Why you should be careful with painkillers and fever reducers?

The paradox of pain – the messenger we kill

Pain is, at its core, information. Not that every pain is some mystical letter from the body that, if decoded correctly, will instantly tell us what the universe is trying to say to us :D... But simply – it is the body’s last and loudest way of saying that the balance of the system has been disturbed. Yet we have learned to fear pain and hate it. We treat pain as an error that needs to be deleted rather than information that deserves to be examined.

With chronic pain, for example, we know quite well that the nervous system itself can become hypersensitive, meaning that pain no longer directly reflects how much tissue damage there actually is at that moment.

But very often, pain is still a sign that something is happening... something was too much... something is inflamed... something is overloaded... something got injured... or perhaps this pain is new and strange and actually needs to be investigated.

But our daily schedule has not accounted for the possibility that the body might want something different today. The meeting is in the calendar, the workout is planned, the kids need feeding, work needs doing, and life does not stop simply because your head hurts. So we take a pill. The pain eases and for a moment it feels as though the problem has been solved. But the cause may not have disappeared at all.

When we press the “mute” button on pain, a paradoxical shift takes place – we remove the sensory discomfort, but leave the cause where it is. It is like covering the engine oil warning light on your dashboard with black tape – the warning disappears and at least one problem really is solved: I no longer have to look at that irritating red light :)... but of course, the engine has gained absolutely nothing from it.

With painkillers it is not always quite that black and white, because reducing pain can itself be part of healing. If it allows you to sleep, move more normally, or get your nervous system out of a constant state of alarm, then that has real value. But if the only purpose of the painkiller is to make the body’s boundary quiet enough for you to keep going at exactly the same pace, then it is worth asking what you were actually treating.

The pain? Or your ability to ignore it? That is the point where overusing painkillers creates an illusion that we are in control of our health, while in reality we are gradually losing touch with our own biological feedback system.

Menstrual pain and ibuprofen – and one little-known side of it

One of the more painful paradoxes concerns women. Menstrual pain can be so debilitating that ibuprofen (Ibumetin) has become a monthly “lifeline” for many. But there is a biochemical trap hidden here.

Ibuprofen works, among other things, by inhibiting COX enzymes, which reduces the production of prostaglandins. Prostaglandins are involved in inflammation and pain and, during menstruation, they contribute to uterine contractions. That is exactly why ibuprofen often works so well for menstrual pain. But prostaglandins do not exist in the body solely to make our lives miserable during menstruation.

They also play a role in ovulation. For a mature follicle to rupture at the right moment and release the egg... an entire chain of biochemical events has to take place, and prostaglandins are part of that chain.

And this is where things get interesting.

There are studies in which non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs taken around ovulation have delayed or prevented follicle rupture in some women. That does not mean that taking one Ibumetin for menstrual pain makes you infertile for that cycle – that would obviously be an exaggeration. Menstruation usually happens after ovulation in that cycle. But if you take ibuprofen for several days in a row, for example because of a migraine, back pain, fever, or an injury, right around ovulation, then for some women it may also affect a process that had absolutely nothing to do with the reason they took the medicine in the first place. And that, for me, is a very good example of something we often fail to consider with over-the-counter medicines. We think: “I’m treating my back.”  But the body has no idea that this agreement exists... it is simply doing biochemistry.

The same mechanism can reduce pain in one place while participating in something entirely different somewhere else in the body.

That is not a reason to be afraid of ibuprofen. But it is a very good reason to let go of the idea that one small over-the-counter tablet is somehow biologically neutral. And there can be a harsh price to “being good” – we may interfere with our primal life-giving force simply to fit into society’s expectation that we should always be productive and “fine”.

Fever – the body’s biological cleaning process

We have a strange relationship with fever in general - 38.2°C and immediately there is a feeling that the number needs to come down.

Scientifically speaking, fever (pyrexia) is the body’s ingenious and evolutionarily refined defence strategy. It is not a system error but a precisely targeted immune response. The brain shifts the body’s temperature set point upwards, which is why we get chills and the body begins producing more heat. As the temperature rises, the body activates its internal systems in ways that no external medicine can replicate – enzyme activity changes, white blood cells are activated, and an environment is created in which pathogens become less able to reproduce.

If we lower a fever purely for comfort, we may actually be doing ourselves a disservice. We force the organism to fight with its hands tied and push the information of the illness deeper into the tissues. Fever is like a cleansing fire – if we extinguish it, the “ash” and unprocessed information remain behind in our cellular memory.

In other words, a feverish body is not necessarily broken... it is doing something :)

Of course, that should not be taken to mean that fever should never be reduced. If a person feels awful, cannot sleep, cannot drink enough, or the fever is high and exhausting, then taking a fever reducer may be completely reasonable.

I am simply no longer convinced that every 38.0°C automatically needs to be “fixed” just because the thermometer is not showing 36.6. And what interests me even more is what happens after the pill.

The fever goes down... The body does not ache as much... Your head becomes clearer...

And if you are the kind of person I am – the “oh, I’m already feeling better now” type – then the next step is very easy: you get up and start doing things again.

But the illness itself may not have disappeared in that hour. You simply feel it less.

I know this pattern far too well, because that is exactly how I treated myself over Christmas 2023...

Paracetamol – apparent safety and the liver’s silent cry for help

Paracetamol is often considered one of the most harmless medicines, something we confidently give even to babies. Used correctly, it generally is a well-tolerated medicine. But that very familiarity can make it seem so safe that we become careless with the dose. It creates one of the most misleading senses of security in modern medicine, because the line between a therapeutic dose and toxicity is dangerously thin. Unlike ibuprofen, which irritates the stomach and may announce itself with heartburn, paracetamol can damage the liver quietly and unnoticed until it is already too late.

So what is actually happening inside us? When paracetamol is broken down in the liver, a toxic intermediate compound called NAPQI is formed. Our body is intelligent enough to deal with it, using one of its most powerful internal antioxidants – glutathione – to neutralise it. (NB! Physical activity helps support glutathione levels and the immune system on a daily basis.) The problem arises when we are ill, exhausted, or stressed – situations in which our glutathione reserves may already be lower.

If too much paracetamol enters the system, more NAPQI is produced than the body can neutralise. Glutathione reserves decline and unneutralised NAPQI starts damaging liver cells. From there, things can become very serious, potentially progressing all the way to acute liver failure.

And what makes it particularly insidious is that paracetamol poisoning does not necessarily look like poisoning at the beginning.

You do not have to collapse immediately after taking it or feel as though something catastrophic is happening. Liver damage may already be developing while you still do not feel particularly ill.

Another very simple trap is combination medicines. One tablet for fever, another for a cold, something else for the headache later in the evening... the packages look different, the names are different, but the active ingredient may be the same in all of them.

And this is where I come to my own story.

Christmas 2023 will probably stay with me for the rest of my life. I was ill, running a fever, and of course it was also Christmas, which in my head meant that everything still had to get done. Because... well, Christmas :D.

Preparations... Other people... Things that “have to” be ready... And I am used to coping. 

I took paracetamol, the fever came down, and I could keep going. Then the fever returned and I took another dose. At some point I was no longer taking the medicine to make being ill a little easier on myself – I was using it to ignore the fact that I was ill as successfully as possible.

It never crossed my mind that I was doing something harmful to myself. Quite the opposite – in my own head, I was simply being “good”. I was ill, feverish and Christmas was around the corner. Things had to get done, other people should not have to change their plans because of me, and I was used to managing.  The paracetamol brought the fever down, I felt better, and so I simply kept going... until I ended up in hospital with paracetamol poisoning and liver damage...

Looking back, it is obviously easy to say that the problem was the dose. It was. But the question that stayed with me much more was why I needed to keep going like that while I was ill in the first place. Why did taking another dose so that I could do a little bit more feel completely normal at the time... while saying “I’m ill, and some things simply won’t get done this time” did not?

That is really the point where, for me, the subject of medicines becomes much bigger than pharmacology alone. Paracetamol itself did not force me to do anything. I used it to make the body’s boundary less noticeable for a while. And because the fever went down and I temporarily felt better, it seemed as though I could carry on. My body was not actually healthier.  It was simply easier for me to ignore what it was telling me rather loudly...

Perhaps that is exactly why this experience changed my relationship with over-the-counter medicines so much. Not in the sense that I am now afraid of them or avoid them. Rather, that innocent “oh, I’ll just take a tablet” attitude disappeared. 

A medicine can be a very necessary and very good thing, but it can also create the deceptive possibility of continuing at exactly the moment when stopping would actually be wiser...

It was a painful lesson – we cannot outsmart the body’s biochemistry. 
The liver is one of our body’s central filters and, in a holistic sense, an energetic centre – if we overload it with doses driven by our need to “be good”, the system eventually gives way. The symptoms do not actually disappear – we simply cut the wire that is reporting them while the internal systems continue to burn.

Ibuprofen, the stomach and the kidneys... things we somehow talk about much less

With ibuprofen, most people know that it can irritate the stomach. “Don’t take it on an empty stomach” - and that is often where our knowledge ends.

But the prostaglandins that ibuprofen reduces have other jobs besides producing pain. They help protect the lining of the gastrointestinal tract and, in certain situations, they also play a role in maintaining blood flow to the kidneys.

That is why non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs can increase the risk of gastrointestinal ulcers and bleeding and, in some situations, also place additional strain on the kidneys. And during illness, another very common combination appears that we rarely think about. Fever, sweating, eating less, drinking less, maybe vomiting or diarrhoea as well... In other words, the body is already more dehydrated than usual.

Then the head and muscles start aching and we take ibuprofen. Again – this does not mean that a person with a fever must never take ibuprofen. 
But dehydration combined with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs can be a considerably less kidney-friendly combination than the same tablet taken by a healthy, well-hydrated person. 

And honestly... how many of us ever think about our kidneys when we take Ibumetin? We think only about the place that hurts at that particular moment.

The gut – the tablet does not simply disappear after we swallow it

It is the same story with the gut. Even though we swallow the tablet to relieve pain in the head or the back, its effect does not remain local – it has to travel through the whole organism. Ibuprofen and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs in particular can damage the lining of the stomach and small intestine, cause ulcers and affect intestinal permeability. The effect of medicines on the microbiome is also being studied more and more, although this is another area where it is worth being careful, because the internet has already turned it into the next black-and-white story: “ibuprofen destroys your microbiome and causes leaky gut.” It is not that simple. One tablet does not “destroy” your internal ecosystem. But it would be equally naive to claim that a medicine travels through the gastrointestinal tract without affecting anything there at all :). 

Personally, I prefer to think of the body itself as an ecosystem. Food, stress, sleep, infections, alcohol, antibiotics and other medicines affect it all the time. So why should an over-the-counter medicine somehow be a special invisible visitor that walks through without anyone noticing?

t is not - it simply does its job – and alongside that job there may also be effects that had nothing to do with the reason we took the tablet in the first place.

If we use these medicines casually, “on the go”, we can create a closed loop – we take a medicine to suppress inflammation, while it is possible that through damage to the gut we may be contributing to inflammation somewhere else.

One particularly strange paradox – the painkiller itself can start keeping the headache going

I think this is something that should be mentioned much more often when we talk about over-the-counter medicines. There is an entirely real diagnosis called medication-overuse headache. Sounds absurd, doesn’t it?

Your head hurts, so you take a painkiller... The pain goes away... Then your head hurts again, so you take another one...And if this happens very frequently, there can come a point where the frequent use of symptomatic medication itself begins to contribute to the headaches becoming more and more frequent. 

This mainly affects people who already have migraine or another recurring headache disorder. With simple painkillers such as paracetamol or ibuprofen, we are talking about very frequent use – for example, at least 15 days a month for several months. But look how deceptive the loop is. Your head hurts, therefore you need medicine. The medicine helps, therefore it was the right solution. The headaches start happening more often, therefore you need the medicine more often. Everything seems perfectly logical. Until at some point the solution itself may have become part of the problem...

And for me, this is yet another perfect example of why “it’s only an over-the-counter medicine” is not a particularly sensible attitude. The body adapts... the nervous system adapts... and nothing happens in a vacuum.

Paracetamol and emotions... one of those areas where there are still more questions than answers

This part is especially fascinating to me precisely because science has not yet reached any final conclusion here. More recent studies on paracetamol have revealed something startling – it may not only dull physical pain, but also blunt our emotional perception. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as “emotional blunting”. People under the influence of paracetamol have been found in some studies to react less intensely to both negative and positive stimuli.

Does that mean that you take paracetamol and become emotionally numb? No... These studies do not allow us to say that. But does it raise an interesting question about whether a medicine that affects pain processing in the brain might also touch other layers of emotional processing? I think it does.

We like to imagine that physical pain lives in one part of the brain and emotions somewhere else entirely. That the pill goes into the “pain drawer”, turns the volume down and leaves everything else untouched. But the brain is not a chest of drawers.

There are overlapping networks involved in processing physical pain, emotional pain, fear, empathy and stress. In other words, pain and pleasure partly use overlapping neural pathways in the body. That does not mean they are the same thing, but neither are they completely separate universes. I do not know how much practical significance any of this has. Science does not know yet either. But I think asking these kinds of questions matters. We do not always need to wait until science has proven the final decimal place before we are allowed to expand our thinking. We simply need to avoid calling a hypothesis a fact.

Think about it – when we press the “mute” button because we do not want to feel discomfort, could we also be turning down our ability to feel ecstasy, gratitude and deep connection? Do we, in a sense, become biological robots who are still functional and “good”, but have lost some of their sensitive contact with the world?

And then there is the “good person” problem...

This is probably the most personal part of the whole subject for me.  A painkiller itself does not send some magical message to your body saying: “Your boundaries do not matter.” But a person can do that very effectively all by themselves.

The body says: stop... You say: just a little more... The body says louder: STOP... You take a pill... And suddenly it is quiet again... Well, if it is quieter, you can keep going, right...

Written out like that, it sounds pretty ridiculous. But how many of us live exactly like this? A pill for the headache so you can finish the meeting. A pill for menstrual pain because the working day does not care what day of your cycle you are on. Bring the fever down because things still need doing at home. Quiet the knee with a painkiller because the workout is on the schedule and “it’s not really that bad”.

And I do not think the painkiller is to blame here. It is more our enormous need to function all the time. Somehow we have reached a point where rest needs justification. You do not rest simply because your body needs rest. You rest once you are “ill enough”, “properly broken” or a doctor has told you that you are now officially allowed to. If the pill removes the symptom, it can feel as though the reason to rest disappears with it. And that is the dangerous part – not because of the medicine itself, but because of our own behavior around it.

I know this very well because this is one of my old patterns. Just a little more... I’ll finish this one thing... I’ll rest afterwards... And usually that “afterwards” keeps getting pushed further away until the body eventually takes the right to decide out of my hands.

The adrenaline and stress loop – forced endurance

Taking a painkiller so that we can continue working or doing things at home sends the body a message: “Your boundaries do not matter.” This activates the adrenal glands, which have to start producing stress hormones – cortisol and adrenaline – to keep us upright in a situation where the body’s biochemistry may actually be asking for a horizontal position and rest. 

This kind of forced endurance exhausts the endocrine system. When the medicine wears off, we do not return to zero – energetically, we are in a deep deficit. If this way of operating continues for long enough, it leads to burnout. We teach our nervous system that rest is allowed only once we are “broken” – and with painkillers we simply postpone that breaking point until it arrives like an avalanche, exactly as it did for me during that Christmas week.

Have we become addicted to quick relief?

Somehow we have become very used to the idea that health comes from outside us. Something is wrong – therefore we need to take something, apply something, inject something, fix something. A pill, a doctor, a supplement, some new gadget or the next “one thing” that will finally make everything right.

I do not think there is anything inherently wrong with that. We have medicine, medicines and specialists precisely so that we can use them when we need them. But if every small discomfort automatically triggers the thought that the feeling must be removed immediately, I think something else starts happening too. We lose the ability to distinguish between the moments when the body genuinely needs help and the moments when it simply wants us to stop and listen for a second.

Because every time a headache immediately means a tablet, muscle tension means a tablet and fever means a tablet, we very easily develop the habit of seeing discomfort itself as something wrong. Something that should not be there...

And that, to me, is a far more interesting question than whether ibuprofen is “good” or “bad”. Am I taking this tablet because the pain is something I genuinely want to relieve? Or because I am deeply uncomfortable with being in a situation where my body is telling me that today I cannot control everything?

From the outside, these may look like exactly the same action – you take a tablet and swallow it – but internally they come from very different places. 

I have realized about myself that I have had a very strong tendency to use medicine not only to reduce pain but to keep functioning. In other words, I did not necessarily want my body to feel better. I wanted my body to interfere with me less... A pretty uncomfortable distinction when you look at it honestly.

And maybe there is something else here too. If we remove every small discomfort immediately, we do not get many experiences of learning that discomfort can sometimes pass on its own. That a headache may need water, food, sleep, or simply stepping away from the computer. That muscle tension may need movement. That sometimes giving my body an hour rather than a tablet may be enough... Not always, of course :)

With a proper migraine attack, you do not need to sit in front of it heroically “being present” until the universe teaches you something :). Likewise, I see absolutely no virtue in someone suffering through severe menstrual pain or being unable to sleep because they are in pain.

But there is another aspect – if we immediately reach for a painkiller at every small discomfort, we do not only silence the pain - we may also gradually weaken our inner resilience. 

With every pill we swallow, we may be sending our subconscious the message: “I cannot cope on my own. My body is broken and does not know how to repair itself.”  That way we can lose the ability to tolerate even small amounts of discomfort and, even more sadly, lose trust in the body’s own intelligence. It becomes a kind of invisible dependence that makes us feel helpless. We lose contact with our internal signalling system and replace it with an external button.

The question you may not have dared to ask yourself is: “Am I taking this tablet because the pain is genuinely unbearable... or because I am afraid of discomfort and losing control?” That is not only a medical choice. It is also a question of courage. We are afraid to remain present with the body’s pain, because it forces us to stop and look at the reasons why the pain appeared in the first place. With a pill, we almost “buy” our freedom from it – but that freedom can be deceptive.

Our nervous system also needs the experience that not every discomfort is danger. That not everything needs to be fixed immediately. Sometimes we can stay with the feeling for a while, observe it, give the body whatever it may be missing... and see what happens.

To me, that creates a completely different kind of trust in the body.

Our mind and body actually need the experience of being able to move through discomfort and come out stronger on the other side. It is a kind of inner conditioning – the knowledge that your body actually has many of the tools it needs to restore itself. If we switch the system off before the body has even had a chance to act, we can become psychologically helpless. We begin to fear every headache or muscle tension, seeing it only as an enemy rather than a signal that may be pointing towards something important. Real strength and peace do not come from a life without pain, but from knowing that you and your body are on the same team – not that you are its prisoner or its harsh supervisor.

Pain that is not only where it hurts

Physical pain becomes even more interesting because pain does not arise in a vacuum. If your neck hurts, there may be a perfectly concrete physical reason. Poor posture, overload, an injury, muscle tension... whatever. But at the same time, the body does not leave outside the door how you are sleeping, how stressed you are, how long you have been on alert, what you are afraid of or what kind of load you have been carrying over the past few months.

All of that reaches the same nervous system. That is why I have used the expression “emotion frozen into the body”. Not in the sense that there is a literal little lump of sadness sitting somewhere under your shoulder blade that a massage therapist can knead out :). More in the sense that prolonged stress and constant readiness leave very real traces in the body. Breathing changes... Muscle tone changes... Sleep changes...
 The jaw stays slightly clenched, the shoulders slightly higher, and the nervous system slightly more on guard than it should be.

If that lasts long enough, it becomes almost pointless to argue whether the problem is “physical” or “emotional”.  It is both. We are one system.

With chronic pain, we are increasingly moving away from the idea that there always has to be one single broken place that explains all of the pain. Sometimes such a place exists. Sometimes it does not. The intensity and persistence of pain can also be influenced by sleep, stress, fear, previous traumatic experiences, mood and how safe the nervous system feels in general.

That does not make the pain any less “real”... and it does not mean that every backache is hiding some “suppressed trauma”.

But for me it does mean that if I only remove the pain, I may not touch the part of the problem that keeps turning the volume back up again and again. A painkiller does not cement an emotion into the tissues, but it can turn the symptom down enough that I never have to look at why the whole system is constantly in alarm mode...

That difference matters to me.

...and sometimes the answer is embarrassingly simple :) One question I like to ask is - “Is this pain a sign that I have a deficiency of paracetamol or ibuprofen in my blood?” 

Well... obviously not :) There is no such thing as an “ibu deficiency”.

That does not mean that medicine is not sometimes the right answer. But sometimes it is worth checking the most boring things first. A large proportion of headaches and muscle tension are not signs of a medicine deficiency, but may be related to cellular dehydration and a lack of necessary salts or electrolytes. When did I last drink? Did I actually eat? How much did I sleep? Have I been sitting in the same position for five hours?Do I have a fever and have I been sweating all day? Did I do a long workout yesterday? Have I had diarrhoea or vomiting and lost electrolytes as well as water?

Dehydration can trigger or intensify headaches, and with greater fluid loss electrolytes also matter. That does not turn water into a miracle cure or mean that every cramp needs magnesium and every headache needs salt water. The body is, once again, annoyingly more complicated than one neat internet truth. The point is simply that sometimes we take a tablet that places even more demand on the kidneys and liver – requiring the body to process and eliminate additional compounds – instead of giving the system what it may actually be asking for: clean water and good-quality salt. That simple combination restores the electrical conditions cells need to function and can help energy flow normally again.

But this is really what I mean – before I add something new to the body, I might first check whether it is missing something completely basic. Sometimes the answer is a pill... sometimes a big glass of water... sometimes food... sometimes sleep...

And sometimes you need to stop treating yourself and actually go and see a doctor :)!

And perhaps it is also worth reflecting on how often, by silencing thirst or exhaustion with a painkiller, we are not only deceiving the body but deepening the original emptiness from which the pain arose. We build walls where there should have been bridges and then wonder why we feel so stiff and stuck inside our own bodies.

When the body stops you – when the system shuts down

Looking back at Christmas 2023, I can very easily see two completely different stories at the same time. 

One is medical. I took too much paracetamol and developed liver damage as a result. There is no need to add anything mystical to that – paracetamol toxicity in the liver is very concrete biochemistry. But as a person, I still experience another layer in that story.

In holistic thinking, the liver is often associated with anger, suppressed emotions and life force. I am not presenting that as a medical fact, but for me it is hard not to notice how symbolic the whole situation feels in retrospect. The fact that paracetamol hit my liver reflects a deep conflict for me. I had become so used to postponing my own needs and shifting my limits just a little further. Just a little more. I’ll finish this one thing. I’ll rest afterwards. Now is not the right time. Right now I just need to get it done. And eventually something happened where I no longer had the option of deciding whether I was going to rest or not... My body decided for me... If you do not stop, I will stop you...

I know perfectly well that this is the meaning I have given that experience, not a medical diagnosis. But it matters to me because that is exactly how it felt. And that stopping was not a couple of days under a blanket or a momentary dip. It was a total biological collapse. 

When I came home from hospital, my physical condition had changed beyond recognition. If the “real” me can walk 60 kilometers without too much effort, then at that point standing for just 15 minutes was such a huge load that I could feel my vision starting to go. Fifteen minutes of standing! The difference was so absurd that I struggled to understand that this really was my body now.

My blood values and overall bodily balance were so disrupted that my connective tissue – the network that holds us together and carries information – felt as though it had literally stuck together. Everything felt stiff. Movement was different, the elasticity of my tissues seemed to be gone, and it genuinely felt as though my body had dried up somewhere from the inside and glued itself together. I cannot say that the liver damage “stuck my connective tissue together” – I cannot prove that mechanism... but that is how I felt.

And even now I am still working on getting that elasticity and freedom back. Looking back, perhaps the biggest change is that I no longer define a strong body by how much it can silently endure. For me, a strong body used to mean a body that could take it. Now a strong body means more that we get along with each other :) That I notice earlier. That I do not always have to wait until the whisper becomes a scream. It is a long road back to trust, where I no longer silence the body’s scream but learn to hear its softest whisper. I do not manage it every time. Old patterns are stubborn and “just a little more” still comes very naturally to me. I am very good at talking myself into things. Just this one thing. Just this week. Just this project. I’ll slow down afterwards. I have probably postponed that “afterwards” long enough. But at least now I recognize it.

So how do you listen before you silence?

I do not think listening to your body means that every time something hurts you have to sit cross-legged with your eyes closed and wait for the universe to deliver some profound message :). Sometimes your head simply hurts... Sometimes menstruation is simply absolutely awful...  Sometimes a fever feels so ughhhhh that you just want something to make the whole thing a little more bearable.

And sometimes a painkiller is absolutely the right answer.

But perhaps there could be a tiny pause between the automatic “where are the pills?” and the pill itself. Not so that you can talk yourself out of taking medicine. Just so that you can understand for a moment what is actually going on.

I would start by asking myself some very boring questions.

Have I actually drunk enough today? Eaten? Slept? How long have I been sitting in front of the computer without moving? Did I have a hard workout yesterday? Do I have a fever and have I been sweating all day? Have I already taken this same medicine several times over the past few days?

And then some slightly more important questions.

Is this pain familiar to me or is there something completely new about it? Does it keep coming back? Have I been relieving the same symptom for weeks instead of finding out why it keeps happening? Do I know what the actual active ingredient in this medicine is, and could I be accidentally taking the same ingredient in another medicine as well?

For women, the menstrual cycle can be another part of the picture. If you know you are around ovulation and are taking ibuprofen or another anti-inflammatory medicine for several days, then at least you know it may have effects on processes that had nothing to do with why you took the medicine in the first place. Not a reason to panic. Just something to know.

And sometimes it is worth asking one more really uncomfortable question... Am I taking this medicine so that I feel better? Or so that I can keep doing more? ...Those are not quite the same thing.

If a painkiller finally helps you sleep, then perhaps that is exactly what your body needed. If a fever reducer allows you to drink and rest, great. If menstrual pain is so intense that it folds you into a pretzel, nobody needs to lecture you about “being present with your pain”.

But if the whole point of the tablet is to make your body quiet enough for you to push through one more workday, workout or obligation... that is the point where I personally need to hit the brakes for a moment.

Because I know far too well how easy it is to relieve a symptom and immediately conclude that everything must be fine again. It may not be. And if the pain is new, very severe, unusual, getting worse, keeps returning, or you find yourself needing painkillers more and more often, then the question is no longer which tablet works better. Then it is worth actually looking for the cause.

The same goes for the medicines themselves. The brand name on the box is not the active ingredient. Two different boxes do not necessarily mean two different medicines. With paracetamol this is especially important because the same active ingredient may appear in several cold and pain medicines at the same time. So perhaps all of this practical wisdom is not particularly sexy after all.

Maybe the answer isn’t to cope better, but to actually change something

If you have noticed that there has been a longer gap than usual between my previous article and this one, the reason is actually very simple. 
I finally started listening to myself. Not in theory... but for real.

Nothing hurts right now... but at some point it became very clear that I was heading back towards that place where my body was already saying pretty loudly that something had to change, while I was still trying to optimize a little more, plan a little better, move things around and somehow make everything fit. Because that is something I am very good at. When life no longer fits, my first thought is usually not “maybe there is simply too much” but “maybe I could organize it just a little better”... be just a little more efficient... move one more thing into the evening... steal just a little more time from sleep... And if I am honest, exactly that kind of “just a little more” once took me to the point where my body eventually had to make the decision for me...

This time I did not want to wait for that. And that is why I am now making one fairly big change. At the end of September, I will have my last working day with my current employer...

Not because I dislike my job. Ohhh no... quite the opposite... Maybe that is exactly what made the decision harder – I genuinely, completely love what I do. I can disappear into work very easily. One topic leads to another, that lovely evening flow kicks in, and suddenly I realize that I have once again borrowed far too many hours from my day. But that time has to come from somewhere... And for too long, it has come at the expense of my own recovery.

At some point I realized that if I genuinely want to understand what my body and my mind need, I cannot do it while staying on the professional hamster wheel and simply trying to get a little better at puzzling all the pieces together. 

So I am stepping off for a while... I am giving myself at least until the end of the year without having to know immediately what comes next. I do not have to fill that empty space straight away with a new job or some huge next plan... I am taking time simply to be... to move... and to do my own workouts :D

To create enough space for thoughts to settle a little and to see what is left when there is not constantly another deadline, another meeting or another thing somewhere that “has to” get done. To be honest, that is a little frightening... Because doing is easy. I am very good at doing. Being still without immediately having to invent the next destination... now that is much harder...

But perhaps that is exactly why I need it right now.

It would be particularly ridiculous to write this entire long article about how we use medicine to turn down the body’s signals and then carry on... only to end it by telling everyone to “listen to your body” while I myself keep running towards the next wall at exactly the same speed :)

This time I am trying something different. Not waiting until the body says “stop” so loudly that I no longer have a choice. But trying to hear that quieter “maybe that’s enough now”. Because perhaps the whole point of this article is actually much simpler than I thought when I started writing it.

It is not that you should not take painkillers. Or that every symptom contains some huge, profound message. And definitely not that strong people should heroically endure pain... It is more that our body should not be something we constantly try to manage, silence and force into line with our plans.

Sometimes it needs medicine... sometimes water... sometimes sleep... sometimes for you to skip the workout... sometimes for you to say “no” to someone... and sometimes... apparently... it also needs you to step off the whole wheel for a while.

That is what I am doing now :)

Let’s see what is underneath all of it once the noise becomes a little quieter. And I will probably write about that in the next piece too – burnout...

But not the classic version where one day you no longer want to do anything, your motivation disappears and everything starts feeling unpleasant. My experience has been almost the opposite. I like doing things. I have ideas. Work can genuinely light me up and sometimes, especially in the evening, I get that lovely feeling that I could happily keep going for several more hours... and perhaps that is exactly what makes this version of burnout so incredibly deceptive.

You do not always burn out because nothing interests you anymore... sometimes you burn out precisely because too much interests you. Because you want to do things. You want to do them well. You want to finish that one last thing, shape one more thought, contribute just a little bit more... and because the drive and passion are still very much there, it becomes incredibly easy not to notice how long you have already been living beyond your limits. 

That is what I want to write about in the next article.

The kind of burnout that does not look like burnout at all.

xxx
Jana



PS. This article is for informational purposes only and does not replace medical advice. For health concerns, diagnosis, or treatment, always consult a qualified specialist or physician.