What my migraines, my Sunday nights, and eventually my heart were trying to tell me about a life that had stopped fitting

This article is the companion to Episode 18 of The Comeback Show with Jen McKillop, a master intuitive, coach, and host of the podcast Awaken Your Path. In the episode we talked about intuition as a decision-making instrument, and I wrote about that side of it for The Comeback Letter [read that one here →]. This piece is about the part I could not put down afterward: what your body does when you keep overriding it, and how to read those signals before somebody in a white coat has to read them to you.

Contents

Sunday, 9:47pm

I am on the couch and I am not going to bed.

Not because I am doing anything. The show I was watching ended twenty minutes ago. I am sitting there because going to bed means falling asleep, and falling asleep means Monday arrives faster, and I have decided without ever deciding it that I would rather be exhausted tomorrow than let tonight end.

So I stay up. Then I wake up exhausted, which makes Monday harder, which makes the following Sunday worse.

That was my life for years, and I want to be specific about the rest of it, because the specifics are the part we skip.

Fridays, I would sometimes cry upon closing my laptop, right at the desk in my home office. Not sad crying. Relief crying, the kind that comes out of you when a weight lifts and your body notices before you do.

Weekends, I was too wiped out to do much of anything. The laundry sat. The mail sat. The personal admin everyone else seemed to handle on a Saturday morning quietly did not happen, so every week I fell a little further behind, and being behind made Monday heavier, and the whole thing turned in on itself.

Underneath all of it, the migraines. I could feel them build. Tension gathering in my shoulders, climbing my neck, arriving at the back of my head like something being delivered.

I did not read any of that as information. I read it as a busy season. Then, when the busy season did not end, I read it as my personality. Some people just run hot. Some people just get headaches.

What I actually did about it was ibuprofen, more coffee, and a later bedtime.

The signal escalates, and that is the whole design

Here is what Jen said in the episode that stopped me.

"Your body comes around to wake you up. It's unfortunate, but you're given little signs that you're off path ... You'll start to get headaches... But that's your body being like, 'Hello. Love yourself...' Stop being mean to yourself... But we don't think of it like that. Then we go pop the Tylenol, right? Okay, we're fine, but then we keep going."

The line I keep coming back to is not the headache. It is then "we keep going."

Because your body does not send the message once and give up. It escalates. A memo, then a phone call, then somebody standing at your door. Each round is louder than the last, and the volume is not drama. It is the design.

Let me be clear about one thing, because I am the science-nerdy one here and I will not hand you a sentence I would not accept myself. If you have symptoms, get them checked. A migraine is a real neurological event. Weight gain, brain fog, and changes in your heart are real medical events with real medical causes, and they deserve real care from an actual doctor. I am not telling you your symptoms live in your head. I am telling you the opposite.

What I am saying is that once you have done the medical work, there is usually a second question waiting, and almost nobody asks it out loud.

Mine got asked six years too late.

The question nobody asked me until a cardiologist did

I have talked about this before, so here is the short version. Years of unrelenting stress put sixty pounds on me, put fog in my head, and did measurable damage to my heart.

My cardiologist told me to reduce stress everywhere I could. I did. I took things off my plate, I dropped commitments, I simplified what I could reach.

Six months later my heart still had not fully recovered.

He asked whether there was any other area of my life I could pull stress out of. And by then there was only one thing left standing.

He looked me in the eye and said, "Jenn, it may be time to decide if your career is compatible with your health."

I walked away from my job days later.

Here is what I want you to notice about that story, and it is not the drama of it. That cardiologist did not give me one piece of new information. Not one. My body had been sending that exact memo for years. The Friday crying. The Sunday dread. The tension climbing my neck every single week.

He just said it in a voice I had been trained to count as authority.

That is the actual problem, and it is worth sitting with. It was not that I lacked the data. I had years of it, in high resolution, delivered weekly. It was arriving in a format I had been taught to discount.

I have written before about how you cannot think your way to ready [read that one here →]. This is its twin. It is not that thinking fails you. It is that you are only counting one kind of thinking, and you have quietly disqualified the rest.

The sentence I would hand my corporate self

If I could go back and give that woman one instruction, it would not be inspirational. It would be this.

Read a physical symptom as a signal that something is out of alignment, not only in your body, but in your life.

Because if I had believed that, the questions would have changed completely. I would have stopped asking how to manage the migraine and started asking where I was working, which boundaries I had never set, who I was giving my hours to, and whether any of it matched what I actually valued.

Those are much more expensive questions. Every one of them has a bill attached.

Which is exactly why it is easier to ask about the ibuprofen.

The Two-Door Test

So here is the practice, and it is the most useful thing I own.

My therapist gave it to me years ago. She never named it, so I am naming it now. I call it The Two-Door Test.

Pick the decision and make it binary. Two doors, no maybes.

Walk through door one.

Not "what if I did this." You did it. It is decided, it is settled, it is done. Live inside that for a full minute without arguing with it.

Then notice your body before you notice your opinion. Your chest, your jaw, your shoulders, your stomach, your breath. Heavier or lighter. That is the entire reading.

Then walk through door two.

And do exactly the same thing.

Then compare the bodies, not the arguments.

When I ran it on the biggest decision of my life, door one was "I am not going back on Monday." I instantly felt like I had put down two hundred pounds. Lighter, hopeful, relieved, almost giddy.

Door two was "I am going back Monday as normal." The dread landed on me so fast and hard I wanted to cry.

When I described both of those to my husband, he said, "You can't go back." I gave my notice the next work day, and I have never once regretted it.

But the small version is what makes this a practice instead of a fire alarm.

Not long ago an old colleague invited me out to dinner, just to catch up. Lovely person. I kept resisting it for reasons I could not name, which is usually my tell that something is going on underneath.

So I ran the two doors. At the thought of an evening of updates about my old employer, I was tensed up everywhere, and that tension did not come close to being offset by the pleasure of the company. Declining was easy.

I said no. No regret, no second-guessing, no story about being a bad friend.

I have used it since for whether to attend a networking event, and for how hard to chase a particular podcast guest. It works on a Tuesday, not just at a crossroads.

Jen has her own version and hers is even lower stakes. Eggs or waffles. Her rule is that intuition is the thing that hits you fast and first, and everything after that is your emotions rewriting the message. I went deeper on that in [the Comeback Letter →].

If you are reading this and realizing you have never actually checked whether your life matches your values, that is step three of The Rewrite. It is called The Compass, and it is exactly this work: putting down the shoulds that were never yours and finding out what you actually want underneath them. Self-paced, no cohort to wait for, no rush. [Have a look at The Rewrite →]

A starter kit small enough to actually do

Jen has ADHD too, which neither of us planned to talk about and which changed how she built her whole practice.

"If we're given 10 things to do, we're never gonna do it, right? We may start one, and we're off in another land doing the dishes ... So in my work, I give one to two things to work on, and that is it. And when you nail that, then we can move on to the next."

She described it as seven pots. Water all seven at once and it takes forever for any of them to fill. Water one and it fills fast, and you get to feel like you finished something.

On our prep call she put it more bluntly, and I have not stopped repeating it since.

Complicated equals abandoned.

So here are three questions, and you are allowed to use one. One is not the lazy version. One is the version that survives contact with your actual week.

Morning

Where am I stiff? Jen's read on stiffness is that you are holding something that is not yours, and her answer is movement, literally. Shake it out. Go in the bathroom and lock the door if you need to. It does not have to look like anything.

Midday

Is there something I need right now? Have I eaten. Have I had water. Do I need five minutes with my eyes closed. "This is taking care of yourself, right? The little things."

End of day

Did I take on anyone's energy that is not mine? Then put it down before bed, out loud or on paper, and move while you do it. As Jen said, it can be in your mind, but you also have to get it out of your body.

And I want to name something for the neurodivergent women reading this, because I am one of you.

We are often extraordinarily good at this once someone gives us permission, because we already feel everything at full volume. The sensitivity, the way a room's mood lands on you before anyone speaks. That was never the malfunction. We were taught to treat it as one, and then handed a coping strategy that amounted to feeling less.

You do not need to feel less. You need somewhere to put what you are already feeling.

Why I am publishing this in September

September is National Recovery Month here in the US, and this episode sits close to it. Jen grew up with a father who was an alcoholic, and then found herself seven years into a relationship with a partner who was too. She is generous and unsentimental about what it took to walk out, and about the year of self-worth work that had to happen first.

Then on September 22 the season turns. Here in the Northern hemisphere, the light shifts, the days shorten, and something in most of us gets quieter and more honest.

This is not a new-year overhaul. Nobody needs one of those. It is just a good few weeks for asking what you have been carrying that was never yours.

Where to start

One thing.

The next time you reach for whatever makes a symptom quieter, take it. Please take it. I am not asking you to be a hero about a headache.

Just add one sentence afterward.

And what is this the bill for?

You do not have to answer it today. You just have to stop pretending the question is not there.

Sit with this

If your body has been sending you the same memo for years, what is the one thing in your life it has been asking you to look at, that you have been calling something else?

Resources

• Listen to Episode 18 of The Comeback Show with Jen McKillop [link →]

• Find Jen McKillop at jenmckillop.com, where you can join the waitlist for her Intuition Level 1 course, or subscribe to her podcast, Awaken Your Path

• The Rewrite, my five-step program for women who are done performing fine. The Compass step is the one this article lives inside. [teachclub.com/@therewrite →]

• Subscribe to The Comeback Letter for the story behind each episode [comebackletter.substack.com →]

• Related reading: [You Will Not Think Your Way to Ready →] and [You Don't Have to See the Whole Staircase →]

If you want the receipts

A quick note first: these are books I have found useful, some of these links are affiliate links that earn me a small commission at no extra cost to you, and none of this is medical advice. Talk to your own doctor about your own symptoms.

• The Gift of Fear, Gavin de Becker. The least woo book about intuition ever written. He argues that a gut feeling is rapid pattern recognition, not magic, and that we are trained out of it by politeness.

• Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman. For the skeptics. The fast system is real, it is measurable, and it is also biased, which is a more useful truth than either "always trust your gut" or "never trust it."

• The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk. The standard text on how stress and trauma live in the body rather than only in the story you tell about them.

• When the Body Says No, Gabor Maté. His conclusions are more debated than the others on this list and I will not pretend otherwise, but the central question he asks, about chronic stress and chronic illness, is the exact question this article is about.