Do headaches spike on full moon nights?
No difference
Pageviews are a proxy for "people bothered enough to look it up," not a record of attacks themselves. Still, if some nights brought more pain, the searches should rise with them — so we test those lookups against the lunar phase.
Views of "Headache"
- Baseline (same weekday & month average = 100)
- 100.0
- Full moon days (±24h)
- 98.3
- New moon days (±24h)
- 99.7
- Verdict for full moon days
- No difference
Views of "Migraine"
- Baseline (same weekday & month average = 100)
- 100.0
- Full moon days (±24h)
- 99.9
- New moon days (±24h)
- 99.4
- Verdict for full moon days
- No difference
Views of "Cluster headache"
- Baseline (same weekday & month average = 100)
- 100.0
- Full moon days (±24h)
- 99.4
- New moon days (±24h)
- 105.0
- Verdict for full moon days
- No difference
Views of "Tension headache"
- Baseline (same weekday & month average = 100)
- 100.0
- Full moon days (±24h)
- 99.5
- New moon days (±24h)
- 100.2
- Verdict for full moon days
- No difference
Data: 2015–2025, Wikimedia Pageviews API (bots excluded), 3,837 days
Act II: What actually splits your head, more than the moon
What really moves the pain is —
×15
On its biggest day (September 22, 2019), the "Headache" article ran about 15x its normal traffic; the top 1% of days average about 3.2x — swings that have nothing to do with the lunar phase. Headaches rise and fall with the day's circumstances, not the moon's.
The prime suspect is the weather. Falling barometric pressure is the trigger people actually track — a well-documented migraine cue — and short sleep and the rhythm of the work-week press on your skull far closer than any full moon.
The moon doesn't cause headaches. But low pressure and lost sleep genuinely do. The pain isn't imaginary — it just isn't the moon's fault.
Why "the full moon gives me a headache" is told so often
Plenty of people notice a heavy head or a migraine around the full moon, and the folk explanations come ready-made: the moon's pull tugs on the water in your body, the pressure shifts, the nerves misfire. The pain is real. The only question is whether the trigger is really the moon.
But headaches have no seismograph and no tide gauge. There is no public dataset logging "how many people had a headache tonight." So we used a proxy for the pain: how many people looked it up — the daily Wikipedia pageviews for *Headache*, *Migraine*, *Cluster headache*, and *Tension headache*. If some nights brought more pain, more people should reach for those articles.
We're honest about the proxy's limits
Pageviews are not attack counts. Many people in pain never look anything up, and traffic can move with news or seasonal interest. So this topic does not claim to measure the true incidence of headaches. It measures whether the *traces* of people bothered enough to search rise and fall with the lunar phase.
Still, if "the full moon brings headaches" were a strong, real pattern, a faint moon-shaped bump should bleed into the proxy. We went looking for that faint trace across roughly ten years of daily views.
How the verdict is computed
- Data is daily pageviews from the Wikimedia Pageviews API (official, bots excluded), July 2015 to the end of last year
- For each article we use the average of the "same weekday × same month" as the expected value, and compare actual ÷ expected as an index (normal = 100). Weekend and seasonal skews cancel out this way
- We mark "full moon days" (instant ±24h) and "new moon days" using the lunar phase at local noon, then compare each group's mean index against normal
See the methodology for the full criteria.
If there's a culprit, it's the weather
One of the things people search alongside *Headache* is barometric, weather-driven pain. The trigger people actually track is not the full moon but falling air pressure — a long-discussed migraine cue. Add short sleep, caffeine, and the rhythm of the work-week, and you have forces pressing on your skull far closer than any moon.
The moon doesn't cause headaches. But the pain isn't imaginary. The thing to look up at simply wasn't the full moon — it was that night's pressure and sleep.
Sources
- Wikimedia Pageviews API (CC0)
- Lunar age and the instant of each phase are computed in-house from the algorithms in Jean Meeus, *Astronomical Algorithms* (UTC basis)
Last updated: June 13, 2026 18:02 UTC (rebuilt daily)