-
Wearing a mask / Resting B!@#$ Face
I couldn’t decide what to call today’s post. The polite version of what I want to write about relates to “wearing a mask” when you live with chronic pain. I often find myself smiling politely to people when I really feel like sleeping / sighing / crying. It’s not the…
-
A Halloween story
Today is Halloween… and I would love to have a real-life Halloween horror story to tell you… but I don’t. In Australia Halloween is not a big thing… (although it is growing)… only once as a kid do I remember dressing up to go trick-or-treating. I vaguely remember I was…
-
Anxiety and migraines
Not too long ago I flicked through a self-discovery workbook that I found, titled “Wanting What You Have” (1998) by Timothy Miller (Ph.D.). The book had the feeling of a hybrid genre – part Cognitive Behavior Therapy (your thoughts influence your behavior which influences your thoughts) and part Buddhism (promoting…
-
Whispers and screams
The other day I read a comment on the blog Thriving Chronicles – it immediately struck me as so simple and yet deeply profound: “I try to listen to my body when it whispers, so it doesn’t have to scream!” My goodness – why hadn’t I thought of that!?! This…
-
Mind-messing optical illusions
Quick word of warning – today’s blog post is NOT very migraine friendly – which is so against everything I believe in… except that I do have a curious mind… If you have a migraine – come back tomorrow… this blog post could make you feel unwell… OR if visual…
-
Less “bad headache” / more “bad hangover”
A migraine is a complex neurological condition… it is NOT just a bad headache. That said, people who don’t experience migraines themselves are often looking for ‘shortcuts’ to help them imagine what it might feel like. I understand where the “bad headache” idea came from… but it’s just not accurate.…
-
Migraine and gut health
Vince Martin, the director of a headache clinic in Cincinnati explained gut health in the 2024 World Migraine Summit earlier this year. As with some of the other presentations, I was out of my depth with the heavy science-side of things, so be sure to follow up my summary with…
-
No spoons (or forks) for me…
A while ago I wrote about the history of “spoons” – the metaphor people with fibromyalgia use to explain how people with chronic pain allocate their limited amounts of energy. Today I want to go into a bit more detail to explain the idea, AND tell you why it doesn’t…
-
Mo(u)rning
It is human to grieve. Necessary. We need to acknowledge loss, to make space for it, and time. You should give yourself full permission to feel deep, heart-breaking-sadness, and there should be no shame in having a good old cry… about whatever, or whoever it is that you’re missing… But…
The Mindful Migraine 