admin Karamo Brown is known for helping others accept themselves, grow emotionally, and feel well mentally on Netflix’s hit show Queer Eye. Now the star is opening up about his own struggle to do all of these things while living with migraines for most of his life. Brown says he’s in a much better place with his migraine management today, but it took proper support and self-care to get to where he is.
Brown, 40, says he had his first migraine in high school. “It was one of the most debilitating things I’d ever experienced,” Brown, who is partnering with Amgen and Novartis on their Know Migraine Mission campaign, tells SELF. “I think it was during finals, and so the stress of finals triggered it, and I just couldn’t focus. I mean, I literally was locking myself in my room, closing the blinds, because the light was making me nauseated.”
Migraine is far from your usual headache—it’s a neurological condition that causes intense head pain for hours or days at a time, usually along with other symptoms, according to the Mayo Clinic. Migraines can progress through four stages—prodrome, aura, attack, and post-drome—though not everyone feels symptoms at each stage. The nausea and light sensitivity that Brown describes are both common attack symptoms (the phase when the migraine is actually occurring), along with throbbing and pulsing pain, the Mayo Clinic explains.
Many different factors can trigger a migraine, and triggers may be different for each person. Some common triggers include changes in sleep, hormonal changes, alcohol, and caffeine, along with stress, as SELF previously explained. Because stress is Brown’s most frequent migraine trigger, preventing his migraines often means monitoring his mental health too. “I do a lot of meditation, I do a lot of breathing,” he says, in addition to exercising in his garage and jumping rope, which has become his favorite quarantine workout.
Brown also notes how important boundary-setting has become in taking care of his health. Simply telling those around him that he needs to take a step back when triggers come up hasn’t always been easy, he says, but opening up that line of communication has changed his life for the better. “[I] also communicate to people, ‘I’m feeling stressed right now, and this stress will trigger a migraine in me, do you mind if we take a moment to have a break?’” he says. “I think being open and honest and vulnerable with people who you work with, who are in your family, helps them to understand and allows them to be able to support you.”
For many people like Brown, migraines and mental health are two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, stress can trigger migraines. On the other, not receiving proper care, support, and treatment for a chronic condition like migraine can be distressing in and of itself. In fact, Brown says that the most difficult part of his migraine journey occurred early on, when, at first, people didn’t believe his symptoms. “I just remember everyone around me thinking I was either trying to get out of the test, which I actually felt very prepared for, or just saying to me, like, ‘Get over it,’” Brown tells SELF. “And that was such a hard thing for me as a teenager, because here I am experiencing this, and instead of getting support, I’m told just to get over it, and that what I’m experiencing was not real. And that was difficult.”
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Brown says that when people didn’t validate his symptoms, his mental health worsened. “I would then start to feel anxious,” he explains. “I would then start to feel a bit of depression. I’d feel isolated—I’d feel alone—because no one else was understanding what I was experiencing.”
“The response I was receiving from the world around me was informing me that what I was going through was not real, though I felt it and though I was experiencing it,” he continues. “Then you start to feel like, Here I go again, canceling on something that we’re about to go to; here I am again, saying I can’t show up; or here I am again, saying, ‘Close the blinds.’ You feel like you’re the downer of the group, and [that affects] your mental health.”
Today, Brown is a single parent to two sons, Jason, 22, and Chris, 20. He uses his experience growing up with a chronic condition—one others did not always take seriously—to inform how he raises his children. What was difficult for him as a child, like finding support and relief from family, friends, and others, he hopes to make easier for his own kids. And for Brown, that starts with listening and encouraging bodily autonomy, particularly when his children have concerns about their own health.
“When my children come up to me and say they have anything going on with their bodies, I believe them,” he says. “It’s their bodies, it’s their minds, and I think it’s such an important thing. It takes away the stigma around whatever they’re sharing—that’s the reason why I’m speaking out about my migraines—and then it also encourages them to know that it’s okay to ask for help and to get support and to look for those resources.”
This, he hopes, will teach his sons the importance of prioritizing their health, both physically and mentally, and to not be afraid to tell others if they feel like something’s wrong. “When you have the one adult in your life saying, ‘Yes, I understand you, and I hear you, and I want to support you,’ that starts a healthy journey on how we view taking care of your body and your mind. I think that’s a great thing that you can give to someone, especially a child,” Brown says.
Brown still has migraines. However, he feels much more adept to handle them now, largely because he knows the people around him—his “core group,” as he calls them—understand what he’s going through. He also has the proper medical care he needs, which is key, as seeing a doctor and getting a proper migraine diagnosis is the first step in figuring out a treatment plan that will work best for you. Now, Brown says, he feels like he has the support he needs to take care of himself best.
Related links:
- 9 Ways People Are Getting Migraine Relief These Days
- Why Serena Williams Felt She Had to ‘Play Through the Pain’ of Migraines
- 13 People Explain What It’s Really Like to Have a Migraine
