017 - Becoming Migraine-Free - A Powerful Mind-Body Approach with Dr. Kevin Wissman

This is the most personal episode I’ve recorded to date.

My guest is Dr. Kevin Wissman - migraine health coach, pharmacist, and founder of Tame the Migraine. After suffering with migraines for over 20 years himself, Kevin developed the Migraine Reset and Rewire System, a revolutionary programme that’s helping people all over the world free themselves from chronic migraine.

And here’s the big twist… I was one of them.

In this episode, we dive deep into:

• What migraines really are (spoiler: not just a bad headache)
• Nervous system dysregulation and why it matters
• Triggers, trauma, and the placebo effect
• My own story of recovery after 18 years of migraines
• How Kevin’s approach changed my life — and why I want more people to know about it

Whether you suffer with migraine yourself or know someone who does, I hope this conversation brings hope, clarity, and real insight.

For more insights, tips, and guidance on living a meaningful life, visit Mel Harrowsmith Coaching. Ready to dive deeper? Reach out to book a session and start your journey towards purpose today.

Edited with finesse, transcribed and produced by Mike Roberts at Making Digital Real

Transcript

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Life with Purpose podcast. My guest today is Dr. Kevin Wissman, a migraine health coach and founder of Tame the Migraine. Kevin has dedicated his life's work to finding relief and solutions for migraine sufferers driven by his own 20-year experience of migraine.

With a doctorate in pharmacy, residency and fellowship training, certification in empowered relief and a specialised background in psychology, Kevin takes a comprehensive mind-body approach. Today we're going to be talking about what has brought Kevin to make migraine coaching his life purpose, we'll do some myth-busting around migraine and we'll talk about Tame the Migraine and the Migraine Reset and Wire System, Kevin's revolutionary programme that is helping scores of clients become migraine-free. Kevin, hello, welcome.

Hi Mel, so happy to be here. I'm thrilled to have you here. This is probably the most personal episode I've done so far, for reasons that are about to become very obvious.

So before we dive into the conversation, I want to be clear about how we know each other. So I am a former client of Kevin's, having recently taken part in his Migraine Reset and Rewire System programme. Now, before I joined the programme, I'd experienced migraine for about 18 years and when I got the formal diagnosis, I was given a prescription and that was pretty much the end, well that was the end of my interaction with medical services on migraine.

I kept asking for repeat prescriptions, they kept giving them to me, but there was no follow-up. So it's down to me to explore alternatives that might bring some relief. So I tried chiropractic adjustments, physiotherapy, hypnotherapy, energy work, kinesiology, shiatsu, magnesium supplements, cutting out different foods, changing the contraceptive I was using, giving up certain types of exercise.

And although I learned so much about myself and migraine along the way, the migraines have changed over time, they were still there. They were getting more frequent as I got older. So when I found Dr. Kevin, seemingly out of the blue, I was really curious but also sceptical.

But curiosity won the day and I joined his Reset and Rewire Programme and I am a new woman. So after seeing and experiencing the extraordinary results in myself and others, I wanted to invite Kevin to come onto the podcast because I think the work he's doing is vital for those suffering with migraine and I want as many people as possible to know about it so that they can make an informed choice about their health because it doesn't have to continue the way that it has been doing. So now that's the disclaimer out of the way, we can get started with our conversation.

So we're obviously going to explore the causes and potential solutions for migraine during our discussion as well as talking about your experience, Kevin. But before we do that, I think we should probably start by explaining what a migraine is because contrary to some popular belief, it is not just a bad headache, is it? 100% true there, Mel. And yeah, before we even talk about migraine, I just am like honestly tearing up hearing you say like I'm a new woman.

I am. That's, I mean, that's why we do what we do. I have my mission and my vision for our business on the wall.

And it's literally, yes, it's migraine, but we're really trying to transform people's lives because I always had the saying that I felt like I was dying to live, but these migraines were just making me live to die. And everyone's at a different severity of that scale. But yeah, being a new woman, being a new person, transforming your life, like you have such amazing skills as a human.

And like I'm so excited for what's going to come for you because of this in your life coaching business and just your life in general. Yeah, I tear up because I care about you. I care about everyone.

And that just means we did our job. You did your job. You did the work.

It wasn't us. We just guided you. I also like to add a disclaimer too that my wife is just as important, if not more important to this whole business.

I was the one that suffered with migraines, but she does so much in the background. And as you know, like some of the advocate things and seeing her involved, it would be a discredit to not give her credit. I give her all credit.

I wouldn't be here without her, and I wouldn't have this business without her too. Sorry for the unexpected sidetrack. But yeah, let's talk about migraine.

And it is absolutely not a headache. Whether your boss or your aunt or your mom or your dad or anyone in your life says, can't you just pop a Motrin or an Advil or a paracetamol or acetaminophen, that's just not going to work. It might help just a little bit.

But migraine is a full body disorder. In fact, it's a nervous system disorder. And although most people with migraine get terrible head pain, I mean, it affects the nervous system of your gut.

It affects the nervous system of your heart, whole body. And we can talk about the different types of migraines. In fact, I mean, there's something called hemiplegic migraine, where half of the side of your body, you go into paralysis.

You can't use it. And that's not a headache. That's a full body nervous system experience and condition.

But it doesn't have to be scary. It doesn't have to be debilitating, just as you've proven with your own example. Yeah, absolutely.

That example you gave there, I mean, that must be really terrifying for people if they don't know what it is, because my mind immediately goes to stroke. Exactly. Yeah.

I mean, when you were working with us, you know, Bernie and Deb, both of them, years of hemiplegic migraine, having to go in the ambulance multiple times. And the doctors sometimes misdiagnose and think it is stroke without the proper history and diagnosis and assessment. But it presents just like it, but it's not.

It's not life-threatening in the fact that, like, you're throwing a blood clot and, you know, you could have brain damage. There is some damage that can come from migraine attacks, but all of this can be reversed, whereas strokes, it's a little more of an irreversible in some cases. So, but presentation is very similar and scary and debilitating in its own ways.

So we're already sort of straying into myth-busting territory here, because one of the other common things that people assume about migraine is that it's only a migraine if you get aura, which is the visual disturbances that only some people experience. I've never had a visual disturbance with my migraine. I don't know what yours was.

I did not have as well. You know, the interesting thing, though, is that migraine can kind of evolve and adapt. We don't know exactly why.

For me, as a young child, I actually didn't know I had vestibular migraine. I would get carsick. I could not read books.

I couldn't do anything but look straight ahead as a kid, and so I hated road trips and vacations as a kid. But then it evolved into more of your traditional head pain migraine attack, and then it started in my 20s, turned into a bit of an abdominal migraine, where you get terrible nausea and vomiting to go with the head pain. I never experienced an aura, and, you know, you really can't compare different types of migraine because vertigo and being disoriented and imbalanced is extremely scary, but the pain, the stabbing pain in your head and your eye is just as bad in its own way, and then you've got the hemiplegic.

You're losing function of your body. That's scary, too, and people might think nausea is not a big deal, but when you get it every day and you want to throw up and you can't keep food down, I mean, there's been stories like Sarah that's worked with us. She lost 20 pounds in four months because of the nausea.

So it's hard to compare. They're all so painful in their own ways, and that's just the physical pain. We haven't even talked about the emotional pain and social pain that comes with it, too.

Yeah, the psychological aspect to it as well is something obviously we've both experienced. This is in some ways worse than the pain, I think. Even taking a step back from migraine, we all know what that voice in our head is like.

Most of us haven't quite got to the stage where we've turned it into a positive voice all of the time, and even those of us who have been working on that, it can still chuck in a negativity every now and again. So I think most of us will have some experience of the kind of things that our internal voice can say to us and how that can dramatically affect our mood. So if you chuck a load of pain in there as well and vomiting and dizziness and paralysis down one side of your body and visual disturbances and all the other kind of things that come along with migraine, it's a really crappy time.

Yeah, I mean, thinking about my story, many people are like me. I'm not sure about you specifically, Mel, but the pain got so bad I didn't want to be alive anymore. Yeah.

And that is obviously not just a headache, right? When you're starting to think about things like that, it's unbearable. It really is unbearable. Yeah, yeah, it is.

And it's heartbreaking that people get into that position where it really is getting to that extent. However, we have something very positive to talk about today that will hopefully mean less people and fewer people will get to that point. So before we go on to some of the positive solutions and how we can bring those to people, we talked a bit about what migraine is.

Are there specific causes? You talked about it being a nervous system issue. So are there particular causes for migraine? I'll give as many different definitions as I can because there's a lot of critics out there in the world. And the crazy thing is when you go to a doctor to confirm you have migraine, they do an MRI so that they don't find anything on an MRI.

So it's like an exclusion diagnosis, a diagnosis of exclusion, as we say in the medical field. If we can't find anything, well, then we know it's migraine, which is, you can see some flaws in that system already. But migraine, some people will say it's a neurobiological condition.

And the definition of neuro and biological is essentially nervous system. Other people will say it's a neuroinflammatory condition, which just means your nervous system causes inflammation in your body that then causes these different symptoms or signs of a migraine attack, which are different for everyone. I like to go more of an umbrella term.

A migraine is simply a nervous system condition where you have an oversensitive and dysregulated nervous system, which means that as life comes at you, all life is stress, good stress, bad stress, you stress. And when you have a nervous system condition where you're sensitive, it's easier for life to set off this cascade of symptoms and events, this neurological firestorm or firework show. And then when it's dysregulated, that's when things stop working properly.

That's when you start to have paralysis when your nervous system gets stimulated too much or oversensitized, or that's when you get head pain because your trigeminal nerve is oversensitive and dysregulated and it causes that stabbing eye pain or that head pounding or pulsing. Same thing with the abdominal nausea as well. It all comes down to having an oversensitive and dysregulated nervous system.

And you ask, how do you get migraine? Well, it's unclear fully. There is very clear there's a strong genetic or inheritable component to it. The studies vary by the day.

Some days it's 20% inherited. Other days it's 80%. And the other interesting thing, I love to get in the weeds, but there's a thing called intergenerational trauma where if your grandmother was traumatized, that changes her genes.

It can turn on migraine genetics. And then she passes that on to your mom. And then your mom just happens to get it from her and passes it on to you.

And so trauma or stress, major stressors, even little stressors can turn on migraine genes. So I like to look at it as either you inherited this or life turned on your genes and life gave it to you, essentially. But we all have the DNA for us to develop migraine, every single person on this planet.

It's just some of us were given different cards and life came at us at different times, if that makes sense. It does make sense. It certainly makes sense to me, but I do have inside information.

But it does make sense. So I think what's interesting there is we touched on a little bit about genetics and also talked about stress. So arguably some of that stress could be from intergenerational trauma, but also environment, lifestyle, the joys and challenges that life throws at us on a day-to-day basis.

So one of the things I also wanted to ask you about, and again, this is another one of those myths that we either need to confirm or deny, is around triggers. So people talk about triggers a lot and say, oh, well, I can't do this because it's a trigger for migraine. What's your take on triggers? Hate them and love them.

I think triggers can be very disempowering because you feel like you're out of control. There's nothing you can do about it. And I live this too, so I'm not blaming anyone if they've got here, but you start to live in like a shell or in a bubble, right? Trying to avoid all possible triggers and no one tells you that, hey, you can heal your nervous system so you don't have to have triggers anymore.

Triggers are essentially just stressors in life. And so, yes, if you have developed or inherited an oversensitive, dysregulated nervous system, you will be more sensitive to temperature changes or to pressure changes from storm fronts, or even the clothes that you wear on your forearm, irritating the receptors on your skin, to foods, to perfumes, to sounds, to lights. I mean, we could go on all day on different triggers out there and anything can be a trigger because all those things are just turning on your nervous system.

And if you're not healing your nervous system, those triggers aren't going anywhere. Life is not going to stop coming at you, which means your nervous system just gets the snowball effect of getting more sensitive, more dysregulated. And so avoiding triggers will not fix the problem.

It will shrink your life and you might have less migraines, but it will always catch up to you. Whereas if you heal your nervous system, the triggers don't affect you. You are above it.

Your threshold is so high. And I just add in case this, people don't realize this, but things you put in your body, like food, things you put on your body, cosmetics, hygiene products. And now there was a recent study that they found that people that live in coastal towns have higher rates of chronic medical conditions because of microplastics in the water and the seafood.

It's just everything can be a trigger or a stressor, but it doesn't have to bring you down. I think one of the things I found most fascinating around the trigger work was also how some of it's not true. Made up, yeah. 

Conditioned responses. Yeah, yeah. We're talking about sleep.

Sleep's probably the best one, the example. Do you have one specifically that was most powerful for you? Yeah, so it only occurred to me doing the work with you. So it's connected to strawberries.

So there's quite a short strawberry season here in the UK, and I refuse to buy them out of season because they come in from South Africa or somewhere ridiculous. So I tend to gorge on strawberries for a couple of months. And a couple of summers ago, a friend of my partner's came to stay, and she said she didn't have strawberries because they gave her a headache.

I'd never had a problem eating strawberries before. And then all of a sudden, after she said that, I started getting a headache after I was eating strawberries. So I cut them out.

Occasionally had a few, thought I'm not going to push it. And then after doing your work, I was like, sod this. This is rubbish.

This is some absolute garbage I've taught myself, and now I'm eating strawberries again. It's the stories we tell ourselves, what we focus on, we get more of, right? It's where our focus goes, our energy flows. And in psychology, that's called selective attention, essentially.

It's what you focus on, you get. And what's so, so great about that story, Mel, is Hazel up in Scotland joined a couple weeks ago, maybe a month ago. She had the opposite.

She went online and found that strawberries have some antioxidant, anti-inflammatory properties, and it helps her migraines calm down. So it's what you find. And obviously you want to get to the truth of what is real and what's not.

But you can do a lot of neuroscience and psychology to work around these migraines, for sure. Break these limiting beliefs or incorrect beliefs. I'm just interrupting this episode for a brief moment to ask how are you enjoying these podcasts? Have you got any questions or comments you wish you could share? Well, now you can.

If you'd like to ask any questions or suggest topics for a future episode, if you'd like to be a guest or leave some feedback or a review on this or any other Life With Purpose podcast episodes, or simply say hello, then you can leave me a message at speakpipe.com forward slash Mel Harrowsmith Coaching. And you never know, I might even include your message in a future episode. Now, let's get back to the conversation.

I just want to change direction slightly because I'm curious. You obviously have a strong background in pharmacists, pharmacology. You're a pharmacist.

Let's stick with that. I can get that one right. Which obviously is connected to prescription medication.

So how do you go for that transition of prescribing medication to coming up with a solution that doesn't involve medication at all? You know, years ago, I wouldn't have been able to answer that. But I really believe the only reason, maybe not say only reason because I did have some good impact when I was practicing pharmacy and I was a mid-level provider managing chronic conditions and help people. But I think the only reason I went, like, I don't know if you believe in God or the universe or the spirit or just yourself.

The reason for me and the meaning I went through four years of pharmacy school, four years of undergraduate, two years of residency and fellowship was simply to have a list of credibility that I know my stuff around these medications because when you go to your doctor, I mean, the first thing they do for migraines is prescribe a medication. And through trial and error and professional experience and research, it's very clear that these medications are band-aid solutions, for lack of better term. They do help.

They treat some inflammatory properties, but just like avoiding triggers, that nervous system is just getting worse. It's getting more sensitive, more dysregulated, even though you're having less migraine attacks while the medication's working for a bit. Nearly everyone that comes to me, the medication stops working.

So that's basically, I think I went through all this training and experience to realize that pharmacy is not the way. Okay. So what made you make that jump from pharmacy into migraine coaching? It was my own personal transformation, essentially.

Everything that I do, I have tried and tested on myself that I coach all of our clients through. And it changed my life in a matter of days. I mean, within one day, I was 80% better.

And then I started to do the work and I was in remission by five weeks. And at that point, you have goosebumps because I had migraines for 20 years. So some might say that sounds like a miracle and it sure felt like it, but we know there's a lot of neuroscience behind what I did, what we do.

And no one's talking about this. I mean, no one's teaching about this in the medical system. No big pharmaceutical company is putting money behind this, but it's changing people's lives.

You're a new woman, right? I just knew, like this was the reason I was put on this planet. This is my purpose. This is my passion, is to spread education and then show people how to do the work.

Because as you know, it's not easy and there are setbacks and road bumps and curve balls that are thrown your way, but it works when you do it and you've got the right support. And so it just blew my mind that no one's talking about this. No one's teaching about this.

Very few people know about it. I've got to do it, you know, and I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but like, I guess we're trying to be a bit of a trailblazer around this with migraine. It's really hard to find anyone that does specifically what we do.

So that's the mission we're on. Brilliant. And I fully support your mission being a very, very happy recipient of it.

I think it's really interesting. So talking about that, no one's talking about it. So there's quite a lot of chat out there about Nova system regulation if you plugged into those channels.

But I was, when I first came across you, and your program, which was completely by accident, I'd never seen anything like it. Now I know in the States, there's a, since then, I've found out in the States as if there's other offerings, again, that I'm not aware of here in the UK. So it's certainly not well talked about.

And it would be incredibly easy to jump onto the conspiracy wagon and say, well, nobody's talking about it because the medication market is so high. But the cost to the economy of people having migraines, we touched very briefly on the social and relationship costs. And we can talk about those in a bit more detail as well.

But I did a bit of citizen science before we got together. So, you know, chat GPT, thank you very much. And did a quick, you know, how much does it cost the economy? And the estimates vary wildly as you can imagine.

But, you know, it's like four to 12 billion UK pounds a year from lost days. In the States, I think the highest I saw was like 72 billion or something. You know, we're talking big numbers.

So if we could bring all of that down so that people aren't having those migraines and A, you'd get people working better. So if you just want to look purely at the economic value, which I don't subscribe to, but a lot of, you know, it's what can be very powerful to people. That economic payback is massive.

And then add on to that the joy and just thrilling life that you can have having got a shot of migraines. You can't put a price on that. That's the priceless bit.

So the fact that people don't talk about it and aren't exploring it, it's just, it's staggering really. In migraines underdiagnosed too, that's the crazy thing. So those numbers are undervalued essentially.

You know, because most people think it's a headache, they don't go to the doctor and they just get worse. And sadly, this happened to me too. You just start to normalize it.

So many people come to me and they're like, I have a headache every day. And I have to tell them that's not normal. And I mean, when we live every day with it, you just kind of get used to it.

Especially when you've tried all the things just like you listed out for yourself. You just start to think this is normal, but having a headache, definitely having a migraine attack is far from normal. Very atypical.

So it's underdiagnosed, which means the economic impact is probably undervalued as well. And then you look at the individual too. The most recent stats I know is people with migraine, they spend about $8,500 to $9,500 every year on their own health because of migraines and the lost work and the happiness and joy, right? I mean, a lot of people are pushing through these migraines to work, but they're not doing quality work.

I mean, I've lived it, right? I can see how much people are underperforming because of these migraines. Businesses could really flourish. People could get so much more done in half the amount of time if we could just fix these migraines.

Yeah. So that sounds like a really great segue to start talking about how do we fix these migraines, Kevin? So tell me a little bit about Tame the Migraine. Tame the Migraine.

Yes. So it's a coaching program where at the biggest picture, if you go back to the definition that I laid out of migraine being an oversensitive and dysregulated nervous system, we have two big missions. It's to first reset that nervous system, and that's by decreasing the sensitivity of your nervous system.

So it's more, I love the term regulated. This is not about calming yourself or removing all stress. I quit my job and my migraines got just, they were the same.

They didn't get better because regulation is the key. It's not just calming and getting rid of stress. There's so much more to that.

A state of regulation is when your nervous system throughout your whole body, not just your brain, but your whole body is working in flow in a very center ground. If stress happens, you can pull yourself down into a nice middle ground. And if life slows down a lot, you're not going to go rain dead.

You'll pull yourself up and bring yourself into a regulated, nice, stable, sustainable, energetic state. When you do that, you're less sensitive to your triggers. And when you're less sensitive to your triggers, you have less migraine attacks.

And when you have less migraine attacks, you're in a better mood. You have more energy. You get back to eating strawberries.

So many things improve. Your snoring improves. Your glaucoma improves.

It's crazy all the other things that you see happen, but your nervous system is essentially working normally again. Now, there's one issue. It's the dysregulation component.

So what we know is your brain can do some really fascinating things, right? It can learn to walk 12 months old. It can start to learn to talk. You can learn a new language at the age of 80.

You can learn to ride a bicycle. But your brain can do some bad things and it can learn bad habits. It can learn migraine, any of these symptoms.

It can even learn symptoms it's never seen before, right? We've seen people kind of like manifest new migraine symptoms or just symptoms in general. And so the second thing we do after resetting is rewiring your brain, your nervous system, or some people call it brain retraining, whatever you want to call it. Essentially, we're helping you unlearn these patterns, these symptoms from your brain, from your body, from your whole nervous system.

And then we're retraining it to work correctly so that this maintains and sticks. This isn't a band-aid solution. We want you staying this way and working this way properly for the rest of your life.

And when you do this, I always explain to people we're focusing on your nervous system, but the end result is a transformation. You don't just feel like a different person. Mel, you can tell me if I'm wrong here, but you become a different person.

You wake up confident. You wake up excited. You go through the day happy.

You find the positives, enjoying the little things rather than scanning for triggers and worrying and planning around, oh, can I meet my friends tonight for drinks? I might have a migraine. I probably shouldn't go. No, you're thinking about the best-case scenario.

You're optimistic. And that's because you reset your nervous system and then you rewire it to stay that way. So there are a few standout things for me.

One that you touched on there, which was the ripple effect from this work. So I came in to work on migraines, but the tools and techniques that I learned through your program, I can apply to so many different areas. And now, not even consciously, you know, things are just sort of shifting and changing and I'm seeing things in a different light.

They've got seemingly absolutely nothing to do with migraine and this pretend world of triggers. And just seeing the benefits. So, you know, you mentioned snoring and glaucoma.

I confess the snoring one is mine. We were talking about it before we started recording the episode. So apparently my snoring is getting better.

Big winner. I'm not the only ben... Well, I don't benefit from that because I haven't got a clue, but my partner certainly does. So that's a bonus.

So the ripple effects are huge. The other thing that struck me having completed the program is it's so simple. Now, not necessarily easy, but it is so simple and straightforward and everything is... You know, you don't have to get your head around anything complicated.

And I hope that doesn't belittle what you're doing because I think it's a simplistic... Good. Because it's the simplicity that I think that makes it so successful. It's still challenging, obviously.

There's things that I had to work on and I had to dig deep for some of it, but it's that simplicity that is so great about it, I think. You know, honestly, I actually take that as a huge compliment. So you may remember I went to a conference recently with Dr. Benjamin Hardy, who's got some new books coming out.

He's got great books like Willpowered Doesn't Work or Willpowered Won't Work, Be Your Future Self. And he had this really powerful quote that changed me. Steve Jobs said it, right? CEO of Apple, revolutionary person.

And he said that simple can be harder than complex. But when you can create a simple system, you can move mountains. But when you've got a complex system, it fails everyone.

And so I find that is the best compliment you could have given me. So thank you. Aww.

You are very, very welcome. So I'm obviously an advocate and in danger of becoming a reset and rewire evangelist and annoying anybody with a migraine and nagging them, going, you've got to talk to Kevin. So before I start doing all of that, perhaps from your perspective, talk a little bit about who is this program aimed at? Obviously migraine sufferers, but does it suit everybody? Technically, yes.

The work works for anyone that is willing to do it. I have to be careful on my choice of words here because there are times where the work doesn't work, but it's there are very like nuanced and specific reasons. And that's why I just really believe everyone needs a coach or an expert or someone, a Sherpa, a Yoda to guide them, right? I mean, gosh, Luke Skywalker needed Yoda.

So and he had some amazing powers. So I've seen it happen so many times. People come to me and they're like, I tried that already.

And I mean, just recently I was some new clients. They like everything that you have in here. I've done.

And then they and then they follow up and saying, but this stuff works. And sometimes it's about having the right coach to make sure you're doing things correctly, being the right type of person. And what we do, as you know, Mel, but listeners know, is we have a community of women so that you feel understood, you feel seen, you feel heard, and they're going to lift you up.

A high tide rises all boats, right? So if everyone's winning, they're going to pull the new people up. But if you're doing it on your own or the very famous African proverb, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

But we know when you go fast, things break. Or the tortoise and the hare story, right? The hare goes fast and loses the race. So we are very methodical and strategic down to the community.

I find that there's so much responsibility from community leadership for me. Community can be healing. And so everything we do is very strategic.

So that's just if anyone's thinking, I'm going to try this on my own, just don't give up. If it doesn't work for you, for sure, try it on your own if you want. Just don't give up if it doesn't work for you.

There's probably seven reasons I could identify in a short conversation why. But for us specifically, you know, right now, because community is so important, we are currently only serving women just because we want a tight-knit community. And, you know, we haven't talked too much about hormones, but there's a reason that about 40% of women have migraine, and it's probably higher than that.

But only 15% of men on this planet do. You know, a total of 1 billion people, but hormones, reproductive hormones, play a huge role on our nervous system, becoming more sensitive and dysregulated around our cycle before and after our period and before ovulation. So right now we only serve women.

Someday I would love to serve, have a men's group as well. This stuff works for kids too. There's less evidence behind it, but there's some anecdotal evidence.

And some people will say, I'm too old. Again, like people can learn new languages at the age of 80. We, you know, have clients in their 70s, and they're rocking it.

They're getting their life back. They're becoming a new woman, even at the age of 73, right? This is for everyone. I have yet to meet someone that this won't work for.

Let me put an asterisk on this. The only person or type of person I found this doesn't work for is the skeptic that's not willing to be open-minded. So like you said, you came in skeptical.

Sure, I was too. Everyone should be. Skepticism is simply fear, and fear is to keep us safe from making a bad decision that could hurt us.

But if you can come around and have belief, because we found that the number one predictor we've looked at all of our clients, the better people get, it's the higher level of confidence and belief they have. So if you believe this is going to work, it will be way more effective. And so we can talk about the placebo effect and what's going on there, and even comparing prescription drugs versus placebo effect in migraine world, it's mind-blowing.

It's a shame they don't talk about that. But yeah, if you don't believe it's going to work, it's not going to work. Other than that, I've yet to find someone it won't work for.

Yeah, the evidence around placebo is really, really interesting. So I haven't seen any in this specific context of migraine, but I have seen some of the research against. Can I share it with you? Because it blows my mind to this day.

So if you look at the latest migraine medications on the market are anti-CGRP inhibitors, and there's many of them. I looked at every single landmark trial for those different pharmaceutical companies. All of these drugs showed up to be about 55 to 65% effective, and the outcome was clinically significant improvement, which is approximately 50% improvement or more.

55 to 65% is huge. That's amazing. But the question is, why do a lot of people come to us and say these drugs didn't work for me? Well, if you look in every single one of those studies, so it was replicated across all studies, the placebo group, the people that simply got a saline injection and belief that they were getting a miracle drug, 30 to 35% of the placebo group got the exact same results as the drug.

That is insane. They got nothing but a saline injection once a month in the belief they were going to get a miracle drug. And what's really, really important about this is you need to, the companies don't do this, you have to subtract the placebo effect from the drug effect.

And so if you do the math with me, if a drug is 55 to 65% effective and you subtract the placebo of 30 to 35%, the drug's actually slightly less effective or at best just as effective as the placebo effect. I get goosebumps every time I talk about it and email me, I'll send the studies to you. I'm not making this up, the stats are there.

They just frame it, right? They frame the story how they want, that plays to their advantage. And the placebo effect is simply a neuropsychological effect. You're playing with your thoughts and your beliefs and that changes your state and that changes your nervous system state.

And it works. Power of the mind. You are your best answer, you're your best solution.

No drug or external thing is better than you. Yeah, I had a guest on a couple of weeks ago, Jules Corrida, and she talked about the mind as the frenemy. It is your greatest friend and can also be your greatest enemy depending on how you choose to wield it.

So we'll focus on the positives, building all of the beliefs that will get us through and lead us to success. So in this case, reducing our migraine symptoms, which is fantastic. So Kevin, if we've got people listening today who either experience migraine or they've got a loved one or a colleague or a friend who are experiencing migraine, what advice would you give them as a starting point? It's a great question.

The first step is, this is not just a headache. You're not broken. You're not the problem.

Sorry, tear up because these are stories I told myself. I mean, years ago, decades ago, right? Maybe you did too and maybe anyone listening, right? But you lose hope when all of these things don't work for you. And so you think you're the problem or you cause this and you're broken.

And we can dive into all of the reasons why this is happening. Most of them are not your fault. And the ones that are, we celebrate because when they're your fault, you can be in control of them and you can change it and get better.

But it's not your fault and you're not broken. I wish I had a better resource other than ourselves because I think that's a little disingenuous. Go to our website, watch our masterclass.

We start talking about the science. We've got a free course. I put a bunch of videos together where you can start learning about the truth of the neuroscience behind migraine.

Find a community of people that not just cares about you but understands you. You know, humans need three core things. And it's one of my heroes.

We were talking before we started recording Jerry Colonna. He saved my life. He's actually a coach by trade.

And he taught me this. And it's that humans need to feel safe. They need to feel loved and they need to feel understood.

And you can feel loved by your spouse or partner and you can even feel safe from them. But I make sure that's actually true because I didn't feel safe. I didn't realize it.

Even though I had an amazing wife, an amazing family, I just didn't feel safe because sometimes I didn't feel loved. But the third and most important is you got to feel understood. So your husband, your wife, your friends, your boss doesn't know what it's like to have a migraine.

There's going to be a disconnect. You won't feel understood. So find people that have migraine but they live in a world that lifts you up.

A high tide rises all boats. Don't find people with migraine that are stuck, right? Because one drop of poison can poison a whole water well. And so it's not their fault they're stuck.

And that's what we're trying to do, right? Is find these people, create these people just like you, Mel, transform you into a new woman. And so they can connect with you so that they can feel understood by you but you can lift them up and give them hope rather than kind of staying in this enemy, frenemy cycle where our thoughts are hurting us more than helping us and keeping us stuck in things that don't actually work. That's what I would tell anyone I met.

But the first thing I would say is you're not broken. You're not unsolvable. It's not your fault.

Yeah, that's incredibly powerful. And I think from the group of women that I did the course with, there were some common traits between all of us, really. People pleasers, high achievers, putting ourselves second, running at 300 miles an hour, spinning too many plates and then still not recognising that it was OK to feel quite stressed with all of that.

And so then when the migraine came, just starting to think that's another thing that I'm not good enough at, that I haven't been able to solve. So that was my thing underneath everything, this just deep-rooted not being good enough. But even sort of recognising that and joining the dots was just, you know, there's a powerful sense of healing around that.

And I know there's a fine line because one of the things you've talked about before is learning is great, understanding what's going on can be really helpful, but there comes a point when that doesn't serve a purpose anymore. It can put us in a state of fight or flight and pressure and need and kind of lack. If you're constantly searching for answers, you know, we just talked about this on our coaching call earlier today, and if you're always searching for the why, the answer, the golden ticket, you're in a fight or flight state and it's not helpful, plus all the screen time, all the learning, that's cognitively, neurologically taxing.

Sometimes you just got to take action, right? And it's doing the work, not learning about it. And I mean, I'm guilty. So I'm preaching to myself.

Back during the pandemic and even before, Spotify told me I was listening to four and a half hours of podcasts a day. And that was simply a byproduct of migraines and me listening and searching for answers when the answers were within me. Now, find someone, myself or someone else, that has those answers and can tell you what to do and not just learn about it.

Yeah, I had a similar experience. I was stuck in the why for years. But I am interested, so there was an element of that, but also just stuck in the why because I didn't know where the how was, didn't know it was within me, and didn't have anybody around who could shine that light for me.

So the fact that you're here doing this work is brilliant. And I know you've been incredibly modest and saying you don't want to be that guy who says, come and visit my website and watch all of my materials, but I will do that for you. So the free material that you mentioned on taming the migraine that does talk a lot about the mechanics of what's going on, I do thoroughly recommend that.

I learned a lot through those channels. So if listeners out there are looking for some resources to dig into, I will thoroughly recommend those. But Kevin, there are going to be people out there who are going to want to know more about you.

So where can they find you? Yeah, I'll mention the free course first. I like to talk about, so I have no affiliation. I actually pay for this service in the platform that we use, but it's called Skool, S-K-O-O-L.

And the free course is at skool.com backslash migraine. And the reason we chose Skool is because at the core, they like simplicity. So you're going to get in there, and it's not all these bells and whistles like some of these other programs or software platforms online.

We just talked about why I love simplicity and why you also love it and why it's powerful. And the second thing is that they believe community first. And so when you log in, you're logged into the community, and they believe community heals, just like I know it does.

The classroom is harder to find. They don't emphasize. They actually tell you to put less things in the classroom because just like we talked about, more information is not the solution.

It's about connecting with others and taking action and joining these calls. So that's why we choose Skool, and that's not an endorsement of them. That's just me talking about I think they're brilliant in their mission, their vision, and their methodology, and it lines up exactly with us.

So that's the free course, skool.com backslash migraine, and Skool is spelled S-K-O-O-L. Fun little way to spell it too because life should be fun even when working through your migraines. If you want to find me and what we do, you can go to our website.

I'm a bit embarrassed because it's kevinwissman.com. I think that's like a little also disingenuous to have your name. Maybe we'll switch it to tame the migraine or something. But you'll get in there, and you'll see on our about page my wife's photo and our kids on there as well because it's not about me.

Obviously, I suffered with the migraine, so people can resonate with my story a bit more, but this is a full family business. I'd just like to share my mission, like have it on my wall. One of our reasons, like my why, is to do this for the kids to have the best version of their parents.

I didn't have that as a kid, and it's not a fault to my parents, but also when we had our oldest daughter, Piper, she was living with a single mom essentially. I was like an extra adult child, and she was taking care of me. I mean, we talk about ripple effects.

I know that had an impact on her. She actually shows signs of dysregulation compared to my other daughter, and I think it was because I wasn't there. That's not fair to her, but I'm taking care of myself now and being the best version of myself and being the best dad for her, but that's the way we do it.

For my daughter, for my old self when I was a kid, and for all the other kids out there and just families. Yeah, we're doing it for everyone. For now, it's KevinWissman.com. You can learn about us.

But watch this space. Yeah, yeah. Watch this space.

Our master class link should be on there. You can even hear stories. Gosh, we've got to get Mel.

We need you to tell your story and share it on there. We've got some stories of past women and screenshots and things like that and talk briefly about the science. But that's the best way to get a hold of us and find more about us.

Brilliant. And if anybody's got any questions about what it's like to be on the program, I would be more than happy to answer those. So I'm happy for people to get in touch with me too to talk about migraine and offer any support because the community part that Kevin talked about is just so important, and it is one of those things I was quite skeptical about when I joined, when you said, oh, the community is really important.

It's like, yeah, yeah, whatever, thinking about Facebook, you know. And it turned out to be me eating my words because it was incredibly important. Not only did I learn so much from hearing the other stories, but also your responses to things that they were raising that were similar to me and at points I either didn't have the confidence to talk about it or hadn't quite formulated what I wanted to say and somebody else was living the same thing at that point.

So that was incredibly helpful. But there's just all these amazing women from different walks of life. You know, we've got a lady in her 70s who's had migraines for 50 years, which just doesn't bear thinking about.

And yet she's taken the courage to do something about it and is getting results. And then at the opposite end, we've got one of the brightest, sparkliest 15-year-olds that I've come across for a while who, look out world, that's all I could say about her. Amazing. 

She's going to be a president of the United States. Yeah, she's a force to be reckoned with. So, Kevin, thank you so much for joining me today, sharing your story, sharing your program.

And thank you for making this your life purpose, for bringing it to so many women for now, but hopefully for men in the future as well. And for returning me to me, I will be forever grateful. Thank you so much.

You're so welcome. And thank you for having me on here. Thank you for doing the work, right? I talk very seriously about, we're in a stage where my reputation is so important, or our reputation as a business.

And we're looking for success stories. And success stories only happen when you show up. You do the work, you lean in, you trust, right? Even when you are skeptical.

And I can't do any of that for you. And so I have to trust you as well. And so I thank you for that, because if you didn't, it would affect our results, and that would affect future people, and our ability to help more people around the world, the billion that are suffering.

I'm so excited for you, with your life coaching. I know I told you at the end too, you have a special set of skills, personality, and I'm so glad you're in a better state. We talk about going back to, you can do more work, you can spend more hours on things that you love, transforming other people's lives, serving other people.

And so I'm so excited for those people that haven't met you yet, haven't met your future self, but it's coming, and they're gonna be so grateful as well, because of it. Thank you, you're making me tear up now. There's nothing wrong with crying, right? All emotions are good.

Love a cry, yeah, celebrate the cry. Gotta get everybody crying, it's a healing process. Wonderful, well thank you so much, Kevin.

I wish you all the best with Tame the Migraine, and the Reset and Rewire program. And I know this isn't the end for us, we'll be staying in touch. So I will speak to you soon, and thank you for joining me.

Thank you so much, take care Mel.