🚫 The Pain of Too Much: Why Healing Requires Saying No
In modern rehab, we often confuse more with better. But healing doesn’t happen when we add more tasks, it happens when we make space for what matters. Inspired by Greg McKeown’s Essentialism, this post invites you to say no to noise and yes to what restores agency.
In a world of more, sometimes healing starts with less.
“If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.”
— Greg McKeown, Essentialism
In modern rehab, we often confuse more with better.
But healing doesn’t happen when we add more tasks, it happens when we make space for what matters.
Inspired by Greg McKeown’s Essentialism, this post invites you to say no to noise and yes to what restores agency.
❓ Start With Why (In Pain)
Simon Sinek taught leaders to start with purpose. What if patients and clinicians did the same?
This piece explores how reconnecting with your why in the healing process can restore clarity, agency, and momentum — even in the middle of pain.
Pain isn’t just a problem to solve.
It’s a signal, yes — but often of something deeper: disconnection from purpose, identity, or meaning.
In medicine, we often leap to what to do: the exercise, the modality, the pill, the injection, the surgery.
But what if the most important healing question isn’t what or how…
—it’s why?
This piece explores how the framework made famous by Simon Sinek — “Start With Why” — applies just as powerfully to healing as it does to leadership.
It asks:
• Why do you want to heal?
• What would feeling better allow you to do, be, or reconnect with?
• And is your care aligned with that purpose — or pulling you further away?
This Wondering offers a way to re-anchor healing in meaning, and introduces the “Healing North Star” tool to help clarify and reclaim your why.
🧩 Pain Without Meaning: Why Pain Becomes Suffering When It Loses Its Story
Most people think pain is what breaks them. But it’s not the pain itself—it’s the loss of meaning. When pain feels random, confusing, and permanent, it turns into suffering. This piece explores how pain becomes bearable—even transformative—when we reconnect it to story, purpose, and dignity. Because pain doesn’t need to vanish to heal. It just needs to make sense.
We often assume it’s pain that breaks people. But it’s not the intensity of pain—it’s the absence of meaning that makes it unbearable. Just like hardship without purpose feels like despair, pain without story feels suffocating. When pain shows up without warning, lingers without cause, and resists all the usual fixes, it begins to feel personal—like a sentence rather than a signal.
This is when pain becomes suffering. Not because it’s severe, but because it’s senseless. The nervous system is trying to protect you, but when there’s no “why,” we begin to fear the pain itself. We question our bodies. We lose trust. We shrink. But if we can reconnect pain to meaning—if we can understand it as adaptation, not just damage—we give it context. We transform it from something to fear into something we can move with.
Pain that makes sense doesn’t disappear, but it becomes bearable. It becomes a process, not a punishment. When pain is seen as intelligent—something your body is doing for you, not to you—it opens the door to recovery, even before the pain fades. The goal isn’t just to eliminate pain—it’s to make it make sense again.