I’m going to be honest and say I don’t want to be writing this right now.

Normally, I love writing these blogs; they are a chance for self-expression; a feeling I am giving a service; a feeling of being a part of something far bigger than myself. All these things are ingredients in our recipe for happiness, according to psychologists. Yet, today, I don’t want to write it. Today, when I did my test, I got my lowest score for months.

Why is that?

It’s very simple – I have a migraine.

Luckily, it’s a mild one. I’m still able – just – to function. I am sure many who are reading this are familiar with migraines that confine us to bed in a darkened room, longing for oblivion, and then inflict brain-fog and exhaustion for hours or even days after.

No – this one is mild. It has still, however, taken away lots of the positives. I don’t feel at all strong, alert and enthusiastic. I suppose I must be determined as I’m here writing this, feeling sick, the left side of my head throbbing and with my eyes twitching and playing tricks so that only muscle memory keeps my fingers on the right keys typing the right letters in the right words in the right order. Even then, there are three times as many mistakes as normal.

There’s a function called a Triggergram available on some versions of Moodscope. This is fed from the annotations of our scores every day. It presents the words used in the ten highest and ten lowest scores over the last six months. The larger the word, the more times it has been used. If I look the words connected with my best scores, they are words like “cleaning”, “swimming”, “determined”, “beautiful”, “focussed” and – for some reason, “maggots” – which is rather baffling!

The words are arranged in a randomised cloud and, in the cloud associated with my worst days, one word stands out – three times as large as all the others: “Migraine”.

So much of our emotional response to the world is bound up with our physical health. It’s hard to be happy when your head hurts; or indeed when anything else hurts.

I know my migraines are almost invariably a reaction to something I’ve eaten. Grains trigger them; so does sugar. A lot of the preservatives and anti-caking ingredients used in spice-mixes result in a bad reaction too. Then there are the mystery migraines, like the one today. It is an ongoing detective investigation. Like most such investigations, it is tedious work, with only occasional breakthroughs.

If you too are in any kind of physical pain, I offer my sympathy. Don’t berate yourself for a “bad” score: it is perfectly normal to feel “bad” when you feel bad.

It is said the best recipe for happiness is a good digestion and a bad memory. I certainly have the latter and would be a lot happier if I also had that first.

Mary

A Moodscope member,