I Had to Overcome My Productivity Addiction to Heal My Migraines
How I finally put my health first and why it was so hard
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” — Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Life on the Treadmill
It was early summer in New York, the sweet sliver of the season when the heat is still a welcome relief from the frigid winter and hasn’t yet wafted the stench of trash and sewer into the streets. I took the 2–3 Express train down from Columbia University — where I had landed a dream fellowship in climate change law — to meet my friend Rose in Chelsea for sushi. Sushi because it was one of the few things I could eat. The list of foods that triggered my migraines was dizzying, but a simple preparation of fish, rice, and seaweed seemed safe. Maybe some gluten-free soy sauce if I was feeling bold.
Migraines had creeped into every facet of my life. They would begin with a menagerie of seemingly unrelated symptoms: sensitivity to sounds and light, aura, irritability, and difficulty focusing. Then the headache, nausea, and weakness set in and intensify until the symptoms become debilitating. The finale was the “postdrome” phase, which I affectionately call the hangover. That summer, a brutal cycle had left me horizontal 20 hours a day for a few months.
I was doing better now. I was back at work, at least from noon to six most days. I was making plans and usually keeping them. I was even occasionally dancing — though now bachata instead of salsa, since it didn’t require the same quick dizzying turns. This was progress. This was something that looked like life after days of unrelenting pain and questioning whether I would ever get better.
Friends and family celebrated my return to work, but not Rose. She sat across from me — big eyes and big beautiful corkscrew hair that matched her larger than life personality. She took in my sunken eyes and thinning hair. Rose remembered high school Meredith — boundless energy, running a million miles per hour. High school Meredith spent Saturday sweating at the dance studio, Saturday night drinking Captain Morgan’s and laughing in the Mason’s basement, and Sunday pouring over AP textbooks and organizing her closet by garment and color. Rose looked at me and didn’t see better. She saw a sick friend failing to pass as functional.
“Meredith, I have been thinking.” I brace myself. Nothing you want to hear ever follows those words. “It’s time you stepped off the treadmill. You can’t keep doing this anymore.”
I was accustomed to pity or even unsympathetic friends downplaying my migraines as headaches, but this response was foreign. Was she telling me to give up? “What treadmill?”
“You worked your ass off in high school. You were third in our class. You went to Berkeley Law. You have a fellowship at Columbia now. You have been on this treadmill for so long, and it’s time to step off for a bit. You are not well. You need to go home and get healthy.”
Every instinct in me challenged the idea that I was on a treadmill. I was not some tunnel visioned go-getter climbing my way to the top! Sure, I had an SAT tutor, but wasn’t that just what everyone (and by “everyone,” I mean everyone I knew, admittedly a very particular, privileged bubble) did when their verbal score lagged so far behind math? Maybe it was a bit much when I was sent to writing camp to craft a college admissions essay. But I was just doing as I was supposed to! And I took the fellowship in spite of it being Columbia, not because of it. When I had visited in high school, I left the tour because the pretentious tour guide kept calling it “Columbia in the City of New York.” What other Columbia did they fear being confused with? And why couldn’t they just call it New York City like everyone else? When I accepted the fellowship ten years later, my mother had laughed, “Columbia? In the City of New York?!”
Here were my defense mechanisms in action. Unable to see my own productivity addiction, I reserved the treadmill for only the most extreme overachievers.
Denying Rose’s assessment, I told myself I clung to my paltry version of normalcy not out of unbridled ambition, but because it might be all I would ever get. I had spent the last few years trying anything the neurologist would prescribe me: infusions, medications, hypnosis, and even Botox. It was all side-effects and no relief. I had already lost so much time to my disease. I didn’t want to waste my life away waiting to get better.
Maybe it seems obvious from the outside that healing would not be wasted time. But, isn’t nourishment always getting pushed aside to make room for, well, everything else? The essentials — sleep, exercise, and food — don’t take precedent over our overcrowded to-do lists. Imagine your coworker saying: “Sorry Susan, I wanted to get you that memo but I just needed my eight hours of sleep.” You can’t.
Productivity too often means sacrificing ourselves. Even my meditation app knows this. It keeps track of my streaks. It awards me stickers to convince me that the time I spend just breathing is a measurable accomplishment. We have entered a sort of time famine with no end in sight.
Even when I decided to pack up my things and move back in with my parents, I was still resenting the time lost. I promised friends it was “just for a few months,” but mostly I was assuring myself. I saw an alternative medicine doctor and followed his orders to a T. And when I experienced a few symptom-free days in December, I immediately booked a ticket to the Bay Area — the last place I had lived before my illness defined me.
Rushing Back to Normal
I paid a price for my rush to get back to “real life.” While I was functional again, I was far from healthy. The longer I pushed on, the more I backtracked. Like a frog in warming water, I hardly noticed the gradual disintegration of my health. I was determined not to let my illness impact my work or my social life. If I was physically able to stand in the morning, I went to work. I was fighting to experience my life through a cloud of endless symptoms, and I was exhausted.
Then I found a new medicine providing moderate relief. Suddenly, I experienced pockets in my day where I felt almost no pain at all. In those brief moments, it was like a veil was lifted. Coworkers celebrated my progress with cringe-worthy revelations like “You’re less sad in the morning!” and “You crawl under your desk less!” Ironically, the improvement allowed me to see just how far I was from healthy.
Several months into my “new and improved” life I met Jacob. I had become immune to morning ice packs just to get out of bed, trading ski trips for Sundays in the office, and the daily stressors of litigation. Jacob was not. His reflection of my suffering sent cracks through the facade of Okay-ness I was holding up with all my will. I started to question, Is my dream job worth it?
And, if I wasn’t inclined to trust the perspective of some guy I just started seeing, my coworker finished the job. One day she marched into my office and said she couldn’t understand why I didn’t just quit and let myself get healthy. But I didn’t want to hear it. Quitting seemed so extreme. So I booked a couple vacations instead. In these brief respites, there was a little more space to take it all in.
I can’t pinpoint the moment I saw myself honestly, but there I was, desperate and worn down. Five years later, I was finally seeing Rose’s treadmill. This time stepping off would be different. Before I resisted putting my life on pause. Now I feared missing my life entirely just trying to push through. I was ready to make health my North Star.
Still, it took months to muster up the courage to accept my truth and quit. A friend recently described her experience leaving the tech world as jumping off a speeding train. She didn’t have migraines, but she had her own set of symptoms sounding the alarm. Treadmill or train, pick your metaphor. We were moving too fast. And stopping at that speed is terrifying.
Getting Comfortable with Quitting
It took so much to quit, but it was only the beginning. Fighting the treadmill has often felt like a game of whack-a-mole. When I finally quit, another mole popped up — In a society so faithful to the ethos of productivity, I drew my self-worth by what I did. I fancied myself an environmental warrior fighting for climate justice. Without the mission, I felt lost. In my lowest moments, I blamed myself for being a quitter, too weak to stick it out and too anxious to handle the stress.
And just below that fear of failure lay another — I might not get better. That I had blown up my life for nothing. This fear loomed so large, when loved ones asked if I felt better, it only poured salt in the wound. I had finally stepped off one treadmill to unwittingly place myself on another. Suddenly achieving health was the marker of my success.
The danger in defining ourselves by what we produce is that there is little room for failure. It took effort to remind myself that grit is not always the answer. There is wisdom in knowing when to surrender. On a good day, I could see my choice for what it was: a radical act of self-love.
A Culture of Addiction
My struggle to pause did not occur in a silo. America’s obsession with productivity is deeply rooted in our economic system and history. The internet is replete with articles warning us of the dangers of our addiction. But every other message is subtly (or not) telling us to stay on track, to take on more, to prove our worth.
My family was no exception. My parents encouraged less drastic measures like lining up a new job before taking time off. Months into unemployment, family members still began each call by asking if I was working yet. My grandfather once called after having a worrisome dream. “I’m afraid you are letting your life pass you by.”
These comments stung, but now I see them for what they reveal. My fears of stepping off the treadmill — of abandoning economic security, of losing my status as a productive citizen, of wasting time — are learned behaviors. And I’ll admit, not disadvantageous ones at that. It was, in large part, the implacable drive of my parents and grandparents that has given me the privileged life I enjoy today. I wouldn’t abandon productivity, even if I could. But I will no longer follow it blindly without considering what I am sacrificing in its name.
Peers were more subtle. They often interpreted my quitting to heal as code for travel. Travel seems to be a special exception to the productivity rule. It is indexed in the collective conscience as vacation, and vacation is kosher. A deserved reward for our effort. But even travel gets turned into its own form of productivity. Destinations get ticked off a bucket list. Breathtaking beaches become Instagram posts. Going to an ashram becomes spiritual currency. Telling people I was quitting my job to see the world would have been exciting! But quitting to stay home and make bone broth was confusing. Maybe I had pretended to be healthy too well.
Another common response was a shocked, “Wow, you are brave.” This seemingly innocuous compliment irked me. I had savings to dip into, a social safety net to support me, and professional experience that (barring say a global pandemic resulting in an unprecedented economic recession) would aid in finding employment when I was ready. So what made me brave? Simply deciding to step off the treadmill. Seeing myself through my friends’ eyes, I was left asking, Am I brave or crazy?
Looking back, I wonder where I would be now if it were not for Rose and others who recognized my suffering and encouraged me to pause. As Glennon Doyle explains in her memoir Untamed, “It’s not the cruel criticism of the people who hate us that shakes us from our knowing, it is the quiet concern of those who love us.”
When reinforced by those we love and respect, the pull of the treadmill can become ironclad. The result is an endless cycle of mutually imposed captivity. We seek validation of our choices by encouraging others to replicate them. We convince people they love the rat race because we are too afraid to envision breaking out. Today, I can admit my choice was brave. But I fantasize about a world where it doesn’t have to be.
Leaning into the Pause
Much to my relief and constant amazement, I am getting better. Healing has been a full-time job, albeit one that doesn’t look very productive. My days are stacked with yoga, cooking, reading books on healing, spending time in nature and with friends (at a distance), and cultivating elevated emotions to rewire my overstressed brain. But the particulars are not the point. Suffice to say I couldn’t be here unless I stopped.
Global pandemic has proved to be an interesting landscape for healing. After nine years of chronic migraine, I was no foreigner to the forced pause. And, my healing process had not been so different from shelter in place (but with hugs and shared meals). Suddenly, everyone was home all day too. I watched Facebook erupt with proclamations of languages friends would learn and projects they would tackle to fill the empty space. But it soon became clear that pandemic is not a suitable habitat for productivity. And just like that, I didn’t have to explain myself anymore. No one asks me what I do all day long. Now everyone knows how little room there is in a day when you are just trying to be OK.
And shelter-in-place has kept me honest. A few months back I decided I would travel to the East Coast and Europe after my short-term disability ran out (because my healing was definitely going to adhere to an arbitrary date set by my neurologist). It felt good to have a timeline. To have a plan. It was familiar to set my schedule to objective markers. I would be lying if I suggested I was keen to give up my fantasies of wondering Parisian streets. But I’m leaning into the pause. Maybe you’d like to join me.
There is much grief and fear as we come to terms with a destructive disease and dizzying new normal. But the stopping, that may be a gift. Maybe together, alone we can notice how the need to be productive is manifesting. What would it feel like not to achieve right now? For those of us lucky enough to be secure and healthy, maybe we can allow ourselves to indulge more in the immeasurable. We can spend more time with family and pets, in nature, or simply in the wildness of our own minds.
And, if we are brave, maybe we can allow ourselves to sit in the discomfort and ask, what do we fear more — that it will never be the same, or that it will be exactly how it was?
A friend observed it is not only that shelter-in-place is hard, but it is also emphasizing the things that were already scratching just under the surface. The beauty of slowing down means there is space to investigate. Having stripped down to the basics, we get to decide what to add back in.
If we have the courage to pause, we can wrestle our lives from inertia’s grasp. We become empowered to choose. Maybe even to risk failure in search of something authentic.
