The Mindful Migraine

About 1,000 years ago when I was working full-time in a full-on role as a project manager, I used to have a guilty obsession: “the breakfast of champions”. It was a takeaway coffee with a chocolate donut that I used to buy just before heading into my office cubicle. The idea was to give myself a big surge of adrenalin to help me grind through my work until lunchtime.

I’m not sure how good it was for my long-term health or budget (and it certainly wasn’t consumed in a mindful-eating-manner – more gulp’n’guzzle and type, type, type). Regardless, it was my go-to staple for at least two years while I was working in a particular office building with the cafe downstairs.

This particular cafe was run by a franchise which was part of a larger “chain” of well-known (at the time) Jamaican coffee providers. Any food that was delivered was given to you in a brown paper bag with the company logo and a Jamaican proverb printed on the side.

One day, the phrase on the bag went something like this: “save enough pennies and you’ll soon have a pound”, only the money phrase used wasn’t English, it was Jamaican.

[I’ve tried several times since to track down what those equivalent terms were, and even with the invention of the World Wide Web, I can’t be certain what they were – but I’m happy to be bombarded with suggestions in the comment section below!!]

At the time, the saying caught my attention and made absolute sense to me. Even though I promptly forgot the correct monetary terms, I converted the words into jingle and jangle (because it felt phonetically similar to the sound coins make in your pocket and borrowed the J for Jamaica).

“Save enough jingles and you’ll soon have a jangle.”

I often thought about it as I picked up coins off the sidewalk or pulled them out of my jeans pockets before throwing the pants in the wash. I kept jars of coins and turned them in to the bank once I had a decent collection. It was saving, albeit on a micro-level, in the hope that micros become macro, given enough time… just as an acorn grows into a mighty oak.

When my children came along, I passed the same story onto them, although somehow, by this stage the phrase morphed (possibly inspired by Willy Wonka) into “save enough winkles and you’ll soon have a wonkel.”

My daughters get it, and they too have jars of winkle-coins, and birthday-card-wonkel-dollars that they collect on the understanding that if you save your penny-acorns, then one day you’ll have a pound-oak.

I do feel slightly guilty that one day, one of them is going to say something about winkle-wonkels to a friend who’s tossing loose coins into a draw with abandon, and they’re going to end up being the source material of memes like these:

[Image source: me and the internet!]

Anyway – I stand by my coffee-inspired advice to them. Collect enough of the little things and one day you’ll have a large collection.

Or, as I say these days; “celebrate your inch-stones and let the milestones take care of themselves.”

While I was preparing my PhD for assessment (I’m still waiting for the examiner’s to read the dissertation so I can present my defense), I concentrated on writing word after word, knowing that eventually I’d have enough words to make up a dissertation. (Or, as it turned out – a word count of 100,000 words when 80,000 is preferred… sigh… so much editing required – but I got there… in the same way, just in reverse; word by word by word.)

Write enough winkles and you’ll turn out a wonkel.

The same applies to your health – keep doing those mini-makeovers, taking those baby-steps, making all those small adjustments to your diet or daily activities… and know that if you were to change a small percentage of your life month by month, the accumulated changes would be epic.

This brings me to the 10% rule.

The 10% rule is explained in a variety of places, including this source that I used: The Ten Percent Advantage: How to Make Progress Every Day | By Gustavo Razzetti. It uses the example of upping your running routine. For clarity – I DON’T RUN – so this example is useful for math’s purposes only (haha). The author says, if you run 20 miles each training session, but really want to be running more, you add 10% to your daily / weekly target.

I did the maths to see for myself, and if you added 10% each week, then by the end of the month you’ll be up to nearly 30 miles a session – that’s a dramatic increase using the accumulated effects.

20 + 2 = 22

22 + 2.2 = 24.2

24.2 + 2.4 = 26.6

26.6 + 2.7 = 29.1

The same could be used in reverse to lose weight (although 10% sounds like too much unless it’s over a longer period of time).

The same could also be said of your chronic pain.

Instead of wishing to be “pain-free” imagine that you’re aimining for a 10% improvement. It’s a more manageble way to get you started on your healing journey, or, as the above article refers to it, it is an “anecdote to inertia”.

Going from chronic migraine, (where I was sick in bed at least 3 days a week, every week for a year) to no pain ever, overnight, is not a realistic goal. But if I was to say that I was sick 72 hours a week (3 days x 24 hours), and what I really wanted to try to gain back as more-functional hours was 7 hours a week… that still sounds hard, but nowhere near as impossible as cancelling out the 3 days… now I’m just going for an hour a day spread out across the week… perhaps through meditation, or slow walking around the block, researching my condition, learning out to calm my vagus nerve down… and so on… AN HOUR A DAY.

And that’s exactly what I did.

Back at the start of my healing journey, I tried to do an hour a day of activities that I thought would help reduce my pain – or if not reduce the pain, then at least reduce the level of suffering I attached to that pain. Over the months, my “good days” started to accumulate, which in turn made me feel better and better.

Winkle-wonkels, people, winkle-wonkels.

If I can do it, you can too.

(And if that phrase is now stuck in your head and you get laughed at – you can thank me later – because laughter is the best form of medicine!!)

Take care taking care, winkle-wonkelly, (wink wink), Linda x