We discuss the comments on our article "Sleep quality, arousal and pain thresholds in migraineurs. A blinded controlled polysomnographic study" published in JHP 2013 Feb 14;14(1):12. We hypothesize that migraineurs need more sleep than healthy controls and more sleep than they manage to achieve. Some migraineurs probably have a decreased ability to process incoming stimuli. Increased spontaneous pain may follow either sleep restriction or sleep disturbance. A comparison of migraineurs with attack onset related to sleep, migraineurs with attack onset not related to sleep and controls will be reported in another paper.