Painless Migraines - The Names and the Stages of the Painless Migraine

Many people think that migraine is an excruciating pain, but the migraine symptoms are far more than pain. The typical migraine type has four phases or stages: pre headache, aura, headache and post headache. Many migraine patients suffer from all these stages, while minority experience painless symptoms! So what are the symptoms of the painless migraine?

Technically, this painless migraine has many other names such as optical, silent, visual, vestibular, eye and optical migraine.

What are the painless migraine symptoms?

These symptoms begin with the typical migraine stage ' pre headache phase ', progresses in the aura stage, and then stops with skipping the pain ' headache stage'. If you have the painless migraine, you have many visual disturbances and other migraine-without headache symptoms.

The painless migraine phases

Pre headache

It is also named as the prodrome. This where the symptoms begin. This stage may remain many hours or even days before recognizing the normal migraine symptoms.

Prodrome recognizing may be helpful to you as it is warning you that changes of visual migraine are beginning to take place. The symptoms of this phase are:

1- Food cravings

2- Fatigue

3- Depression

4- Constipation

5- Irritability

6- Diarrhea

7- Neck muscle stiffness

The aura

It may last less than an hour. Many people believe that the aura is only visual disturbance ( flashing lights, spots and zigzag lines in front of the eyes ). They think this aura affects only the eye. This explains the physician's term ' painless, visual migraine '.

The migraine aura has other symptoms, including:

1- Dizziness

2- Difficult in finding words which you want

3- Hearing ability decrease

4- Confusion in thinking

5- Partial paralysis

6- Olfactory hallucinations ( smelling odors, which aren't there )

7- Reduce touch and feel or increased touch and feel

8- Sight loss ( blurry or partial vision )

9- Auditory hallucinations ( hearing sounds, which aren't there )

10- Numbness or tingling of your face

11- Visual hallucinations ( seeing sights which aren't there: zigzag lines, spots, wavy lines, flashing bright lights ).

If you have the visual migraine, your symptoms will stop here. You won't experience the headache pain.