Jack McDade

Pursuing recovery from a mind & body damaged by tech. | Recovery Mode Pursuing recovery from a mind & body damaged by tech. A podcast hosted by Jack McDade & Marce K.

Years of sitting, coding, shipping, scrolling, and pixel peeping destroyed my body. I honestly thought I was DYING.

It took me 4 years and 22 specialists to figure out what was ACTUALLY happening and how to fix it.

Now I'm sharing everything I learned & more in my new podcast —  recoverymode.fm

I completed Jack McDade’s Radical Design Course. Am I a designer now? An honest Review. - miralytics A little while ago, I had one of these moments. You know, these situations when you somehow stumble upon new people online and all of a sudden you’re

miralytics.io/jack-mcdade-...

Radical Design – A Rebellious Web Design Course by Jack McDade Radical Design is a rebellious, potentially life-changing design course by Jack McDade

This is a *really* nice review of radicaldesigncourse.com 😊

Thank you Mira!

Just reply & let me know if you do want me to share more and I'll figure out what format it should be. I have a newsletter I never use (jackmcdade.com/newsletter), maybe that would be best? Or maybe it's a podcast, or a blog... I dunno. You tell me.

Thanks reading. ❤️

Let me know if this is something you'd want me to share more about. I have done tons of research, tried a crap load of stuff that didn't work, have had successes that conventional medicine says is nonsense, & am carving out a barely traveled path here. I cut out 99% of my story.

I've learned a ton and have even more to learn going forward, but if you're going through anything similar (and I've met a bunch of people like me/us, trust me) — nothing would make me happier than to be able to help.

Every day isn't amazing, and sometimes i feel like it's one step forward, two steps back, but looking back at where i was 6 months ago, 2 years ago, 5 years ago... and know I've absolutely found a path towards healing that is proving itself to be effective and fills me with hope.

So here I am, quite convinced that the *bulk* of all my problems stemmed from a slow-motion self induced injury of extremely poor posture which developed a severe disfunction in my cervical spine, all which can be addressed with patience and persistence.

TL;DR it's incredible how much damage you can do to yourself by hunching over a computer 8-10 hours a day for 25 years.

I started doing weekly Functional Patterns training sessions with a 15 minute cranial/jaw massage and within 2 months started to feel ALMOST normal again. ‼️

She actually has a wide range of unusual specialties, including Structural Energetic Therapy (*sounds* like voodoo but isn't, i think it's name poorly) and Functional Patterns.

We went through the list of things I'd been through and she told me she dealt with the same exact things.

I actually went back and read my "Struggle Bus" post to remember how all this started and thought harder on the TMJ/nerve side of things and went down a rabbit hole of research, which led me to deciding to go back to this one fantastic massage therapist I had been to a few times.

Now I could start focusing on the remaining issues — lightheadedness, migraines, fatigue, a hyper-sensitive Vegas nerve (touch the side of my neck and i almost pass out) and brain fog.

After a few weeks I was able to stop cycling in endless unproductive loops of worrying what was wrong with me, not to mention not having the sudden heart racing/passing out sensations and I felt more like a human again. Maybe not my former self exactly, but it brought hope.

SSRIs block the reabsorption of serotonin, which helps your body get rid of excess cortisol (stress hormone) and allows your brain to transmit proper mood signals to your body.

And it helped. A lot.

These symptoms compounded everything else going on and cause a lot of signal interference.

I saw a psychiatrist who promptly diagnosed me with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (as they do with probably everybody) and he put me on Lexapro, an SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor).

When unchecked and imbalances, these neurohormones cause anxiety (not the only source, but probably the most common one) and can hijack your normal responses to stress.

This explained the racing heart, palpitations, panic attacks, and to at least some extent the lightheadedness.

Not only that, but our catecholamines (neurohormones that include dopamine, noradrenaline and adrenaline) can get completely out of wack for a number of reasons, like genetics, nutritional deficiencies, viruses, gut imbalances, and so on.

(This really resonated with me as I have some pretty severe trauma I have yet to fully metabolize, but I'm getting there thanks to good counseling.)

Anxiety is so much more complicated, and I'm embarrassed to even admit how naive I had been.

Our bodies keep the score — our unresolved traumas live inside us and change us, change our physiology. Anxiety can well up from completely subconscious sources.

First, and most surprising to me, was anxiety. I had never really been a worrier and thought people who suffer with anxiety were soft people with weak minds that couldn't get over stuff in their past.

How wrong and naive I was.

This was a turning point for me.

Through good counseling I was able to separate some of the symptoms into two categories, two potential sources for the combined clusterf*** I had become.

I found a few little wins here an there, but overall it got worse, and then much worse, and then so bad I almost gave up on trying to get better. Last year I went to counseling to start working on acceptance.

For the most part nobody could find anything wrong with me. My bloodwork was nearly perfect. Scans revealed nothing. Chiros couldn't crack the problem away, doctors couldn't prescribe a fix. "Maybe it's just in your head" they would say.

Cool.

Cool cool cool.

Over the next 4 years I went to 15 different specialists — a functional medicine clinic, 3x different chiropractors, a cardiologist, an allergist, a vestibular clinic, 2 osteopaths, an acupuncturist, a sports medicine physical therapist, a neurologist, and several types of massage therapy.

It's kinda sad to read that post and think "Oh you naive little puppy, you've only scratched the surface and barely started suffering."

In August of 2021 I wrote a post called My Struggle Bus where I announced I thought I had figured out what the cause of what I had been dealing with for "quite a while" – which at the time was... a few months. jackmcdade.com/struggle-bus.

For the last 5 years I've been dealing with brain fog, lightheadedness, heart racing or palpitations, sometimes i would suddenly almost pass out, dizziness, fatigue, migraines, poor sleep, and other related symptoms, and eventually — near-crippling anxiety and panic attacks.

I've been on a really long journey with my health and decided that it's time to share a bit more. I've learned so much (and have so much left to learn) and want to put this out there in case it helps anyone dealing with something similar.

Radical Design – A Rebellious Web Design Course by Jack McDade Radical Design is a rebellious, potentially life-changing design course by Jack McDade

Just made some updates to my Radical Design course today — added some resources, refreshed the hero area to better explain what the course is REALLY about.

It's every bit as useful as the day I launched it 1 year ago and I'm still freakin proud of it.

radicaldesigncourse.com/

WIP new command palette for Statamic 6 👀