Self-Care Learning in Lockdown

For those of you who really cannot just “Keep calm”

Write a journal, keep calm, meditate, do yoga, breathe – so easy to say and very difficult to do when your mind is saying “These are crazy times!”. If this has any resonance for you then perhaps my experience will be helpful to emphasise that with practice we can teach ourselves to ... keep calm-er and reap the benefits of this change.

Like many of you, I have been learning a lot in lockdown, for example how to screen share in Zoom with ease. But I have had some specific learning in focus during this time. I have been extending my learning on how to manage myself and ... oddly enough ... keep calm. It started with a commitment to Migraine Reduction Practice.

You might never have had a migraine or might think that fixing migraines cannot be about learning anything except patience with pain. Instead I learnt loads that became really useful during lockdown, about self-care and how the mind and body work together … and sometimes not together.

Why did I both with weeks of work plus some follow-up of learning?

My first migraine at 10 was memorably in the middle of a school test. Migraines waxed and waned through my life after this time. Usually I soldiered on, often not running on 100%, always with an umbrella, sunglasses, my phone, my purse and some Migraleve in my handbag.

I had worked with Jan Southern, who developed the Migraine Reduction Practice programme, for a few years. We worked together to promote her business. I knew that Jan’s approach to migraines was scientific and thorough and worked for her clients.

Yet somehow, I felt my symptoms were not quite life-threatening enough to warrant working with her for myself. I did not always take sick leave as I work flexibly; I could shuffle work around and make do.

But at the end of 2019 I finally decided that making do with more days than not being clouded by migraines was just not good enough anymore.

In what became the first of many steps prioritising my self-care in 2020; I committed to 10 weekly 1 hour sessions with Jan through her online clinic. Same day of the week and same time for 10 weeks. As well as committing to doing the practice itself in the intervening days. There was also further follow up to engage in.

Each session Jan introduced various techniques which I practiced between our sessions. Each session we would review my previous week and unpick how my brain and body had learnt to work. Sometimes I found the practices easy and sometimes difficult.

The initial discomfort and weirdness was in emotions and physical sensations and thought processes. However, the combination of learning and safely applying these techniques with her on a weekly basis gave me the ability to practice during the week.

It is difficult to explain how the process worked as each practice Jan taught appears simple.

The process reminded me of when I learnt to play tennis. I had been taught to play hockey which meant I had learnt to connect an implement and a ball. With tennis, apart from being told vaguely how to hold a racket I spent 3 years of weekly Games session playing un-tennis. Then I got the opportunity of tennis lessons. I had to unlearn and relearn everything. This meant wiping out my muscle and brain memory of a couple of years of playing un-tennis. It was hard but I would practice on the courts every day in between my weekly lessons and initially my game changed almost imperceptibly. Suddenly I could serve an Ace and actually hit a backhand. Suddenly I was playing tennis and it was easy because I was doing It the way it was meant to be played. My badly learnt habits were rewritten, and I became a competent player.

What I discovered with the Migraine Reduction Practice is that I was relearning self-care practice. I had simply muddled my way through this … I had simply never been taught how me worked. I had to learn and practice caring for me.

In the examples of the effect of my practice that follow it might seem that for me migraines were simply directed connected to stress, and the practice unravelled this direct connection. But this is not the case, in my brain’s meandering stress would have an impact on me and my emotions and my body and my thoughts but at odd angles to the meander. Thus, my practice was like unpicking a ball of wool that had been tangled whilst rewinding it in a different way. Stress was sometimes the tangle and sometimes the thing that created the tangle and sometimes completely tangential to the tangles.

I have shared results of this process for me even though for each person the Migraine Reduction Practice itself is bespoke and the results are different.

1. Finding Me-Time

Committing to the ten weeks of sessions and practice became a commitment to me-time. This was something I had thought I was getting a handle on, but it always slipped to the bottom of my to-do list.

But the practice and commitments to the process led and continues to lead to me finding moments of hidden time for reflection and for me. This space includes the almost frivolous activities like painting my nails. These hidden pockets of time now allow me to breathe more and rest more in the moment, which has always been difficult for me to learn.

2. Being lighter yet achieving more

This commitment to me led to a lighter approach to life. I genuinely want to help people through my work. It is not a critical job and in the current climate I am not a key worker. I find it hard to say No.

Starting to value time for me, made me value what I do with all my time and made me consider the best thing to do in each moment. I learnt to be responsible for my own life and goals, and not be swamped with other people’s needs both in work and home.

And this came with great rewards because the lightness makes work easier and me easier to work with – referenced by feedback.

3. Social Venture Weekend was easier

One of my biggest migraine moments comes three times a year with a weekend bootcamp (Social Venture Weekend). I love it – we have fifty entrepreneurs who want to build a business to change the world in the Cambridge Judge Business School. I am part of a fabulous team and we work all weekend together, teaching and mentoring. But for the past few years I usually wake on the Saturday with quite a dizzy head and on the Sunday with a pain-migraine. I used pain killers and going a bit slower to cope.

This time Social Venture Weekend hit in week 7 of my practice. The changes for me were huge:

·      no migraine symptoms – I talked to more people, even probably worked harder but also was symptom free

·      whilst I worked harder, I was able to engage lightly and be helpful but not stressed

·      my teaching improved .

The last two points were confirmed by improved anonymous feedback from the delegates, in addition to me feeling better.

With social distancing this crazy and amazing weekend might not happen again for a while but the learning was useful for the first few weeks of lockdown when the same team was delivering 3 days of training online for the first time for our Incubator kick-off.

The greatest (but not the greatest) impact of my practice has been reduced migraines and migraine symptoms. This has had an almost imperceptible extension but a very real one nonetheless: migraines have less control over my life in general. Less symptoms means less preparation and fear of symptoms which reinforces and is reinforced by my continued practice of self-care.

Over lockdown I have had fewer migraines than the same months last year, but more importantly, I have been using the practices I have learnt to manage and care for myself better. This in turn has allowed me to keep calm when usually my brain would not be agreeing with the plan and my body would be responding with various pains.

If you want to find out more about Migraine Reduction Practice here is the link to Jan's website.