ADHD & Headaches: The Link and What You Can Do Written by helen in Uncategorized This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through any links that you click. This post may also contain sponsored links. In this episode, I talk with Dr. Sarah Cheyette about the link between headaches and ADHD. Dr. Cheyette is a neurologist who specializes in ADHD and I saw her give a talk about the topic at ADHD Women’s Palozza.
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Adulting with adhd this is the adulting with adhd podcast self-empowerment for people with adhd today i’m very happy to have with me today dr sarah shayed she is a pediatric neurologist and author based out of the san francisco bay area hi sarah welcome to the show hi sarah yourself and thank you so much for having me there it’s going to be fun to talk i was
Very excited to see you on the roster at the adhd women’s palooza and i’ve watched your presentation with great interest and so that’s where this interview comes in is just i wanted to make sure our listeners could hear you talk about hormones and headaches and adhd first what what is the relationship between adhd and headaches i know i get them all the time
That’s all i know it’s funny you ask because if you look it up there’s really nothing there except maybe something i’ve written but i got into people are like wait a second neurologists don’t usually treat adhd but that’s actually how i got into treating adhd is through headaches i was having headache patients who were having such horrible headaches and such long
And never-ending and just awful headaches and it turned out the reason for some of their headaches like some people’s headaches are caused by this but these people were under a tremendous amount of stress and the adhd wasn’t known you know nobody really thought about adhd and it turned out that by treating the adhd i wound up treating their headaches so i was
Like oh this is pretty darn cool that’s very cool i’ve had a similar experience not with headaches but with anxiety i had a doctor treat adhd and that helped with the anxiety that’s funny how that worked so what do hormones have to do with it because i know there’s been a relationship there as well with women and yeah hormones so focusing specifically on women
Here hormones and you know take this from someone who’s been pregnant four times and whatever hormones are powerful they affect your brain i remember one day my husband who’s a psychiatrist went to see a talk on you know how hormones affect your brain cells and he came home he’s oh my god honey i totally understand now he seems just like it’s kind of amazing and
What i can say is that hormones relate to headaches a lot of people’s headaches are hormone driven for example there are some people whose headaches are most likely to happen during their period and that’s not everyone but that’s not uncommon but along with that can have many effects on adhd so when you have your headaches aren’t you gonna have a harder time
Concentrating stress pain and so stress yeah so when people’s hormones are fluctuating around the time of their period for example yeah along with that they also have more anxiety and stress and just it they can get a little yeah and when you’re feeling well that’s not when you’re going to be at your best for doing whatever it is you’re doing your laundry your
Chemistry homework your whatever it is plus sleep can be an issue as well again the pain of the headaches can affect sleep the stress of the anxiety depression you know fill in your negative emotion here type of thing can be an issue and the medicines for the headaches can also affect your concentration so there’s a lot of reasons why these things can go hand
In hand i don’t know about you but sometimes medicines for headaches can make you sleepy or dizzy just want to check out for a little bit that’s a really interesting piece i hadn’t considered i’ve never even looked out for that but i’m sure that could affect people as you were talking i was thinking through i know when i have headaches i i guess it doesn’t really
Matter what’s causing it but it’s like how do you just make it go away so this is such a basic question but say i have a headache what’s my first step what do i do so again we’re talking about somebody who knows what their headaches are from a migraine means something ticks off your brain your brain has a nest of cells in it that then send out pain signals to the
Nerves that go out to your head and that’s where the pain of the migraine comes from the some people will have abnormal signals to the visual part of their brain and that’s where some people will see weird things spots or squiggles or heat waves or other things other people that those little nests of cells will then go and set off the vomiting center some people
Can’t think straight as part of their migraines when you have a migraine they’ve done studies on people in the middle of their migraine and for some people they will just see the electrical activity of the brain shut down it’s just wild and so that’s why pieces of your brain aren’t working so well there’s been a couple of times at least where for example on air
Newscasters had what looked like a stroke because they couldn’t talk and maybe had some weakness and it turned out it was a migraine that part of their brain wasn’t working so where am i going with this that’s a good question but we were talking about there’s two parts of headaches one is trying to figure out how to get set off in the first place and that’s
Where like managing the adhd could be a part of it then there’s a question of what do you do once it’s set off to get yourself back to normal and for most people that is medication some people would take a walk or have a drink or other things but that would be a drink of water may i be clear adulting with adhd but not an adult beverage so oh yeah um although i’m
Sure there are people who go that route too it’s not recommended the issue really is a medication for most people and for some people that medicine might be tylenol or ibuprofen early seems like the best idea for people because the medicines work the best so if you can kind of cut into when you’re at most likely to have the headache if you can understand that you
Might be more likely to take your medicine at that time and there’s a lot of fantastic medicines for migraines out the last few years have seen a new treatment ten years or a little more before that there was another revolution it should be doable to get rid of the that’s good to know it’s doable doable talk to your doctor because all these things are prescription
Medicines but they’re available and they are just amazing what scientists have figured out for this va scientist i continue to be blown away some of the stuff they’ve come up with it’s incredible it’s incredible and of course we have a long way to go both for adhd and for headaches but we don’t understand the brain so when we don’t understand the brain it’s hard
To do things for it something that’s brought me comfort is just knowing that there is affordable private online therapy available anytime and anywhere through better health and i’ll just found it to be way more convenient and way more in line with how i prefer to communicate there’s ways to communicate through email through chat through phone whatever is easier
For you and listeners of the adulting with adhd podcasts can save 10 percent off their first month today if they sign up to take advantage of this deal go to betterhelp.com adhd adulting that is betterhelp.help.com adhd adult and i know for me like when i take my adhd meds and forget to eat that’s usually when i my headache sets in it’s such a basic thing but
Yeah we talked a little bit about the headache medicines making adhd worse because of sleepiness and stuff but it goes the other way some people have headaches directly from their medicines for adhd so for some reason they take their ad or all ritalin folklin whatever it is stratera and then they have a headache and even eating doesn’t seem to fix that so these
Medicines can cause headaches directly but like you sometimes the headaches can be indirect in that medicine cause lack of eating or drinking or both and then because that you have the headache in which case you’ll want to set your alarm to eat or drink even if you’re not hungry because if your medicine is otherwise working well absolutely but let’s say i i take
This advice and i have chronic headaches and i know there’s medicine out there when i go to my family doctor or am i looking for a specialist what’s kind of i would say that it may depend on the different area you live in across the country but most people would start with their primary care doctor their family doctor their internist whoever it is most of them
Are very adept at treating migraines on an as needed basis so that’s the turning it off once it starts basis however if you are having frequent headaches you may want to go see a neurologist or get a referral to a neurologist as needed because that’s where prevention comes in from migraines so yeah it would be nice to not have so many headaches and then not have
To take so much medicine for the headaches i would say probably at least from what i can tell the primary care doctors will refer to neurologists when the prevention stuff is is needed gotcha okay so thank you i want to thank you again for being on the show and i wanted to ask you what you’re up to these days and where people can keep up with your work oh sure i
Have a website and that’s basically my name so i’ll spell it for you because it’s not obvious for most people how to spell my name but it is s a r a h c h e y e t t e dot com and i have several books out on adhd one which is called adhd in the focus mine is written with my kids karate teacher actually yeah we try to take a holistic view towards eight and oh
My husband the psychiatrist is on there too but yeah yeah the point is that it uses the athletic mindset so it uses techniques borrowed from athletes that even if you’re not an athlete you can develop the mindset of an athlete to maximize your ability to deal with adhd so that’s one there’s winning with adhd which is for teens was written by somebody who was
I think she was 20 21 when she was writing it and she got me along as co-author and my third one is a little comic slash graphic novel called adhd and me and it’s meant to explain adhd in five minutes or less with lots of pictures so all of those are on amazon but wherever you get your books but yeah tune in at some point i love being on this show because it’s
Really fun to simplify things so that people can understand what’s going on with their own bodies yeah there’s always a breath of fresh air when i come across a doctor who gets it i feel like oh you get it and i feel like a lot of these episodes turn into i just finding things out the hard way because it’s not common knowledge you take for granted that you assume
People would know and i know hormones is one of those that we’re learning we don’t know as much about our bodies as we thought we did and yeah yeah and you know these are all common things and so of course they can all overlap but they really do seem to go hand in hand in lots of people in lack of sleep adhd negative emotions and then of course the hormones
Are part of that for some people other people are pretty steady hormones do not cause these things but they still have these issues and it’s you go to one doctor for one thing and you go to the other doctor for the other thing and it to find the one who deals with both of them that can be a bit tricky so you might talk to your primary care or your neurologist
About your migraines and not even think about the adhd part or which may be treated by a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist doesn’t want to deal with the headache part of it so it can be really hard to sometimes find a way to tie everything together but you’re all one person absolutely i’m learning that the hard way it’s i i think i grew up thinking you go to a
Doctor they have all the answers and they know everything and now that i actually have a complex condition and perimenopause and everything oh it’s not all black and white there’s all these like layers and shades of gray oh my god that’s it’s tough and just you know from the doctor’s perspective most things that we know about you are through you so like yeah adhd
You don’t get like a thing on your forehead that says i have adhd and if you don’t wear a t-shirt saying by the way i’ve got migraines too and some people over emphasize things some people underestimate you know what i’m trying to say but you know under emphasize yeah that’s exactly it not underestimate yeah we’ll shade things differently every doctor has their
Own personal history and their own personal world view as well and many doctors are very constrained by time and and other things so it can take a while to dive deep but just try to be persistent and try to you know maybe make a list of what you want to say before you go into the doctor and oftentimes when you’re trying to figure out if one thing is related to
The other keeping a diary or journal which doesn’t have to be complicated hey adhd people it is hard to keep i find it hard to keep a journal myself of anything but try to keep it simple piece of paper with jotted notes is fine you don’t have to get the latest app for journals it doesn’t have to be all inclusive but just getting an idea as what is going on at
The same time will help your doctor make sense of your symptoms because if you don’t know they’re gonna be like i don’t live with you try to bring something to the discussion yeah awesome really good advice sarah that’s really all i have did you have anything else you wanted to throw in there i can talk about this for hours but the most important thing is that
These are both hidden things of migraines and adhd like i said there’s no i guess there could be but most people don’t tattoo adhd on their forehead or migraines or anything else so just know that what’s obvious to you may not be obvious to other people either and so both conditions can worsen each other and controlling one might help the other a little bit and
So it’s just something to think about for people who are suffering from both things awesome thank you sarah thanks for having me hey guys i’m here to ask a little favor so in order to grow the podcast even more it’s come to my attention that i should probably survey you guys to get a better idea of who’s actually listening and what you guys want and what you don’t
Want if you could pretty please to adultingwithadhd.com survey it would help me immensely to have this information not just for myself as i’m creating content but for any potential partners who may want to help grow the show i would like to find people who are exactly right for you guys thank you very much and until next time happy adulting
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ADHD & Headaches: The Link and What You Can Do By The Adulting With ADHD Podcast
