Headaches have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.
I (Joanna) started wearing glasses at age 12, but as a teenager, I rebelled against them and used to go out without them, giving myself significant eye strain for the sake of vanity. I moved to contact lenses at 19, but then spent long hours in the library at university and started at a corporate desk job in 1997. Since then, I have spent the majority of my working life in front of a computer.
I should have taken out shares in big Pharma based on the number of painkillers I took in those days. I popped ibuprofen like candy to keep the headaches at bay while I did my work, most often in large, open-plan offices. At one point, my office was like a high-intensity farm, with hundreds of us in cubicles separated by low-rise dividers. Cubicle slave, indeed! The level of noise and sensation in the room was torture for me as a hyper-sensitive introvert, and this was before the days when wearing headphones was acceptable.
Little tip: if you work in this kind of open-plan environment, invest in some noise-canceling headphones as they make a lot of difference to being able to shut out sound and distraction.
During those corporate days, my headaches were a combination of over-stimulation and work-related stress, plus hours concentrating in front of a screen, plus eye strain, with some added dehydration because of enthusiastic air-conditioning.
I had always experienced hormonal migraines once a month, but they had increased to once a week because of my lifestyle. When the head pain got too much, I ended up in bed in the dark with a cold flannel on my face for hours at a time. I thought that head pain was just part of my life, but it was getting worse as my work-related stress increased. I cried a lot in those days, frustrated and angry. I hated what I was doing with my life, but I was also in pain a lot of the time.
Here's an excerpt from my journal at that time.
"I feel the pinching of my spine and the taut muscles in my neck as the screws tighten. Throbbing curves around my ears and down into my shoulders. Someone has bashed me with a baseball bat at the edge of my skull, smashing the bone into my brain. Two bars of steel bore through my eyes and the surface of my eyeballs expand from pressure.
Light is torture. Pixels split into too much detail and everything is magnified and in capitals. Sound is amplified to a roar made up of billions of tiny noises all crowding for attention. Breathing sounds like a deafening waterfall, a footfall is a crash, music a thudding cacophony. There's buzzing in my ears, an insect trying to get out or blood knocking on my brain. My vision narrows as a mask, pink and orange patches dancing on the walls. My legs wobble as I struggle to get somewhere dark and quiet before I collapse into a wreck of tears."
It was around this time in 2006 that I started writing what would become Career Change, a book about finding work we love. I discovered writing, self-publishing, blogging and a whole community of people making their living online. Suddenly, I saw a future where I didn't have to work in such a high-stress environment, and I began working to make that a reality.
You can find the highlights of my journey at www.TheCreativePenn.com/timeline
In 2011, I left that corporate job and my stress headaches disappeared quickly because I removed myself from that high-stimulus environment, stopped doing work I hated and moved away from the stress imposed by all-consuming deadlines and the relentless project life-cycle.
But I still had head pain.
So, perhaps we need to think about pain as multi-leveled
You can soften away one layer, deal with the problem that causes it, only to find another level below.
As authors, it's all too easy to stress ourselves out with deadlines, whether contractual or self-imposed. We work hours in front of the computer, unblinking, chin out like a tortoise, putting strain on our necks and causing tension headaches. Back pain and headaches were tied together for me and as I outlined in Chapter 1.3, I resolved a lot of this over time with changes to my work environment, walking, and yoga.
But I still experienced hormonal migraines, so I went back to the doctor and switched to a different contraceptive pill. It was like a miracle! My monthly migraines disappeared completely. I had been on that same pill for 15 years by the time I changed, and I had assumed that the various side effects were just the same across different medications. But they were completely different. I kicked myself that I hadn't thought about switching earlier.
So am I a completely headache-free zone these days? A paragon of healthy virtue?
Of course not! But because I have removed the biggest reasons for regular headaches and migraine, I am acutely aware of when I cause a headache through my own actions.
My headaches and very occasional migraines these days are generally related to speaking and going to conferences, where the amount of stimulation and noise sends my stress levels soaring. I love that I can change people's lives by speaking and I enjoy the learning experience of conferences, but I pop pills during the events and tend to experience a week of pain afterward. You'll find me in my reading chair with a hot wheat-pack around my neck being very quiet.
There may come a day when I decide that live events are just not worth it, but for now, some form of occasional pain is a trade-off I am willing to make for the positive benefits.
Pain is our body saying that something is wrong.
It's feedback, but only if we listen.