A migraine feels like intense, pulsating pain, usually on one side of the head or behind the eye, that gets worse with ordinary movement like walking or bending over. But the pain is only part of it. A full migraine attack can involve visual disturbances, nausea, extreme sensitivity to light and sound, and even skin that hurts to touch. The entire experience can last anywhere from a few hours to three days, and many people feel drained for up to a day afterward.
The Pain Itself
Most people describe migraine pain as throbbing or pulsating, almost like a heartbeat inside the skull. It tends to be moderate to severe, meaning it genuinely interferes with your ability to function. Unlike a tension headache, which often wraps around the whole head like a tight band, migraine pain typically concentrates on one side, though it can affect both sides, especially in children and teenagers.
The pain commonly settles behind one eye, in the temple, or across the forehead. What makes it especially disabling is that routine physical activity makes it worse. Walking up stairs, leaning over to pick something up, even just shifting positions in bed can intensify the throbbing. Many people find that lying completely still in a dark, quiet room is the only tolerable option during a severe attack.
What Happens Before the Pain Starts
A migraine doesn’t always start with the headache. Many people experience a warning phase called the prodrome, which can begin hours or even days before the pain hits. During this time, you might feel unusually fatigued, irritable, or have trouble concentrating. Neck and shoulder stiffness is common. Some of the stranger early signals include frequent yawning, intense food cravings, and needing to urinate more often than usual. These symptoms are easy to dismiss in the moment, but over time, many people learn to recognize them as a reliable sign that a migraine is on the way.
About one in four people with migraines also experience an aura, which typically develops over five minutes or so and lasts up to an hour. Aura is most often visual. You might see shimmering or flickering lights, blind spots, or geometric patterns with jagged, zigzagging edges. Some people describe it like looking through a kaleidoscope, or like the wavy heat ripples you see rising off hot pavement. These visual disturbances can form crescent or C-shaped arcs, sometimes assembling into a ring before fading. Less commonly, aura involves tingling or numbness on one side of the body, or temporary difficulty finding words.
Sensory Overload During an Attack
One of the most defining features of a migraine is how your senses become overwhelmed. Normal light feels blinding. Everyday sounds, a conversation at normal volume, dishes clinking, feel physically painful. Many people also become intensely sensitive to smells. A whiff of perfume or cooking food that would normally go unnoticed can trigger waves of nausea. This sensory hypersensitivity is so central to migraines that doctors consider it a core part of diagnosis, not just an occasional side effect.
For some people, this sensitivity doesn’t fully go away between attacks. Research from the American Headache Society has found that many people with migraine report being bothered by light, sound, and touch even during headache-free periods, something that often goes unrecognized.
When Your Skin Hurts to Touch
One of the more surprising sensations during a migraine is allodynia, where things that shouldn’t be painful suddenly are. Your scalp becomes so tender that brushing or combing your hair hurts. Wearing a ponytail, resting your head on a pillow, or even feeling the shower stream hit your scalp can be genuinely painful. A study published in Neurology documented patients describing it in striking terms: “My hair hurts.” Some reported cutting their long hair short to reduce the weight pulling on sensitized follicles. Others said they would float their hair in the bathtub to get relief.
This isn’t exaggeration or anxiety. It happens because the sensory nerve endings around the hair follicles and skin become hypersensitized during an attack, turning ordinary touch into a pain signal. Wearing hats, headsets, or anything pressing against the head can become intolerable.
Nausea and Stomach Symptoms
Nausea is one of the most common migraine symptoms, and for many people, it’s the most debilitating part after the pain. Some experience full vomiting. What’s happening beneath the surface is that the stomach essentially slows down during an attack. Your digestive system stops moving food and liquid through at a normal pace, which is why nausea feels so persistent and why oral medications sometimes don’t work well during a migraine: they aren’t being absorbed properly.
This gut slowdown is well documented. Research has shown that even liquid digestion is measurably delayed during an attack. For some people, this connection between migraines and digestive disruption extends beyond the attack itself, with a significant overlap between migraine and chronic stomach-emptying problems.
The Migraine Hangover
When the pain finally breaks, the experience isn’t over. Most people enter a postdrome phase, often called a “migraine hangover,” that can last up to 24 hours. During this time, you might feel profoundly tired, achy, dizzy, and still somewhat sensitive to light. Concentration and clear thinking can be difficult. Simple tasks that normally require no effort, reading an email, following a conversation, making a decision, can feel like pushing through fog.
Brain fog during and after a migraine is real and well recognized. The American Migraine Foundation notes that people should not expect their brain to work at full capacity during any phase of a migraine attack, including the recovery period. This is not a matter of willpower or effort. The brain is genuinely impaired, and pushing through it doesn’t speed recovery.
How It Differs From a Regular Headache
The distinction matters because many people who have migraines don’t realize it. A regular tension headache produces a dull, pressing ache that’s uncomfortable but manageable. You can usually keep working or going about your day. A migraine, by contrast, is a neurological event that affects far more than just your head. The combination of one-sided pulsating pain, worsening with movement, nausea, and sensitivity to light and sound is what sets it apart. Doctors look for at least two of those pain characteristics alongside nausea or sensory sensitivity to make the diagnosis.
In children, migraines can look different. The pain is more often felt on both sides of the head rather than just one, and stomach symptoms sometimes dominate over headache, which can lead to misdiagnosis or dismissal. The unilateral pattern more typical of adult migraines usually develops in late adolescence or early adulthood.
The Full Timeline
A complete migraine attack, from the earliest warning signs through full recovery, can span several days. The prodrome lasts hours to days. Aura, if it occurs, lasts five to sixty minutes. The headache phase itself runs from several hours up to three days. And the postdrome adds up to another day of fatigue and cognitive cloudiness on top of that. Not every migraine follows all four phases, and the severity varies from one attack to the next, but the pattern helps explain why migraine is so much more disabling than a simple headache. It’s not a few hours of pain. It can be a multi-day neurological event that takes over your entire body.