client explore their values, goals, and motivations. Together, they develop a personalized action plan that takes into account the client’s unique circumstances, preferences, and challenges.

Coaching focuses on NOW and WHAT while therapy is more about PAST and WHY.

The benefit of focusing on the present situation and what can be done about it is profound. You can immediately apply the strategies discussed with the coach and therefore achieve a positive impact quickly.

Coaching is a collaborative and client-centered approach.

The coach’s role is to support you in achieving your goals by helping you identify and remove obstacles on the way. The trained coach provides motivation and support to you, but it is client-led. It means the coach asks powerful questions that help you unlock the unique insights needed to move forward in your unique situation. But it is you, the client, who then decides what steps you are willing to take to act on those insights.

The benefit of a client-led approach is that you as a client are in a driver’s seat. You benefit from the powerful guidance of the coach, yet you are the one who shapes the path forward that feels the best to you.

Who is considered to be a coach? What training do they normally have?

Coaches are trained professionals who typically have a background in the areas in which they coach. For example, an addiction recovery coach may have an extensive background in drug addiction recovery while a career coach may have expertise in HR or career development.

A trained coach uses their knowledge and expertise to empower you to take charge in your specific situation and make needed changes. In this article, I infer coaching as life coaching and/or health coaching – both of which are beneficial for migraine management.

There are a lot of certification courses that coaches can take to become professional coaches. There is also a well-recognized organization called International Coaching Federation through which the coaches can get officially accredited. This adds a huge amount of credibility to their way of practicing. Anyone can call themselves a coach, but not everyone is equally qualified. So, look for a coach who is certified and accredited.

What is the role of coaching in migraine management?

When I went to school to become a professional coach myself, so I can help others, our trainer used to say to us, students: “At the end of the day, your job is to help your clients identify and remove obstacles and hold them accountable so they can move forward in life.” Anyone who suffers from a chronic condition encounters a series of obstacles on a daily basis. This is why coaching for migraine management can be a great strategy.

Here are just a few strategies and techniques that coaches utilize to help clients with chronic pain and chronic conditions.

Behavior Change Strategies:

A well-trained coach will help you identify and overcome barriers to change by employing strategies like motivational interviewing, positive reinforcement, and cognitive-behavioral techniques.

Support and Encouragement:

One of the biggest challenges people with migraine face is the debilitating nature of the condition which makes it hard to plan things and hard to make sustained changes at times. Coaches provide ongoing support, encouragement, and guidance, helping you stay on track, keep momentum and navigate challenges along the health journey, on good days and on bad ones.

Goal Setting:

Coaches help you define specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals that align with your specific health needs and aspirations. The goals can be small but serve a bigger aspiration. For example, your overall goal may be to go from chronic to episodic migraine status with less than X migraine episodes per month by XX date. And there could be many smaller goals inside that include obtaining a new treatment plan, making specific dietary changes, introducing light exercise, etc. Each of the goals will be defined using the SMART framework.   

Accountability and Momentum:

As a person with a migraine, you have to juggle your everyday obligations while enduring migraine symptoms and the unpredictability of migraine attacks. These can be real barriers to making the changes needed to improve your health. Coaches are best at helping you stay on track and keep momentum, however small it is, holding you accountable for the actions you commit to and celebrating your wins.

Coaching, whether it is health or life coaching, is not a substitute for medical advice or treatment. Instead, it complements your traditional treatment by focusing on empowering you to take an active role in managing your health. It is a client-driven process that emphasizes self-discovery, self-efficacy, and long-term behavior change.

My personal experience of coaching for migraine management

This year, I had to take a medical leave at work and subsequently retire from my executive management career to re-engineer my life. I took charge of my health and really got focused on getting better. My headache doctor helped me to get access to a newer class of migraine medications and a better treatment plan. In addition to a better treatment plan, I started seeing a coach to help me get my life back together and better manage my condition.

Taking the first step – finding a coach:

I personally experienced the power of coaching before, but it was in career coaching and life coaching areas. Because of this positive previous experience, my mind was open to trying coaching for migraine management.

You can visit the World Coach Institute Facebook group and answer the ad for one of the certified coaches who needs more client hours for further credentialing. This could result in securing a well-trained and qualified coach who was willing to provide coaching for a much-reduced rate.

I found my coach during taking my own coaching training and we started our coaching sessions around April 2023 and it is June now. So, I have had at least 8 sessions and would love to share just a few things that coaching helped me with so far.

Impact in 60 days of coaching for migraine management:

I am less stressed and more self-accepting than I ever was.

Coaching helped me realize how much internal worry and pressure I put on myself during the times when I didn’t feel well. The coach asked me some very powerful questions. In turn, I derived valuable insight about my ability to accomplish a lot on those days when I feel well which allowed me to be less stressed about things that don’t get done on migraine attack days.

It was literally one question that turned it around for me: You said you felt well yesterday. What were you able to do on that day? My own answer made me stop in my tracks because I listed a long list of things I got done and how much fun I had that day. Mike down kind of moment for the coach. She smiled as she listened and said: Exactly!

It removed one of my biggest obstacles to exercise with chronic migraines

Having had migraines for 35 years, and having tried countless medications and therapies, I felt discouraged at times with a lack of improvement. Being in pain almost every day also made it hard to do any kind of exercise. I would start and fall off the bandwagon to start and fail again. It felt insurmountable. So, I stopped trying at some point.

In just two sessions, I was able to determine that my real obstacle to ongoing exercise was that I found it to be boring in general and had little motivation to do it, to begin with. And my attempts to take it outside failed because I was cold due to my poor circulation. The Rainy Northwest climate doesn’t help either.

Since then, I combined my exercise with some more interesting things like listening to my favorite podcasts, audiobooks, or affirmations while I exercise. I choose YouTube videos that combine walking and talking as well on good weather days. I exercise inside on rainy and cold days. For the last 6 weeks, I am able to exercise at least 3-4 times a week.

In addition to that, I only do 5 minutes of stretches on those days when my migraine pain is too high. Oftentimes, just these 5 minutes make me feel a lot better in my own body. I learned to be gentler with myself and tailor my expectations to the day I am having.  

Working with a coach unlocked that barrier and helped me to feel unbiased support and move forward in ways I was not able to before.

More meaningful time and fun with family  

With less stress and more exercise, I am able to stay asleep better. Not to mention my weight is stable and I feel in general just all around better about myself. Chronic migraines siphoned the fun out of my life leaving room only for the responsibilities and migraine management. Working with a coach helped me to access the part of me that needed nurturing and fun.

As a family, we introduced a Saturday brunch as part of new fun family traditions. And we now watch the stars in the summer while eating healthy fruit on the balcony of our house.

Little changes help pave the way to bigger and even more positive changes! That is what coaching is all about. There are additional benefits you can derive from using coaching for migraine management. Read below to find out more.

Key benefits of coaching for migraine management:

I just started experiencing the benefits of coaching as a strategy to help me improve my health. There are many more positives to coaching. Here are the key ones that you could derive with the right coach for you:

Personalized Guidance:

Your needs might be entirely different from the next person who has a migraine. While you might need to better understand your triggers, another person with migraine may be fully aware of what triggers their attacks but need more guidance around stress reduction or navigating difficult family relationships. A great coach provides individualized support, tailoring strategies to the unique needs of each migraine patient.  There is no cookie-cutter approach to coaching.

Insight, Education, and Awareness:

Coaches can ask powerful questions that will bring key insight into a solution for you. This is one of the critical components of successful coaching – the ability of the coach to help you gain valuable insights so that your level of awareness increases. As a result, you can unlock the solution needed to make changes. While coaches don’t provide diagnosis and medical advice, they can guide you to the up-to-date resources on the topic at hand, helping you to make an educated decision about the next steps.

Holistic Approach:

One of the biggest gifts any service provider can give a migraine patient is to look at them as a whole person and not just a collection of their symptoms that need to be addressed with a cocktail of medications. A holistic approach is what coaching does. It focuses on the whole you, addressing not only the aspects of your health but also your overall well-being, taking your entire life situation into consideration.

Lifestyle Modification:

I usually cringe a little whenever I hear this term – lifestyle modification. It reminds me of my failed new year resolutions and many failed attempts to make a big change. Just read my post about learnings from a failed diet modification! One of the biggest jobs of a coach is to create a supportive environment to help you take small but measurable steps and hold you accountable.

Having an accountability partner increases the chances of adherence to the committed task tenfold. As I mentioned above, this is one of the benefits I already encountered through coaching – more regular exercise.

Coaches assist you in reducing migraine triggers by improving your diet, sleep patterns, and exercise, which can have a significant impact on migraine management.

Stress Reduction:

Stress is one of the common triggers for migraines. Health coaches can teach you stress management techniques such as relaxation exercises, mindfulness, and breathing exercises to reduce stress levels, which can lead to a decrease in migraine frequency.

Empowerment and Self-Advocacy:

Since becoming an Emerging Advocate for American Migraine Foundation, I realized just how much work we still have to do to become better advocates for our own health. Coaches can help you better navigate the complex healthcare system and advocate for your needs when you talk to your doctors. My coach helped me build more confidence in my own ability to keep my migraines under control. The result was a reduction in my worry and anxiety over the next migraine attack.

Conclusion:

Various forms of coaching are getting traction in the patient and medical communities. It can be a strong complement to your treatment plan and carries numerous benefits. Personalized guidance from a trained coach can help you achieve stress reduction and reduction in migraine frequency and severity, and empower you to make lifestyle changes to better support your health needs.

I experienced the positive impacts of coaching in my own migraine management journey. One of the biggest overlooked benefits of coaching is the long-term support that you get when you have a supportive coach by your side. This allows for lasting impact and retained new skills.

Remember, it is always advisable to consult with a qualified healthcare professional or specialist for specific medical advice and treatment recommendations tailored to your individual needs.