Ein2

There’s a book called Running On Empty: Meditations for Indispensable Women. I know all about “running on empty.” At one point in my life, I was working fulltime plus for a small, struggling web development agency, teaching part-time to supplement the poor income from the first job, and trying to work part-time on a Ph.D. That’s a lot of time. I was running so far below empty on the gauge that, not only was I on the verge of total burnout, I had stressed and over-worked myself into frequent migraines. Migraines and I were no strangers, as I first met them in my early 20s. This, however, was on a mammoth scale. I was regularly enduring migraines resistant to painkillers up to fifteen days a month. While the magnitude of the pain and frequency fit in well my personal philosophy of, “If you’re going to do it, do it 250%”, I was in a constant spiral of trying to catch up and then working myself into a migraine. Add stress and repeat, as required.
I am not going to say that by simply drinking 8 glasses (2 litres) of water a day I miraculously cured my migraines and other ills of my life. That would not be the honest truth. However, I had read many articles on migraines and more than one suggested that, for many people, migraines were often induced by a combination of co-occurring factors. Stress, implicated in so many things, was obviously one factor. Another one was dehydration. Most people simply do not drink enough or drink things, like coffee, which are actually diuretics, causing a loss of water.

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