The Mindful Migraine

When I get migraines, I become extremely sensitive to light and noise.  ‘Normal’ sunlight suddenly seems way too bright, and people talking becomes amplified in my head, as if someone turned the volume up to 11 on the 1-10 dial. 

My traditional treatment was to go to the quietest, darkest room in the house and lie down.  I would shut all the curtains and blinds, and shut the door.  The aim was to make the room as dark and silent as possible.  Then I would lie as still as I could so that I didn’t trigger any feelings of nausea… and wait it out.

In other words; solitary confinement combined with sensory deprivation.

The problem with chronic migraine, is that to qualify for that diagnosis, you have to experience 15 migraine days a month.  That’s 50% of your life you have to be very sick.  It also means that, if you follow a similar ‘get well’ routine to me, then you’re lying alone in silent darkness for 50% of your life. 

That’s a long time. 

I can tell you from first hand experience, that it doesn’t take long living this way to start to feel as if your life in general is small, dark, silent, empty, lonely…

30 years ago, when I was living the full-on life of a workaholic, with all its hustle-and-bustle and over-achievement and deadlines and running around, I would have loved the idea of a couple of days off to do nothing but lie around in bed. 

15 years ago, when I had two babies under the age of 2, who wouldn’t always synchronize naps, I was so sleep deprived that a few days left alone in bed would have sounded like heaven.  I would have totally been on board with the trend of ‘bed rotting’ (read more here).

I promise you, however, the novelty of days and days in bed quickly wears off – especially when you’re not in bed by choice.

The treatment starts to feel like its own form of torture.

If you do suffer chronic pain and spend a lot of time in bed – I’m sorry – I know what a hideous diagnosis it can be and how hard it is to get better.  But, I’m also going to give you some advice:

Open your bedroom door.

As someone who believed that no light and no noise was the ONLY way to get better, I think I trained my brain to believe it too.  But given that all those days in bed didn’t seem to speed up my healing, I started to wonder if there was a better way. 

There was – open the bedroom door – even if it’s only a crack:

+ Too much light can still be painful, but an open door allows some ambient light to come into your room – and into your eyes – and teaches you that you’re not going to frazzle like a vampire if you are exposed to light beams.  Over time, you learn that you still need ‘darkness’ but it doesn’t need to be quite so dark.  If you’re still nervous, keep an eye mask nearby that you can take on or off as the light levels change.  Eventually you might even find that the soft cheery glow of a bedside lamp is preferable to no light at all.

+ Sound in general is not really your enemy, only loud bangs and whistles.  Unless your family and friends are vacuuming or blending smoothies, the chances are that the noise that will come into your room won’t be as extreme as you imagine.  Hearing the odd snippet of conversation will make you feel less lonely.  Over time, you’ll desensitize yourself to noise and it won’t always seem such an enormous problem.  Again, you can keep some earplugs handy if things do get too noisy and you feel too sick to get up to close the door.

+ The main reason to keep your door open a crack is so that you feel connected to the rest of the world.  You’re now sharing the same air, the same energy as it were, you’re no longer completely isolated and ‘locked away’.  Your bedroom goes back to being a ‘bed-room’ not a ‘prison-cell’. You can still close the door at any time if things really get too hectic out there and it’s stressing you out, but more often than not, there’s real comfort to be had in knowing you’re still ‘a part’ of family life not ‘apart’ from it.

As you get increasingly desensitized to noise and light, start to experiment further.  I soon learnt that soft ‘spa-like’ music made me more relaxed when I was sleeping off a migraine.  I made a whole channel of ‘healing music for migraines’ on Spotify (here) – the 3,500 other people that have saved the link suggest that others agree with my approach. 

Later still, I found that if the migraine was not in full-rage mode, I could take half a triptan-tablet, lie down and listen to long meditations.  I usually fell in and out of sleep as the hosts were talking in their lilting sing-song-voices about deep breathing in and out… in and out…  Having someone’s soft voice in the room made me far less lonely.

I hope that if you’re reading this, you’re not as sick as I was, but if you are, I hope you know that you can get better. 

And if you’re not in pain, then soak up all those long lazy days in bed you lucky ducky!!

Take care taking care, Linda x