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Mindfulness for migraines
Mindfulness is the number one, overarching tool that has helped me reduce my migraine triggers (stress, fatigue, posture) and increase my resilience to the triggers I can not avoid (genes, hormones, climate etc.). As a result, I have managed to reduce my migraines from 3+ days a week (every week for…
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My migraine story
I have experienced migraines since I was 11 years old. In my younger years, they only appeared occasionally and did not have a major impact on my life. As such, I’ll be brutally honest and admit that I never attempted to understand my migraine diagnosis. I did not take the time…
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When silence hurts (music for migraines)
One of the most obvious side-effects of migraines is the terrible head-in-a-vice pain. Migraines, however, are more than just a ‘bad headache’. In the past I have compared them to a ‘bad hangover‘, which is slightly closer, because a migraine event is a whole-body catastrophe. Symptoms can include: nausea, dizziness,…
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What is ‘soft-hermitting’?
If you live with chronic pain, your bedroom is a big part of your life. More than just a place to go to rest and restore at the end of the day, it is also a retreat and a sanctuary. I call it my “migraine cave” where I hibernate during…
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Contrary to contronyms…
Today’s post is tiny… and out there. I was curious to discover a heated debate taking place on social media between a reader and… a dictionary. Yep. It all started when Mirriam Webster posted a note to say that ‘supposably’ was a word. (For the record: my spell checker agrees…
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“The Vagus Nerve Reset”
For a long time now, I’ve been saying that the biggest step forward in my healing journey was learning how to calm down my over-stressed (potentially broken) nervous system. I’ve previously written about the Vagus Nerve in particular, and my Nervous Breakthrough in more general terms… that’s why I was…
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Self-Guided Meditation
A significant part of my self-healing journey has been re-learning how to meditate. When I was in my 20s I used to attend regular Yoga sessions, and a short guided-meditation was almost always included at the end of the lesson. More recently, I started meditating again as a means of…
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What is hemiplegic migraine?
OK, so the last couple of weeks I have been travelling a detour, looking into books and beliefs and gawking at AI making me a podcast episode… it’s now time to return to the main road and talk about migraines and mindfulness. So, today’s post is about the source of…
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When no one believes
A while ago I did a post on how a very British lady called Sarah Colwill developed a Chinese accent after a severe migraine. The post included a reference to how Ms Colwill lost friends because they thought she was pretending (read more here). At the end of that post,…
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‘My’ first ever podcast episode
OK, so if you’ve visited my blog before, then you know that I feel very conflicted about AI. Two years ago, I was so excited to discover AI could make images for me with the push of a button… and then… the novelty wore off. Especially when the whole internet…
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The opposite of The Placebo Effect
I don’t identify with the term ‘pessimism’. I see myself as ‘rationally realistic’. My husband, an ‘eternal optimist’, would probably disagree. I’ve written before about the version of pessimism that I carry through life (which can be summarized as ‘hope for the best / plan for the worst’). The prior…