The Mindful Migraine

“Drink more water” is the catch cry of chronic pain curers and well-wishers everywhere: this post is not about hydration… not the normal sort anyway.

This morning was like any other.  Tai Chi, farewell hubby, walk the dogs, and then the manic scramble to get the kids out the door to school.  When the house was empty, I took a deep breath and sat at the kitchen counter, drinking lukewarm coffee and eating a smidgen of cinnamon-scroll I’d taken as ‘tax’ from my daughter’s lunchbox.  The sun was streaming in, the dogs were at my feet, my ‘healing migraine music’ was playing.  The cinnamon-sunshine and the music all made it feel like I was chilling in a spa resort.

Then, because I have a bad tendency to multi-task, I decided to write my to-do list for the day.  I like to keep it short, so it feels achievable, and then I get to tick things off.  Regardless, the items can still get a bit big; watch the Migraine World Summit interview, turn the notes into a blog post, check my emails for work, chase up the school about something, write a particular subsection of Chapter 10 for my PhD dissertation on how architects use and abuse metaphors.

Now, Chapter 10 sounds advanced, even more so when I tell you there’s only 11 chapters to my work.  However, I also have to circle back and write chapters 1-3.  So, in that moment of writing down my code ‘C10-§10.3’ I didn’t stop to appreciate how far I have come in my research, only how far I had to go.  In a split second my mind leapt to the fear of failure, and wham; I decided I was done for.

My stomach screwed itself into a knot, my chest tightened, my heart began to race, my breathing got shallow, I felt decidedly ill.

ABOSULTEY NOTHING in my environment had changed to place me in peril.  There was NOTHING that was a threat to my safety and wellbeing – except – for my own thoughts.

For some reason, my mind then went to a vague memory of a lady telling me that the human brain holds a remnant of a primal, reptilian brain – think creature crawling out of the mud millennia ago.  This ancestor’s brain was only geared towards the 4 things it needed to survive; food-fight-flee-f**k (sorry).  The lady suggested to me that when we are in a state of distress, our ancient brain takes over and resorts to survival mode, focusing (presumably) on the middle two responses.  However, if we want to calm that part of our brain, then we need to ‘trick it’ (or eventually ‘train it’) into believing that we are safe and secure; there is no risk, no peril, no predator.  The way to do this, she said, was:

Stand in the middle of the room and drink a glass of water – slowly.

In this way, by standing ‘exposed’ and not being all ‘hurry-scurry’, we’re telling that ancient brain-beast; I AM OK.

So that’s what I did. 

And it kind of worked.  The problem is my brain is slightly more evolved towards a ‘monkey-brain’ (which is a Darwinian joke combined with a meditation joke – see?).  Consequently, my mind wandered over towards the questions; who was ‘the lady’ and when did she tell me this story?  I’m 99% sure I didn’t dream it up, but strangely, the memory, unlike most of mine, didn’t come out of the filing-cabinet of my mental storage-system complete with a manilla folder and extra evidence stapled to it; photo of a face, or the room I was in, etc.  These ‘words of wisdom’ were just floating around with no extra information to help me place them.

I guess ‘she’ might have been either a general practitioner or therapist, or maybe even some YouTuber? And it must have been when I was at my sickest, lowest, stage of chronic migraine about a year ago.  I assume that I was so overwhelmed that day that only the absolute basics stuck in my mind, everything else was unnecessary surplus.

It rammed home the reminder that sometimes we really need to slow down.  It would be naïve to pretend that we don’t have a lot to do, and that we’re not burdened by responsibilities and expectations – but sometimes LESS IS MORE. 

I should have been a lounge-lizard, patted the dogs, and just enjoyed the cinnamon-sunshine for a few more minutes.  Not even those cute geckos with their adorable pudgy-sticky digits need a stapler to cling to.  I ruined the magic of the moment by switching from ‘rest-and-digest’ (happy vagus nerve mode) into ‘fight-flight-f**k-no!’ mode by picking up a pencil and being all pro-go.

Sometimes we really should go a little slooooower.

Sometimes the day’s crowning achievement might be standing in the middle of the room and drinking a glass of water in slow motion.

Take care, Linda.