Last Monday morning I rolled onto my left side in bed, and the room started spinning.
I lay still until it stopped.
Later, when I was up, I bent to pick something off the floor and went over. I very nearly landed on my head.
No harm done. But I was startled, and a little scared. I’d never had it before, and when you don’t know what something is, it could be anything.
So that day I described the symptoms to an AI, which offered a suggestion.
On Tuesday I felt much better. Not entirely right, but I could bend down without the room moving. On Wednesday evening it came back. On Thursday I took the AI’s suggestion to the walk-in clinic at Guy’s, and a doctor confirmed it.
Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. Tiny crystals in the inner ear come loose and drift into the wrong place, where they tell the brain that the world is spinning. The room hadn’t moved at all.
I’ll admit the word I held on to was benign.
The treatment I was given is a set of exercises that bring the spinning on deliberately. I did the first on Friday night before bed, and it was terrible, especially on the left side. By Saturday night I was dreading it, and to my surprise it wasn’t as bad. Today it’s easier again, though the nausea is the worst of it.
Here is what interests me. Friday night was horrible, and I wasn’t frightened. I knew what it was. I knew it would pass in a few seconds. On Monday morning I hadn’t known either of those things. By Friday it had a name, an explanation, and something I could do about it.
Researchers at UCL measured something like this ten years ago. People were more stressed by a fifty-fifty chance of a mildly painful electric shock than by knowing for certain that one was coming. In that experiment, not knowing was harder on them than the bad news.
Mine had a name within days. I’ve been thinking about the things that go without one for much longer.
Being tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix. Going through the motions of a life that is, by any fair measure, a good one. The spark that’s gone, though you couldn’t say when it went. You can’t quite explain it, even to yourself.
I can’t name yours from here. But there are four patterns I look for in my coaching work, and from the inside they can feel alike.
For some it’s exhaustion, plain and deep. For some it’s the life they keep saying they’ll get to. For some it’s doing work they’re good at but no longer finding it meaningful. And for some it’s that the things they used to look forward to no longer give them much pleasure.
Those aren’t necessarily the same need. That’s why what worked for a friend may have done nothing for you.
I’ve built a short, eight-question assessment to help you recognise which of those patterns feels closest to your experience. Your report comes by email, with a few notes from me in the days after. It won’t tell you what to do. It offers a starting point for understanding what you’re experiencing and what might need your attention.
Rosaleen