A pain in the head is often caused by someone.
Sometimes that someone is another person.
Sometimes, unfortunately, that someone is you.
And that’s where things get interesting.
Because if someone else is causing you a headache? you can usually identify the problem. You can have a conversation. Set a boundary. Walk away. Or, in extreme cases, develop a sudden and mysterious interest in moving to another country.
But what do you do when you’re the one giving yourself the headache?
You can’t exactly walk away from yourself.
Although, judging by some of the things we do to ourselves, we occasionally seem determined to try.
We replay conversations that happened three years ago.
We worry about conversations that haven’t happened yet.
We interpret someone’s silence as rejection, their expression as criticism, and their perfectly innocent comment as evidence in a case we have already decided to prosecutep.
We expect ourselves to get everything right.
Then we criticise ourselves for not getting everything right.
And somewhere in the middle of all this, we wonder why our heads hurt.
Perhaps the problem isn’t always what happened.
Perhaps sometimes it’s what we have added to what happened.
There is the event.
And then there is the story.
Someone doesn’t reply to your message.
That’s the event.
“They’re annoyed with me.”
That’s the imagined story.
You make a mistake.
That’s the event.
“I’m useless.”
That’s the imagined story.
Something doesn’t go according to plan.
That’s the event.
“My life is falling apart.”
That’s the imagined story.
The interesting thing about stories is that we can become so familiar with them that we stop noticing we’re telling them.
They become reality.
But they aren’t necessarily reality.
So perhaps, when the pain in our head is coming from us, the answer isn’t to argue with the world.
Perhaps it’s to examine the lens through which we’re looking at it.
What actually happened?
What am I assuming?
Is the story I’m telling myself true?
Is it useful?
And perhaps most importantly:
Is it mine to carry?
This doesn’t mean that everything can be solved by changing our thoughts.
Some people genuinely cause us pain.
Some situations genuinely need to change.
Some problems require action, boundaries, distance, help, or simply the courage to say, “This isn’t good enough for me.”
And sometimes, a pain in the head is just a pain in the head.
But there is something strangely liberating about discovering that we don’t have to believe every thought we have.
We can notice it.
Question it.
And, if necessary, let it go.
Because sometimes the person standing between us and a little more peace isn’t somebody else.
It’s the person in our own head.
Fortunately, that person can learn to be a little bit kinder.
