The Mindful Migraine

OK. So, the idea of conducting a premortem on yourself sounds incredibly depressing – but – if you think about it, it makes sense… sort of.

I came across the idea early in the year when the majority of news articles were about making New Years Resolutions. The Wall Street Journal article’s title caught my eye:

It’s Called a Premortem—and It’s the Most Productive Thing You’ll Do All Year – WSJ

The subtitle of the article was “Forget about making a New Year’s resolution. Have you tried imagining your deathbed?”

When I went back to read the article to summarize here, I was blocked as I don’t have a subscription. The idea, as I remember it, is that instead of looking into the past to imagine why someone has passed away (as in a post-mortem), you look into the future and imagine what it is about your life that might make you susceptible to failure (pre-mortem)… not necessarily or specifically death, just short-fallings in general.

For me – if I keep eating a biscuit with my morning and afternoon cups of tea, then I can’t expect to lose weight. I can’t get to the end of the year and wonder why I weigh the same. In theory, doing a premortem means I would try harder to swap out sugary snacks for healthy ones. Instead of saying, my New Year’s Resolution is to eat less sugar, I’m attaching a motivation on why instead of just saying “don’t”… potentially creating a fear of failure rather than a hint of hopeful success.

My migraines are likely to continue if I don’t really cement the mindfulness activities, that have helped me so far, into my lifestyle moving forward. Setbacks are likely if I get lazy with my Tai chi or hydration.

Other websites refer to a premortem as a pre-project phase. Going to build a new house? What could possibly go wrong? OK – now you have a sense of all those potential failings, what are you going to do about it?

Hope to get to see your family overseas next Christmas? Great! What’s some of the reasons that you might NOT be able to get there and how can you minimize those risks?

It’s the sort of “hope for the best / plan for the worst” approach that I often used in project managing the construction of retail projects in the past. This time however, the intention is to turn it towards your own life goals.

I’m not sure that I love the idea.

It makes sense when you’re planning the construction of a house to be ruthlessly negative in your predictions – what will we do if rain delays the start date, or the budget runs over…?? It’s a much safer way to start a project than to enter into the building phase with a hope and a prayer and then find yourself remortgaged to the hilt and out of a home when your interim lease isn’t renewed.

It doesn’t make as much sense when I think about my life – what if I gain more weight instead of lose it, or I get sicker instead of healthier? How will my mental health and self-esteem weather the results if I have predetermined what failure looks like?

There’s a touch of “don’t hit the pole – don’t hit the pole – oh dear – why did I hit the pole?” thinking about it. When we concentrate on negatives, we risk manifesting negatives.

Energy flows where attention goes.

“What could possibly go wrong?” places all the focus on what could possibly go wrong. It’s part of the catastrophizing and anxiety domino-thinking I am trying to do away with.

I wrote a while back that manifesting people are very specific – always focus on the good – even down to the detail that you should write down your dreams and aspirations in blue ink, because the frequency of the color blue best aligns with channeling good outcomes into your life.

“Premortem” sounds as black as black can be…

The word has the dark morbidity of angsty indulgence about it…

I’m happy to have learnt something new in coming across the idea of a premortem, but I think I’ll give it a miss and focus instead on generating a halo of positivity around my sore head – “lighter and brighter” are my key terms for the year ahead – and they feel a whole lot better to carry around than the idea of what failure might look like.

As always – I’m happy to be proved wrong – if YOU have conducted a premortem on your life and it has helped – let me know!

Take care taking care, Linda xox