My wife has been dealing with some pretty bad headaches of late. She has always been prone to them, but lately they have been getting worse. So much so, that at times, she is out of commission, and needs to go lie down. She went to see a doctor who advised her that they were migraines without the aura, which I never knew existed, and prescribed her with medication which I know she really doesn’t want to take.
Despite a series of tests that seem to point at everything being “fine” clearly it isn’t, otherwise she wouldn’t have them, or certainly they wouldn’t be as debilitating.
We know that headaches can arise for a variety of reasons, but we often associate their onset with stress, and we often see them as occurring because something “bad” happened.
Even our use of the word “headache” conjures up negative thoughts. There is really nothing positive about a headache, its onset, or the after-effects of it.
Therefore, in both our personal and professional lives, we want to do our best to avoid “getting” a headache. This means taking care of ourselves and taking care of others so that the ingredients for a headache (whether it be stress, lack of sleep, poor diet, etc.) don’t come together. In fact, the best cure for a headache is to proactively avoid putting ourselves in situations where they might arise. Sometimes that means physically staying away from an area that, or people who, might lead us to develop a headache. At other times, we can’t avoid the place or the people, so we need to diffuse potentially problematic situations before they arise.
And what if we do develop a “headache?” What if those stressful situations do, in fact, materialize? In those cases, we need to consider the shortest route to a potential solve. What negotiation of the situation at hand will result in all involved having no headache? Or, if that can’t be avoided, at least not having a migraine?
Negotiating work and life to avoid headache-inducing situations is not easy. In fact, it is likely impossible. But, part of dealing with the headaches that life brings is understanding what types of situations will lead us to develop them, and also having a knowledge of the factors that will lead to those we serve developing them as well.