Are There Any Benefits to Having Migraines? Here Is What the Research Says

Almost everything written about migraines seems to be about what they cost you. The missed days, the cancelled plans, the cognitive fog, the career conversations you dread having. While accurate, it’s also exhausting to read on a bad week when you are already lying in a dark room and don’t have the energy to eat.

After more than ten years of living with chronic daily migraines, I went looking for something different. Not toxic positivity. Not "everything happens for a reason." Just an honest answer to a question I had never seen asked with any real seriousness: is there anything this condition is actually good for?

The research is more interesting than I expected.

Why Migraine Content Is Almost Always About What You Lose

It makes sense that most migraine content focuses on the negatives. The condition is disabling. According to the World Health Organization, migraine is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. The research exists to support that, and the people writing about it are largely trying to help others get their lives back.

But the result of that framing is that if you go looking for anything positive about having migraines, you find almost nothing written from a lived experience perspective. The few articles that exist are short, mostly clinical, and don’t extend beyond the research itself.

In this post, I want to try to do something slightly different. While it does cover the actual research, it also covers what a decade of managing a chronic neurological condition has forced me to build, without pretending for a moment that any of it was a fair trade.

Migraines and Lower Type 2 Diabetes Risk

A large study published in JAMA Neurology followed nearly 75,000 women over ten years and found that women with active migraines were 20 to 30 percent less likely to develop type 2 diabetes than women with no migraine history. The link was strong enough that when women's migraines improved, and their headaches decreased, their diabetes risk went back up. Strengthening the case that the relationship is real and not coincidental.

Researchers writing about the study in Harvard Health noted that headache specialists had already observed informally that their migraine patients didn’t develop diabetes at the same rate as the general population. But what remains unclear is the mechanism. One leading explanation involves CGRP, a protein that is active in both migraine and metabolic function and appears to be the link between the two conditions.

Note: This study only followed women, and the population was relatively homogeneous. The researchers believe the findings likely extend to other groups, but that has not been confirmed with the same level of evidence.

Migraines and a Natural Protective Relationship With Alcohol

Research summarised by Harvard Health found that migraine sufferers tend to be relatively protected against developing alcoholism. The most straightforward explanation: alcohol is one of the most commonly reported migraine triggers, so many people with the condition naturally reduce or avoid it over time. The body essentially enforces what willpower often cannot.

If you have ever been at a work event, watched everyone else have a second drink, and quietly decided that no glass of anything is worth two days of symptoms, you already understand this mechanism. You were not making a virtuous choice. You were doing a fast risk calculation that most people never have to think about.

There is no moral high ground in this. You’re just doing the calculation, which is the same one that will sideline you for three days over a pressure drop. But it is an interest side effect of living with migraines.

The Evolutionary Advantage Angle

This is where I found the research to become really interesting, and also where I have the most complicated feelings about it.

The evolutionary explanation for migraines goes roughly like this: as a rule, conditions that impair the function of an individual should lead to poorer survival over generations and eventually die out. Migraines have been present in human populations for millions of years. They have not died out. That suggests they served a purpose.

One leading theory, discussed in Harvard Health, is that migraines originally evolved as a protective alarm system against toxins entering the body. If consuming certain substances produced severe neurological symptoms, that would be a strong incentive to avoid those substances. The individuals with the most sensitive alarm systems would survive longer. The migraine we experience today is thought by some researchers to be the result of that early warning system becoming over-sensitized over time.

So my body, in 2026, is running ancient protective software on hardware it for some reason decided not to update for the modern age. The software is now randomly malfunctioning and freezing up during barometric pressure drops, ragweed, work fatigue, and the smell of someone's perfume hitting me from two desks away.

While this knowledge is interesting, it doesn’t make the condition easier. But it does make it feel less like a random malfunction and more like a very old system doing exactly what it was built to do, in conditions it was never designed for.

What Migraines Have Forced Me to Build

Managing a chronic condition for years forces you to build support systems. Not because chronic illness is a gift, and not because suffering has some inherent growth attached to it. It builds something because there is no other option. Your body leaves you no alternative but to learn it, in more detail than most people ever have to.

Here is what ten years of chronic daily migraines have forced into place for me, none of which I would have developed on the same timeline without the condition.

Sleep consistency. Sleep disruption is one of my most reliable triggers. Missing a night, shifting my schedule, or letting the stress spiral run until 2am costs me days. So protecting sleep stopped being optional years ago. I keep a consistent sleep schedule in a way most people I know do not, not because I am disciplined, but because the consequences of not doing so are immediate and measurable.

Never skipping breakfast. Fasting fills my threshold glass quickly. Missing breakfast is one of the fastest ways to set up a migraine before noon. So breakfast is non-negotiable, every day, regardless of how early or busy the morning is. I have accidentally made a health habit out of something that is entirely self-protective.

Yoga regularity. If I skip yoga for more than a few days, the tension that accumulates in my neck and shoulders starts to pre-load an attack. I do yoga because not doing it carries a direct consequence. The side effect is that I now have a consistent movement practice that I genuinely would not have maintained without that feedback loop.

A doctor-supported supplement protocol. I take B2, magnesium, CoQ10, D3, and iron in a specific combination and dosage because my neurologist recommended them for migraine prevention. I researched all of them. I understand what each one does. I would not know any of this existed without the condition that required me to find it.

Early stress signal recognition. I know what stress looks like in my body before it peaks, because I have had to learn it. The tension starts in my jaw. The change in how my shoulders sit. The point at which my calendar is too full, and the threshold is filling faster than usual. Most people learn these signals late, or not at all. I had a strong incentive to learn them early.

None of this is a silver lining. It is not a lesson or a reframe. It is a list of outcomes that exist because managing this condition at this level of frequency gave me no choice but to build them. The cost of building them was years of pain. That is not a trade I would choose. But the outcomes are real, and I think they are worth naming.

The Honest Verdict: Is Any of This Worth It?

No. While knowing that I’m less likely to develop type 2 diabetes is reassuring, and understanding why my body evolved to have migraines is interest, it doesn’t offset a chronic daily neurological condition that affects fifteen or more days out of every month for me.

But this post was never meant to convince you that having migraines is secretly fine. They are not. What it was meant to do was offer a slight reframe on why we have migraines in the first place… that they aren’t an evolutionary glitch, they serve a purpose, but just not one that works well in the modern world.

• Does having migraines reduce your risk of type 2 diabetes?

  Research published in JAMA Neurology found that women with active migraines were 20 to 30 percent less likely to develop type 2 diabetes over a ten-year follow-up period compared to women with no migraine history. When migraines improved and headaches decreased, the protective effect also decreased, suggesting the relationship is real. The mechanism is not fully understood, but the protein CGRP, which is active in both migraine and metabolic function, is thought to be involved. This research only studied women, so broader conclusions require more evidence.

• Why do migraines have an evolutionary advantage?

  One leading theory is that the migraine brain evolved as an early warning system against toxic substances. Individuals whose bodies responded severely to certain ingested substances would have had a survival advantage by avoiding those substances. Over millions of years, that sensitive alarm system persisted in the human population. The current state of migraines, highly reactive to modern triggers like pressure changes, sensory overload, and stress, is thought to represent an over-sensitised version of that original protective function.

• Is migraine connected to a lower risk of alcoholism?

  Research summarised by Harvard Health suggests that migraine sufferers tend to be relatively protected against developing alcoholism. The most likely explanation is behavioural: alcohol is a well-known migraine trigger, and people with the condition often naturally reduce or avoid it over time because the consequences are immediate. The body effectively enforces avoidance without requiring a deliberate decision to abstain.

• Can managing migraines improve your overall health habits?

  For many people who manage migraines long-term, the condition creates strong feedback loops around health behaviours. Consistent sleep, regular meals, movement routines, and stress management are all areas where the consequences of neglect are faster and more noticeable than they are for most people without the condition. This does not make the condition worthwhile, but it does mean that the management process builds certain habits that tend to become consistent over time.

• What does CGRP have to do with migraines and diabetes?

  CGRP, or calcitonin gene-related peptide, is a protein that plays a role in both migraine and metabolic processes including blood sugar regulation. Researchers believe it is the likely mechanism connecting the observed lower diabetes risk in migraine sufferers. CGRP has also become central to modern migraine prevention treatments, with several CGRP-targeting medications now approved for migraine prevention. The full picture of how CGRP links migraine and metabolic function is still being studied.

• What habits do people with chronic migraines tend to develop?

  People managing chronic migraines over a long period often develop consistent sleep schedules, regular meal timing, exercise routines tied to tension management, and more detailed awareness of their stress signals. These habits form primarily because the feedback loop between lifestyle and symptoms is fast and direct. Skipping a meal, disrupting sleep, or missing a movement practice carries a measurable consequence that reinforces the behaviour over time.

The content on this page is based on personal experience and is not medical advice. Always consult your doctor regarding your migraine management and treatment plan.

QUICK ANSWER: Research published in JAMA Neurology found that women with active migraines were 20 to 30 percent less likely to develop type 2 diabetes over a ten-year period. Separate research also suggests that migraine sufferers tend to be naturally protected against developing alcoholism. And from an evolutionary standpoint, the migraine brain is thought to have developed as an early warning system, a sensitivity that likely served a survival purpose long before we had fluorescent office lights and open-plan offices to contend with. There is also a quieter set of benefits that does not show up in any study: the habits that managing this condition for years has forced into place.