Your Neurologist Wants Data, Not Adjectives

"How often do you get headaches?" is the question that exposes how little you actually know about your own pain patterns. You say "a few times a week" because that feels right. But when the neurologist presses — which days, what severity, what changed — you're reconstructing from gut feeling. That's how you end up on a prophylactic that targets the wrong trigger, or cycling through triptans when the real problem is that you sleep five hours on weekdays and nine on weekends.

This diary turns vague suffering into filterable evidence.

The Severity Scale That Forces Honesty

Two integer fields, both on a 0–10 scale. Headache severity. Other pain severity — the template's author specifically references stump pain, which tells you this was built by someone managing chronic pain from multiple sources simultaneously.

That second field matters more than it looks. Comorbid pain confounds headache analysis. A day where your headache is a 4 but your stump pain is an 8 is a fundamentally different clinical picture than a day where your headache is a 4 and everything else is quiet. When you filter for headache severity above 6 and cross-reference other pain severity, you start to see whether your headaches are independent events or part of a systemic flare pattern. Your pain management specialist needs that distinction. You probably haven't been giving it to them.

Sleep Architecture in Three Fields

Time went to bed. Approximate time to fall asleep (in minutes). Time awake this morning. From these three inputs, you can derive total time in bed, sleep onset latency, and approximate sleep duration.

Sleep onset latency above 30 minutes correlates with next-day headache in a way that total sleep duration alone doesn't capture. The person who lies in bed from 10 PM to 7 AM but doesn't fall asleep until midnight got seven hours of sleep but spent two hours in pre-sleep rumination — a known migraine trigger. The Medication for sleep field captures what you took to get there: mersyndol, melatonin, diphenhydramine, whatever you're using. When you filter for nights where sleep medication was used and check next-day headache severity, you see whether your sleep aids are actually preventing morning headaches or just masking the onset delay.

The Trigger Nobody Suspects

"Used spray for miniatures?" Yes, that's a real field in this template. Volatile organic compounds from hobby aerosol sprays — primer, varnish, clear coat — are a headache trigger that most people never connect to their pain. You spray miniatures in the evening, ventilation is marginal, and the next morning you wake up with a frontal headache you attribute to stress or poor sleep.

This is the field that separates a useful headache diary from a generic one. The author built it from their own experience, tracking a trigger that no standard medical intake form would ever ask about. When you have three months of data and every headache day correlates with spray use the previous evening, you don't need a neurologist to tell you what to change — you need a spray booth with proper extraction.

Hydration Tracking That Actually Means Something

Soft drinks versus water, both counted in glasses. The ratio matters more than the absolute numbers. Six glasses of water sounds adequate until you see it was accompanied by four cans of cola, and the net caffeine-and-sugar load is doing more harm than the hydration is doing good. Filtering for days where soft drink intake exceeded water intake and checking headache severity the following day reveals the dietary pattern your food diary never caught because you weren't thinking of beverages as food.

The Walk and the Remedy

Went for a walk outside. Duration in minutes. Two fields that capture whether you left the house and moved. For chronic headache sufferers, the correlation between sedentary days and pain days is strong enough that most headache clinics now prescribe walking as first-line management. But "I try to walk most days" is meaningless without data. Filtering for walk durations above 30 minutes and checking same-day headache severity gives you the dose-response curve for your own body.

The final two text fields — "What did you try to help?" and "How did that go?" — are free-form outcome tracking. Resting, walking, medication, ignoring it, cold compress, dark room. Over sixty entries, patterns emerge: maybe ibuprofen at onset works but paracetamol doesn't, maybe lying down makes it worse while walking actually helps, maybe nothing works once severity crosses 7 and you just have to ride it out. That's the kind of granular treatment-response data that turns a follow-up appointment from a guessing game into a targeted medication review.