Ep 15. Lessons from My Extended Sick Leave: What Helped Me Heal from Burnout and Chronic Migraine

Join me as I reflect on the five-year journey since I went on sick leave due to all of the physical and cognitive effects of burnout, and other chronic pain and symptoms. In this episode, I dive deep into the lessons learned about self-awareness, what was under my perfectionism, the forms of stress I didn't recognize, and the importance of self-compassion through it all. I share personal experiences about overcoming overwhelm, recognizing the mind-body connection, and the steps I took towards healing, including the significance of mindset and surrounding oneself with a supportive community. Whether you're dealing with migraines, burnout, or stress-related illness, I hope my story provides insight and encouragement for your own healing journey.

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00:00 Introduction: Five Years Since Sick Leave
00:42 Struggles and Transition
01:27 Facing Stress and Burnout
04:07 Lessons from Burnout
07:43  Honest Self-Awareness
10:02  No such thing as perfect
10:59  The Power of Mindset
15:30  Building a Support System
17:22  Importance of Listening to Your Body
19:02  Your Needs Matter
21:18  The Importance of Small Actions
23:02  Getting Comfortable Sitting In The Unknown
23:43  Understanding the Nervous System States
25:05  Stress Comes in MANY Forms
26:22  Self-Compassion is So Neccessary
27:54 Conclusion: Reflecting on the Journey

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Education and techniques discussed in this Podcast originate from many sources, countless hours of research, training, and self-healing unless otherwise noted.

Music credit: MomotMusic, Kyrylo Momot
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Disclaimer: Information provided by Migraine Oasis & Karen Ash is for general informational & educational purposes only & is not a substitute for medical advice, psychotherapy, or counselling. Utilizing any of the education, strategies, or techniques in the podcast is done at your own risk. Consult with a physician before engaging in any suggested movements. If in immediate danger, call a local emergency number or go to the nearest emergency room.

Transcript

0:53

It is the five year anniversary of me going off on sick leave, and I thought I would do an episode on the lessons that I've learned. I was out of work for five months and then slowly integrated back in very slowly, like 10% working, then 20%, it was, months and months before I was back to about 80%. And then it was very clear that I was leaving the company. I never went back a hundred percent actually even a year after going out on sick leave. I tried to reintegrate back into work that didn't, yeah, obviously work. I just did not want to go back to that position. They allowed me to find a temporary position until I could find a permanent position. And that was in the mindfulness and the, employee wellness, diversity and inclusion, stress management, all these kind of topics were being worked on. I loved that position and it fueled the fire for me internally of, yes, this is the type of work I wanna do. I wanna do self-development, I wanna help people outta stress related illness. I thought it was going to be helping people avoid burnout. And then going into coaching schools and trying to figure out, what's my niche going to be? Migraine then became a topic, okay, I know a lot about this and it became clear this was a symptom that I could recover from because I was, and I got very excited about helping others do the same. So little of the backstory there. I actually found a presentation that I had given to my work colleagues. Now mind you, at the time that I went on sick leave, I was so stressed about what would these people think of me. I was in management in pharma at the time. It was a job you just didn't wanna look weak in, and you needed to be on top of your game. I wanted people to respect me and to think of me as a qualified and a competent person. I had this kind of like imposter syndrome sometimes, and I was struggling to keep up with the workload and feeling bad about that, I always had on top of my mind. What are people thinking of me? I, I just, that was so important to me. I was giving this presentation to colleagues that were all pharma executives. It's funny looking back at this. I haven't looked at this since 2021 . A couple people did come up to me afterwards just saying how brave they thought it was, that I completely was raw in telling my story. I felt at the time really passionate about the fact I saw so clearly what stress had done to my body and the mind body connection that I had learned of and how this environment we were in was coming out in my body in sensations and symptoms. It was like a warning to them. I felt very, I don't know, somehow obliged that now I had this information and I needed to share it with others that, Hey, this environment It's so dysregulating to the nervous system. It's damaging to our health. Yes, we're in drug development and in pharma, but we need to look at this in a more holistic way. So I do look back on this and think, yeah, it was a bit brave to push against the biomedical system. As I was giving this presentation. Also some of the topics that I was talking about with, getting in touch with their emotions and different things. But, they were all friends and colleagues, so it was, quite natural for me to be able to talk openly to them. But to this point, when I went out on sick leave, it was that aspect of what do these people think of me? They're going to think I couldn't handle the stress. They're going to think ill of me. I'm putting more work on them now. I had a lot of shame and guilt around that. Everybody's gonna know. Don't give Karen any more assignments, don't give her any big projects to manage because, she's fragile now. She can't handle it. So I was really very conscious of that and scared of that, that I had just killed my career. in hindsight. Thank Goodness I killed my career in the next year anyway, I pulled the plug and said, no, no more. I want more for myself. So yeah. So anyway, without further ado, let me get into I first started talking about that I had been under stress for 30 years. This wasn't just this latest job. I had stress for ages. I went into some of those aspects of going to university or positions that I got outside of graduating. They were high pressure sales management positions. I had a meeting planning company for 10 years that I was doing meetings worldwide for pharma companies. So there was always stress and that wasn't the problem. It was how I managed the stress. I went into some of that and then saying in mid stage of all this, I was having a lot of different things, like I was uncomfortable with change and we had a lot of change in that environment. We had restructurings very often. I was nervous about financial security and that was a generational trauma. My mother was always having this nervousness of, do we have enough? Will there be enough? Her parents grew up in the Great Depression. Her grandparents came over on the boat from Germany and struggled to make it for a bit. There was this underlying stuff that I didn't even know. Then my department had been outsourced, and then we came into another position and it was more around the governance and compliance around our interactions with healthcare professionals and patients. Well, that job was not anything that I signed up for. And it was very, tedious. I had to learn all the laws of the various countries that we were operating in and stuff that I felt outta my depths. And I learned it and I was able to be good at it. But, not anything I loved or had passion for. I mentioned a death of a loved one, two dogs that I adored passed away within that year before all this came to a head. Our global lockdown, being worried about aging parents. That's a big one for a lot of people. And just avoiding my emotions and really overcompensating with work and other distractions in general. How this started showing up was chronic stress related illness and overwhelm and memory issues and brain fog and concentration issues and migraines increasing. Waking up in the night with panic and this to-do list, I forgot to do this, I forgot to do that. And just like always in this, uh, panic almost every night, and exhaustion, irritability, all the things that come with it. Chest and heart pain. And then, I went out on sick leave. I never said the word burnout to this group. I just said, then I went out on doctor's leave in June of 2020. I have not used that word until this year, five years later, which is really interesting. I was so shameful of this. Feeling like I couldn't hack it and what is everybody gonna think of me. There was actually a girl on a podcast that I listened to last year, and she was talking so freely about, well, when I burned out and dah, dah, dah, dah. And I just thought. Oh, like, what is she doing? Like everybody's gonna know like that she burned out. And at some point it hit me like, why are you so ashamed of this? Why are you, you know, the migraines aren't a thing, but the burnout for some reason is a heavier weight, as like feeling like a failure or something, or I don't know. I need to do some more, processing of that, I think, because obviously there's still some emotions underneath that. I'm getting used to it and I'm starting to really own it and I want to normalize it. Hey, this is happens when we push ourselves too hard and when we lack self-care and when we lack self-compassion and boundaries and all this other. So, I do really feel strongly now to name it what it was and let's move on. The first lesson learned was having an honest, brutal self-awareness is so important. You really need to take time to get to know yourself. And I thought I had done that. I did a lot of therapy and coaching and I really thought that I was pretty self-aware and self evolved. It turns out I was not at all. We were working on things, yes, from childhood or different hurts or wounding, different situations with relationships and that kind of thing. But to know myself as the stuff that was causing me internal stress, I just really did not realize that, say my perfectionism and how hard I was on myself. I was beating myself up all the time. This inner critic was just incessantly telling me that I was no good at that or I was messing that up or I wasn't right. And it was going out with my name on it and how to be right. There was just such an intensity to how I was operating because in hindsight, it was a control factor. I needed to control my environment to feel safe, and this is why perfectionism and people pleasing and all these other things come in. I call it a personality trait, but it's more than that. It's a coping mechanism and a strategy that we come up with as children, actually, and it's a learned thing. When did you learn that you needed to be perfect or things needed to be perfect? Somewhere along the way, either a caretaker or a partner or something along the way has taught you that what you're doing isn't good enough, and that more was needed to be done, to be accepted, to be loved, to be part of the community, to feel, a part of the group, whatever the case may be. I was talking about, the self-awareness and it's more about yeah, what your coping strategies are. This people pleasing and over analyzing and you have this fear of missing out. So you're constantly trying to not say no to things because you really wanna feel like you're not missing out on something, or fear of failure, or your reputation is so important, understanding what's underneath all that because that is the root of what needs to be worked on. Perfectionism. Another lesson learned that it's just not, uh, a thing that what is perfect to me is not perfect to you, and I'm striving for something that is a creation of perfection that I learned from others that really made no sense. And it put so much pressure on myself. Nobody really was looking that hard at me. They were all concerned about their own stuff. Everybody else was just struggling to keep their head above water. So what I was doing and if the Excel document was exactly, color coordinated and whatever, the level of detail that I worried about was just ridiculous. In hindsight, I do feel like that was. Another way that I was just distracting myself from feeling emotions and dealing with anything at home and bringing work home and working so many hours was just an escape. I mean, that's pretty clear to me now. The other lesson learned was mindset. Mindset and belief is everything. This was a talk to pharmaceutical people, so they knew the placebo effect . We had to structure our clinical trials around the placebo effect. For anybody that doesn't know what that is, you are trying to test a new medicine that you want to bring to market a new compound, and you have to have a clinical trial, right? So you have to compare it to something. So you give somebody a, essentially a sugar pill. It has no active ingredient, but they don't know if it's the real pill or not. They believe that it's going to help them. They believe 'cause they want to believe it's the active ingredients and they're gonna get helped in some way. And in all clinical trials, there is a placebo effect that some people get well from just taking that inactive pill. It's a phenomena that is just absolutely amazing because it just shows the power of the brain. If you believe something is going to help you. It actually physically was making them better, making their symptoms go away. So it's something that I knew well and my colleagues knew well. But I was trying to go a step further in what you believe as far as if I was going all day long saying, I'm so overwhelmed. I'm so overwhelmed, I can't handle it. I'm so stressed. All day long, that was my belief that I was sending my brain all these danger threat signals. If I was believing, Hey, I'm gonna do as much as I can. It's all gonna get done in the best way possible. I'm gonna get through this. It's manageable. I've always managed. Those type of less threatening messages to the brain, it would've had a very different effect on my nervous system. Also having an open mindset versus a fixed, closed mindset. A lot of times in that company we were having a lot of restructurings and a lot of change, and there were just really upset people around, and many times we were just sitting around bitching and moaning basically about the situation, and that did no good for any of us. And so I was trying to point out what your mindset is and looking at the negative and looking at the worst case possibility is not going to help us. Looking at the problem is going to keep us in problem mode. If you're looking for solutions or looking to neutralize things, that's where the healing can happen. That's when an open mindset and possibilities and solutions can be found. When I was on sick leave, I consulted with a clinic and there I really found there were two distinct types of people. One that were open-minded and thinking, Hey, I've got nothing to lose. I'm at my bottom and nothing has been working so far. So let me listen to these people. If they're telling me my nervous system is totally dysregulated and I need to do something about that. If they're telling me that the holistic approach and looking at my mindset and my beliefs and my stressors and what I've experienced in life and all these kind of things, if they're telling me that's important, I'm gonna listen. Those are the people that were healing because they were open, trying whatever, and step by step, they were healing. The ones that just couldn't get outta their own way and were just very negative, and in victim mindset, this sucks, this is the worst thing that's ever happened to me. I can't heal. It's a disease, it's a disorder, it's a condition. And just so negative in their thinking. Those people, I can tell you, did not get better. And if anything potentially got worse. I saw that very clearly over time. I actually even consulted with one of the therapists there to say, this is my observation. Do you see this? Because I see two very different types of people, and I feel like that other group is not healing. And they were like. Yeah, very astute, That is very true. Thankfully you're in the group that is healing and just continue on keeping this open, curious mindset that is going to do you so much better in the long run. So, yeah, that was a very important lesson to keep open, keep curious, and, believing that things are possible. Because of the placebo effect because of the ability of the brain to pick up on that and feel safe about that. If you're just constantly like in the problem, the brain's gonna feel under attack and under threat. You're gonna still have symptoms. How are you gonna get out of that, right? If the brain is still feeling unsafe. The next lesson learned was to surround yourself with a team of people. Sometimes you can afford coaching or therapy, sometimes not. It's more to do with getting your tribe. Getting your community, figuring out the people who are making you feel safe and heard, and recognizing what you are going through. Finding communities that are healing. Not the Facebook communities that are talking about being support group, but the all they're doing is complaining about the problem and talking about what medications and what the doctors are saying and all these things. I'm talking about support groups that are communities of people that are healing and talking about solutions. That is so, so, so important because the other way, you're just focused again on the problem and it's going to just keep you stuck in this loop of the doom and gloom of it all. And it can feed into your doubt, by the way, if you're in these groups and you're seeing other people saying, no, no, I heard that it's magnesium. I heard that it's this, I heard it's that, and you just keep going down all these rabbit holes and you just have all this doubt that is making the brain feel very, very unsafe. So that is an important thing to just have connection and have whether it's certain people that you follow online, if it's certain people that you are in groups with or whatever the case may be, just to feel like you are not alone in this. In migraine. There's 1 billion people worldwide suffering. So you are definitely not alone when it comes to migraine. And there are places and if you're looking for community dM me. I am at the moment trying to work on something with group coaching. That's not set up yet, but I really feel like this community part is very important and so, I wanna get something going with that to help you. The next lesson learned was listen to your body. For so many years I just didn't even know what that meant first of all. I was so in my head, so analytical, so over-functioning and trying to think my way through everything. And I thought that gave me a sense of control. I started getting then some coaches that one specifically kept telling me, drop 10 inches, go down into your body. You're up in your head all the time. Drop down. Drop down into the body. And she would always remind me of that. Until I started catching myself and saying, uh, I need to drop down, she's like, yeah. It made such a difference of listening. And we all have this innate intuition. We all have it, but we are typically not listening because we're so busy. Life is hectic, it's fast paced, and there's a lot going on That's a given. But until you take these little, even micro moments of one minute at a time to check in with yourself. What do I need right now? Do I need a hot tea? Do I, would a coffee make me feel good? Let me just walk out on the balcony and just feel the sun on my skin. Let me just take a really deep cleansing breath that's gonna feel good to me right now. Am I sitting here just powering through and I haven't eaten all day? Yeah, let me get up and just have something to eat. All these little micro things make a big difference because they're reassuring the brain. Everything's fine. We're not under threat. I'm good. I'm taking care of myself, and I actually mean it. I'm looking out for myself. I don't have this huge inner critic that's beating myself up all day, making you feel like there's threat at every corner. I have this self-compassion now, and I am working on making sure that my needs are met because I matter. And that is a huge thing. That's probably another lesson that I should have added that you matter. And I don't think I've told this story, but the reason why I went out on sick leave when I did was because I had an appointment with my counselor. And I was just complaining about the stress and the workload and the life work balance that I didn't have. I was working on another big project and I just felt like, how am I supposed to do this 200% job? This is just not realistic and nobody's listening to me and I'm not heard and dah, dah. And she said, When are you going to choose you? When is it time for you? And I remember that just being like, oof. It just hit me like a ton of bricks. And I burst out crying and she said, it's time. When is it going to be time? What's it gonna take? Because you are now sitting in my office holding your chest because you're saying your heart and your chest is hurting 24 7, pain 24 7 for months. You're not going to the doctor about that, like, what is going on? When is it your turn? And that woke me up. So really paying attention to the body and understanding all these symptoms are escalating. What is going on and why would that be happening? And understanding the nervous system dysregulation that's going on and using the intuition, silencing yourself a little bit to be able to say, uh, okay, this is what's going on. Okay. That's a normal felt sense that I would have in my body. I'm really nervous, so yeah, it makes sense that my stomach is upset or whatever the case may be. Migraines obviously them escalating and it coinciding with me taking a high pressure job. Yeah, that in hindsight wasn't strange. Also, the fact that I moved countries. There were so many different stress factors. And my personality traits and defense mechanisms that were really coming out in full force that caused me so many problems. So, in hindsight, it's not surprising at all. But it's listening to the body is just so important. We're so detached from our bodies and so stuck in the mind, and it's so important to remember that, to come back every once in a while. The next lesson learned was that little things do add up to make a really big difference. They don't feel like it at the time, maybe. Or you just think what's one minute going to do to do some mindfulness or walk out on the balcony or whatever I was just saying of different techniques that you can use, and it really does though. It's regulating the nervous system and if your brain is feeling like it's under threat, but yet you're going out and taking a really deep cleansing breath, well, it's like, okay, well there's no big saber-tooth tiger chasing her. How much danger could she be in if she's doing that? That's not a normal thing to do if you're not safe. So it's these little micro things. And it became a habit for me of doing little things all day long to just check in with myself. And not in a way that's hypervigilant, checking in with yourself. Like, what do I need? What do I need? It's just this ease about it, of I matter and my needs matter, and I'm putting myself up on the list of everybody else. Why wouldn't I, why? I remember saying this to a client and she was so taken aback, it was really moving to her that I said, why wouldn't you matter? Why wouldn't your needs matter? Of course, and she was just like, I don't know. I never thought about it like that. It was a part of a conversation that was a pivotal moment that shifted something for her, which was great. I wrapped up this presentation by saying, where I'm at now, and I have decided that I did not want to, continue doing the work that I was doing, that I was starting to work in the stress management and that I would be glad to be a consultant on anything, if anybody needed anything. And I was saying that we are under a restructuring at the moment. And one of the things I'm working on right now that might be helpful to them, was sitting in the unknown. That was very uncomfortable to me before, and it still was, but I was learning skills to be able to sit in the unknown and realize what's in my control, what's outta my control, the amount that I would allow myself to worry about it, basically. You can control your thoughts and your emotions. You do have influence over what you're thinking about. A thought could come in. Obviously there's a lot that's coming in from the unconscious mind, but you can learn to stop it and say, no, I'm not going down that rabbit hole. I need to focus on these things that I know bring me in the direction that I wanna go to. Still to this day, I think those are the main lessons that I learned. There's a couple other ones that I wanna mention, and one is the nervous system regulation or what understanding of the nervous system can do for you. Understanding that there's a regulated state and there's dysregulated states. Understanding how you feel in those dysregulated states. When you're in fight or flight and you're super stressed out and in this anxiety, this hustle mode and this like activation type of braced for something. That mode versus a shutdown or a free state where you're numbed out and disassociated and oh my gosh, not one more thing. Like I can't handle one more thing. Understanding that stress is a part of life. It's gonna come in our life no matter what. That's just inevitable. But how we can ride the waves of the stress states in our nervous system to not get stuck there, that is the key. Over time I realized what was causing a lot of the chronic pain and symptoms in both myself and clients and everybody else that I've seen that are in these communities that are healing. Was that the nervous system was in a prolonged state of survival, and that is in this fight or flight or freeze. Learning how to recognize that goes back to the lesson of being aware of your body and how you're feeling, so that you can take action and do things to regulate the nervous system if needed. One of the last big learnings that I think I took out of this situation was stress has many, many forms, as I often say. I just did not realize. I thought stress was day to day like what's your work, your relationship, things going on that you're worried about. That was called stress, and I had no idea that it was internalized things that were back in the subconscious, that these repressed emotions. Emotions that you never dealt with in life. Adverse childhood events. Now I know there's a direct correlation actually to adverse childhood events and people in chronic pain later in life. People who have IBS, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, some of these things, there's a direct correlation to your ACE score. It's called ACE. Adverse childhood event score and the severity of the symptoms. That is big. That's a huge factor. So understanding that stress comes in many, many forms, it's the childhood. What happened? Have you dealt with that? These emotions and have you done the processing, the awareness, first of all, bringing it into awareness because a lot of that is in the unconscious mind and have you processed it, felt it in the body, and then processed it so that is no longer a tension that you carry within the body essentially. The body keeps score. Another big one is self-compassion. I just had none, all my life, I think. And working on that, actively recognizing the fact of how horrible I treated myself all these years and how many mean messages were in my head all day, all night. I could have done a hundred things right during the day and accomplished a million things. And at night when I was going to bed, it was always, oh, I didn't do this. I didn't do that. That person's gonna be upset because I didn't get back to 'em on that. It was always the what went wrong. Or that person said this and that stuck with me. Not the 10 compliments that I had gotten of how helpful I had been, but the one that had said, I didn't get back to him in time. So it's self-compassion of you're human being, you are trying the best you can, and we need to have compassion for what we're going through. This is a journey of trying to look back on sometimes decades in my case of patterns and beliefs and ways of being that were coping mechanisms that we never chose. They were either put upon ourselves, these beliefs, from caretakers, society, friend group, whatever. So to bring that power back within us and this empowerment to start living a more authentic life and a life that you're treating yourself well, treating yourself with the same respect as you would a child going through the same situation or another friend that you care for. Five years. In a way it feels like so much more time has gone by in a way it feels like it's flown by. I've accomplished so many things in that time. I did leave that work. I got my coaching degree. I started the company and trying to, yeah, make a difference in somebody else's life now and trying to coach others. If you do need support in any way, please do feel free to reach out to me and in the meantime, keep watching some of the content. There's plenty of other people out there that are doing great work. With migraine, I really hope you find the resources that look at this as a neuroplastic symptom. The old model that we've been listening to, that it's an incurable disease that you have no hope other than pain management is just not correct, first of all, but it's just not helpful. So looking at it in this biopsychosocial model and looking at the biology, the psychology, your emotions, your thoughts, all this and the social aspect to how connected are you, how supported are you, how are you feeling in your environment? Do you feel safe? Do you not? Are you seen? Are you heard? All these things matter to our overall health. I want to get that across that looking at it in that lens is so much more helpful and it's leading to people healing from chronic migraine. I no longer have chronic pain, which is amazing to me. I look back on those years that I thought, yeah, this is just my lot in life if you think it's in your genes and you can't get break free of this go back and listen to my podcast on genetics. This new approach, this new model, I really hope gets more traction and more people are looking into this. I also hope the little rambling off topics of things like the placebo effect or certain things about how things were at work and, the defense mechanisms that maybe I had incorporated, maybe spark something in you as well of thinking of it in a different way. I really do not regret this whole five years. I know it sounds crazy. I know that some people are like, oh, how could you thank the pain? It's not that I'm thanking the pain. I obviously would have preferred my brain to have chosen another way to get my attention, but this worked. This, really was a wake up call. It's just to say if you're going through this and it seems like a really dark time and you're at the beginning of your journey, just know that it gets better and that looking back on hindsight, I really can say this is what was needed to just crack me wide open and to expose these pieces that were just not working, that were not resonating with my true, authentic self and values and life and what I wanted for my life going forward. I just hadn't had the insights or the awareness to look at some of this stuff. So as you do this work, even as painful as it can be at times because you're looking at patterns and things that you want to disrupt and there is some work to it, it was so well worth it. I was so motivated because I saw other people healing, and so I hope I can be a ray of sunshine on that front to just know that this is possible. I hope something resonated for you and you're able to take something out of this to help you on your own healing journey. Reach out if I can be of help in any way, pass this along to anybody else that you think that it would be helpful for. And until then, I hope to see you soon.