What if the trigger is not only in the body?
Migraine is usually considered a neurological illness with complex triggers. Light, stress, lack of sleep, hormonal changes, weather shifts, or certain foods are often named. But what if the air in indoor spaces also plays a larger role than previously assumed? What if headaches, pressure in the head, nausea, sensitivity to light, and migraine-like complaints are in some cases linked not only to internal processes, but also to the room in which we live, sleep, and work? The book asks exactly this question and connects it both to personal experience and to scientific indications regarding CO2, particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, and other indoor pollutants.
In Dicke Luft, we do not just tell of symptoms, diagnoses, and the search for explanations, but also of the disturbing possibility that poor indoor air may intensify migraine and migraine-like complaints, or in some situations even help trigger them.
When Headaches Become Everyday Life
In the book, this topic does not begin with a theory, but with experience. There is the throbbing, pressing pain behind the eyes that radiates into the neck. Light hurts, sounds cut, sometimes a flickering veil moves through the field of vision, and there is nausea along with the feeling that even thinking becomes too difficult. Such episodes were taken seriously medically, investigated, and yet never truly explained. EEG and MRI showed no findings. Instead of clarity, there remained confusion, interpretations, and ever new suspicions.
This mixture is familiar to many affected people: severe complaints, but no clear cause. That is exactly where the book’s search for clues begins.
What if the Room Is Involved Too?
The book describes how for a long time no one even asked the most obvious question: whether the tiny bedroom, the constantly closed window, and the stuffy air could be related to the complaints. Instead came what many people know: retreat into darkness, pull the blinds down, avoid stimuli, take painkillers, and hope that things will eventually improve. The idea that the same symptoms might also have something to do with the air in the room seemed unimaginable at the time.
Why This Topic Will Not Let Go Of Us
What particularly concerns us about migraine and headaches is not only the severity of the complaints, but the gap in between: the many examinations, the missing explanation, and the feeling that everything somehow fits while at the same time nothing really explains anything. That is why headaches in the book do not stand in isolation, but as part of a larger field of symptoms including tiredness, concentration problems, brain fog, sensory overload, and autonomic overwhelm. Precisely because of this, we increasingly gained the impression that one has to look not only at the body, but also at the room.
Indoor Air as a Possible Amplifying Factor
We are not claiming that migraine is generally caused by poor indoor air. It is not that simple. Nor does our book provide a final answer to that. But it firmly puts the question on the table of whether polluted indoor spaces, chronically poor ventilation, and air pollutants could be a significant amplifying factor for some people.
Because if headaches, pressure in the head, nausea, sensitivity to light, and mental exhaustion plausibly intensify in poorly ventilated rooms and can change with better air, then air can no longer remain mere background. Then it belongs in the picture.
Why We Are Writing About This
Dicke Luft is not an attempt to simply reinterpret migraine. It is a personal search for clues. A story about symptoms, misinterpretations, examinations without clear findings, and the slow realization that perhaps we must not search only in the nervous system, only in lifestyle, and only in stress, but also in the air we breathe day after day.
The book connects personal experience with scientific indications of the health relevance of indoor air. It invites readers to view headaches and migraine-like complaints not only as an individual fate, but also as a reason to take environmental factors more seriously.
Perhaps Part of the Answer Is in the Air
Perhaps in many cases migraine is exactly what medicine currently understands it to be: an illness without a clearly recognizable cause and without any real possibility of cure. But perhaps there are also cases in which polluted indoor spaces, chronically poor air, or certain exposures play a larger part than previously assumed. Perhaps indoor air is not the whole explanation. But perhaps it is a missing piece of the puzzle.
And perhaps the crucial question begins not only in the body, but in the room where that body breathes day after day.
