After I posted yesterday’s note where my mind was ‘spinning out’, I realized that some of you might think I’m a bit of a looney. That may be true, but I also trained myself to think that way – for better or for worse.
When I was at university and studying architecture, I created what I call ‘domino thinking’. The idea was a form of brainstorming based on the word association game.
I say cat – you say dog – friend – party – drink – champagne – strawberry.
And just like that, with 6 degrees of separation, you get from a cat to a strawberry. Now sometimes, such as when the cat is ginger-colored, where you end up is not as far away from the ‘source’ as you had hoped. Other times, however, you create an interesting way of looking back at the subject that is related to the source, but in a lateral rather than literal way, creating a more figurative than formal connection. As a design student, it helped to reposition your view of the site and the brief, avoiding the more ‘obvious’ and ‘crowded’ solutions. The trick of course, was not to get too far afield. Presenting a library project that looks like a rocket might work if you can convince people that knowledge ‘launches us into the stratosphere’, but presenting a library shaped like a lemon is unlikely to win you any support.
Domino thinking became almost automatic for me. As the teachers were speaking, my mind was skipping off to the periphery, wondering what other avenues I could explore, intuitively guessing whether they were likely to provide exciting new vistas or dead-ends.
The problem is that this way of thinking, which used to be a sort of super-power for creative problem solving, is a curse when it comes to anxiety and managing my chronic pain triggers.
“The sun is a bit bright today – I should have brought a hat – if the sun gets in my eyes I’m going to frown – if I frown I get pug-puppy face – the tension in my face will give me a migraine – I feel like I’m getting a migraine – I don’t believe in self-fulfilling prophecies or blaming myself for ‘making-my-migraines’ but gosh I really do feel like I could be getting a migraine…”
These days, I have to shift the metaphor and instead of celebrating domino thinking, I have to remind myself that once the train leaves the station it tends to build up steam pretty quickly, and the anxiety-journey inevitably ends in catastrophe (real or imagined).
Next time your mind starts ‘spinning out’ or ‘racing away’, remember that there’s a time and place for that sort of thinking. Brainstorming is good when you’re in your creative mode. Storming your brain with worse case scenarios is not, however, so great for managing brain-pain.
Good luck thinking clearly today, and take care, Linda x
The Mindful Migraine 
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