Handmade punch cards are trending on TikTok as a cute, visual way to track 2026 goals.
Modeled after the punch cards that will secure you a free coffee or sandwich after showing loyalty to one café or another, theyre meant to instead get punched, stamped, or checked off, one square at a time, whenever you make progress on your goals, whether thats staying consistent at the gym, completing a no-spend weekend, or paying down debt.
Todays New Years Eve, and I made these little punch cards this morning of goals I have for myself starting this new year, TikTok user @camiunderthesea said in a video showing off her deck of cards. The first one is to read five books. Ive been trying to get into reading more, and I just cant do it, so hopefully this will motivate me.
She continued: The way it works, if I read a book, I punch it out. When I have all five, I get a treat.
Another TikTok user, @aleegatorrr, set herself the goals of going on 12 hikes this year, a date night once a month, and baking eight new recipes.
This isnt a new trend; it first surfaced in early 2025. But it has once again been embraced as a way to visually track goals and turn vague resolutions like go to the gym or stop doomscrolling into measurable habits.
One week into 2026, and there are more than 200 videos under the hashtag #2026punchcards.
There are a few tutorials online, but the process is simple enough: All it takes is a few index or blank business cards, markers, and a hole punch.
Make a list of some obtainable goals for the year. With a marker, title each card with a goal and draw as many punch spots as you hope to achieve. Add rewards across the bottom and jazz up the cards with borders and/or illustrations.
Punch a small hole in the top-left corner and tie them all together with a ribbon to keep them close at hand as you successfully check off your goals throughout the year.
You may not get a free cappuccino. But you might actually make it to the gym three times a week.
The beginning of a new year ushers in an ominous day in the NFL: Black Monday, the day when coaches are (typically) most at risk of losing their jobs. Black Monday happens the day after the regular season ends, a time when an especially harsh backward review is cast over the wins, losses, and total misses.
The casualty list includes Raheem Morris, who lost his job with the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday, January 4; Kevin Stefanski, Pete Carroll, and Jonathan Gannon, each fired on Black Monday, January 5, by the Cleveland Browns, Las Vegas Raiders, and Arizona Cardinals, respectively; John Harbaugh, who was fired by the Baltimore Ravens on Tuesday, January 6; and Mike McDaniel, whose dismissal from the Miami Dolphins was announced Thursday, January 8.
In the NFL and other sports leagues, performance metrics could not be more clear-cut and public. So if coaches arent wracking up enough W’s, isnt it just radical accountability to let those who arent performing go? And could the business world learn anything from this?
“High-visibility performance management”
That kind of slice em and dice em mentality doesnt offer a model of accountability to the traditional work environment outside the sports world, Mario Avila, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Management at Vanderbilt University, tells Fast Company.But it does offer a model of high-visibility performance management that may well serve the upper echelons of corporate America.
Conceptualizing performance in the NFL in this way is possible because all eyes are on the field as the game unfolds. And while these KPIs are powerful, and having clear performance indicators are powerful and important, the difference between the NFL and a traditional business is in the corporate sector, Avila also said, where accountability functions differently. A football coach has to consider injuries, rosters, and the patience of ownersfactors that dont cross the mind of a CEO. Therefore, Avila added, accountability is very different.
But that doesnt mean corporate leaders cant take from the NFL and Black Monday. The top of the list includes clarity and feedback loops, he explains.
Theres a significant amount of clarity of what the KPIs are in a game, and they provide instant feedback loops: are you winning or losing? Are you hitting the right numbers or are the expectations being met? Its highly visible, youre in front of millions of viewers, on display every weekend.
A manager at a desk job may not be conducting on-field warfare against 53 opponents, but those same loops persist; after all, most work is about hitting goals and, ultimately, winning.
More teamwork lessons than accountability ones
Football also offers a lot of lessons about leadership and teamwork, something thats baked into the backbone of the sport, Stephen Master, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Marketing at New York Universitys Stern School of Business tells Fast Company.
Sports are about teamwork: its about everyone contributing what they can, and its about culture. Just like in a traditional office environment, if theres someone who is giving off a negative vibe and is a cancer in the locker room, and theyre just not a good teammate thats the same thing you can risk in corporate America, where someone is really only interested in their own achievements and their own personal growth goals.
If leadership has incentivized the work experiencefootball players get trophies, corporate workers get bonuses, perhapsthose incentives should be also tied to
company performance or division performance, and thats the same thing in any sport, but especially in football, he added. As Master put it, a quarterback on any given team can be the best in the world, but if his offensive line isnt doing their job, the team isnt going to win.
The real takeaway
If there is one thing corporate leaders should avoid emulating, its the NFLs culture of disposable leadership, which is detrimental to the long-term success of a business, Avila says. Bringing people into an environment where easy firings and mass layoffs run rampantwhere a bad start can cost you your job after barely two seasons on the fieldisnt something businesses should mimic if there are concerns about company morale.
Conversations that intersect the NFL and corporate America also raise questions of long-term results vs. short-term gains, Dae Hee Kwak, Graduate Program Director and Associate of Sport Management at the University of Michigan explains to Fast Company. The NFL is built for a 17-week sprint, while a healthy business is built for a 50-year marathon. If you apply NFL logic to a marathon, youll never have enough runners left to finish the race.
An environment steeped in fear will do little to encourage those marathon runnersor, perhaps, football coachesto approach their jobs fearlessly, Avila agrees. Incentives about winning now reduce long-term capability building, he said. But when we look at some of our organizations across the country that are the most successful short-term incentives and winning now [mentalities] really distort the behavior.
Fear crowds out learning, he continued. Because people are going to start to protect themselves instead of experimenting. Success is built on risk, and you want your people in business to take risk. If you make the environment safe, people will take more risks. If they fear that theyre going to get fired, they will be less willing to take risks, which leads to a decrease in innovation, and a decrease in growth.
As endless newspaper and website pages are filled with stories of mass layoffs, perhaps one of the more salient lessons from the NFL is exactly Avilas point: to succeed, workersall workersneed to be encouraged to try something new, and maybe even fail, before they can rise.
Radical accountability might be a mainstay in the NFL, but that doesnt mean it truly can be applied to other work environmentsor that it should even be considered. If long-term success is the objective, it likely behooves corporate leaders to let the football coaches do their thingwhile they do their own.
Days after hitting the market, the new pill version of Novo Nordisk’s wildly popular weight-loss drug will be available through Amazons online pharmacy.
Amazon joins telehealth providers, discount prescription stalwart GoodRx, and even Novo Nordisk itself in providing the novel weight-management drug for consumers who want to pay out of pocket.
With the introduction of the oral version of Wegovy, the weight-loss drugs that have taken the world by storm will become even more accessibleand more readily available for anyone who can pay out of pocket.
The oral version of Wegovy will start at $149 a month out of pocket through Amazon Pharmacy, and will cost $25 a month with eligible insurance coverage. The 1.5-milligram and 4-milligram starter doses of Wegovy are priced at $149 per month, with the higher doses that many people move up to priced around $299.
We know there are people who are interested in addressing their weight but have been waiting on the sidelines for a medicine that was right for them, Novo Nordisk marketing and patient solutions SVP Ed Cinca said in a press release. For many of them, that wait is over.
Rivals race to market with a weight-loss pill
The two companies that introduced the world to the GLP-1 diabetes and weight-loss drugs semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro and Zepbound) in injectionable form have been racing to market with a pill version of their hit drugs. Late last month, Novo Nordisk secured Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval first, beating its rival drugmaker Eli Lilly, which expects its own drug to get the green light in March.
The Danish drugmaker was also first to market with the injectable version of its weight-loss drug Wegovy, but it struggled on the production side when a massive wave of demand outstripped supply. That dynamic allowed Eli Lilly to gain ground with its own weight-management drug, Zepbound, and pushed the American drugmakers stock to new heights.
In November, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly announced a deal with the Trump administration to make their upcoming weight-loss pills available for $149 out of pocket. Under the terms of the deal, part of the White Houses wider negotiation on drug prices, both companies will be exempt from tariffs on pharmaceutical products for three years.
Beyond Amazon Pharmacy, Novos weight-loss pill will also be coming to TrumpRx, the Trump administrations upcoming portal that will connect consumers with drugmakers to lower prices. For many years, Americans have paid the highest prices anywhere in the world for prescription drugsmuch more than other countries for the exact same product, Trump said in a quote featured on the TrumpRx placeholder site. That ends today. TrumpRx is expected to launch in early 2026.
Dr. Amazon will see you now
If youre confused that Amazon is suddenly a healthcare provider, youre probably not alone. The company best known for its sprawling online storefront and ubiquitous delivery trucks jumped into the prescription drug business in 2020 when it launched its own online pharmacy, which grew out of a previous acquisition of a company called PillPack.
In 2022, Amazon expanded its health ambitions by buying subscription-based primary care and telehealth provider One Medical for $3.9 billion. Last month, the tech giant launched a network of drug-vending kiosks, bringing its signature robotic touch to the pharmacy. The drug vending machines, located in some One Medical offices, are a no-footprint answer to major store closures from longtime drugstore companies like Walgreens, Rite Aid, and CVS.
With widespread patient-initiated telehealth and cheaper weight-loss drugs popping out of vending machines, the future of medicine is, for better or worse, looking a lot more like the future in 2026.
As President Trump takes even more steps to pull back on climate action, Bill Gates is emphasizing how crucial government policies are crucial to addressing climate change.
In his annual year-ahead letter, the billionaire Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist warns that the market alone is not enough to change our climate reality.
Without a large global carbon tax (which is, unfortunately, politically unachievable), market forces do not properly incentivize the creation of technologies to reduce climate-related emissions, Gates writes.
To stop global temperatures from increasing, we need to replace all emissions-emitting activities with affordable alternatives, Gates says. He particularly calls out industrial emissions and aviation as areas that need innovation.
And government policiesin rich countries, he notesare crucial to bringing about that innovation, because unless innovations reach scale, the costs wont come down and we wont achieve the impact we need.
Climate change is linked to poverty and health
Gatess annual letter comes just a few months after he wrote a blog arguing that the world is too focused on cutting short-term emissions, and that focusing on climate change risks getting in the way of addressing global poverty.
That post sparked some backlash from environmental activists and experts who noted that climate and development goals are interconnected.
If you look around the world right now, climate change is directly undermining human development goals, poverty eradication, and health goals, Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Fast Company back in October.
In his annual letter, Gates said that, If we dont limit climate change, it will join poverty and infectious disease in causing enormous suffering, especially for the worlds poorest people.
Climate change will also worsen both those hardships: Experts have long said that climate change exacerbates disease outbreaks and pandemics, and that it is expected to push up to 132 million people into extreme poverty by 2030.
‘Investing more than ever to climate work’
In his October post, Gates said that although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, the biggest problems to poor people are poverty and disease.
Understanding this, he wrote, will let us focus our limited resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact for the most vulnerable people.
In his year-ahead letter, though, Gates emphasized climate change as a critical area for the world to focus on. He added that he will be investing and giving more than ever to climate work in the years ahead while also continuing to give more to childrens health.
Some of his investments around climate change will use AI. His foundation has committed $1.4 billion to helping farmers adapt to climate extremes, and in his annual letter, he says that with AI, we will soon be able to provide poor farmers with better advice about weather, prices, crop diseases, and soil than even the richest farmers get today.
How Trump has devastated climate action
The Trump administration has taken multiple steps to inhibit America’s climate progress. Most recently, Trump pulled the country out of a a landmark climate treaty, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Trump has also canceled billions in green energy projects, rolled back Biden-era government incentives for clean technologies, and cut hundreds of millions of dollars from climate and renewable energy research.
At the same time, Trump has rapidly increased the governments support of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels, opening new mining leases, loosening coal plant emissions standards, and forcing coal plants that were going to close to keep operating.
Trumps actions have devastated multiple climate companies. Even Gatess own climate actions faced a challenging 2025: In March, Breakthrough Energy, a climate group Gates started 10 years ago, laid off dozens in its U.S. and Europe policy teams.
But Gates will continue to put billions into climate innovation, he writeswhile also focusing on health and education. And all three of those areas, he notes, can improve rapidly with the right government focus.
General Motors will be hit with charges of about $6 billion as sales of electric vehicles sputter after the U.S. cut tax incentives to buy them and also eased auto emissions standards.
Shares slid almost 3% Friday.
The charges that will be recorded in the fourth quarter follow an announcement in October that the Detroit automaker would take a $1.6 billion charge for the same reason in the previous quarter, with automakers forced to reconsider ambitious plans to convert their fleets to electric power.
The EV tax credit ended in September. The clean vehicle tax credit was worth $7,500 for new EVs and up to $4,000 for used ones.
GM, which had been the most ambitious among all U.S. automakers with plans to replace internal combustion engines, said in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission late Thursday that the $6 billion in charges includes non-cash impairments and other non-cash charges of about $1.8 billion as well as supplier commercial settlements, contract cancellation fees, and other charges of approximately $4.2 billion.
EVs have been considered to be the future of the US automotive industry. GM announced in 2020 that it was going to invest $27 billion in electric and autonomous vehicles over the next five years, a 35% increase over plans made before the pandemic.
GM expected more than half of its factories in North America and China would be capable of making electric vehicles by 2030. It also pledged at the time to increase its investment in EV charging networks by nearly $750 million through 2025.
Its goal was to make the vast majority of the vehicles electric by 2035, and the entire company carbon neutral five years after that.
Those plans have been shaken due to the drastic differences in economic and environmental policies between the Biden and Trump administrations.
China has become a global leader in electric vehicle technology in recent years, with factories there churning out millions of cars and laying the groundwork for a massive charging network for vehicles.
Earlier this month, Tesla was dethroned as the world’s largest EV automaker, replaced by China’s BYD, which produced 2.26 million electric vehicles last year.
Michelle Chapman, AP business writer
Sluggish December hiring concluded a year of weak employment gains that have frustrated job seekers even though layoffs and unemployment remained low.
Employers added just 50,000 jobs last month, nearly unchanged from a downwardly revised figure of 56,000 in November, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate slipped to 4.4%, its first decline since June, from 4.5% in November, a figure also revised lower.
The data suggests a reluctance by businesses to add workers even as economic growth has picked up. Many companies hired aggressively after the pandemic and no longer need to fill more jobs. Others have held back due to widespread uncertainty caused by President Donald Trumps shifting tariff policies, elevated inflation, and the spread of artificial intelligence, which could alter or even replace some jobs.
Still, economists were encouraged by the lower unemployment rate, which had risen in the previous four straight reports. Weakening employment raised alarms at the Federal Reserve, which cut its key interest rate three times last year.
The labor market looks to have stabilized, but at a slower pace of employment growth, Blerina Uruci, chief economist at T. Rowe Price, said. “There is no urgency for the Fed to cut rates further, for now.”
Some Federal Reserve officials are concerned that inflation hasn’t improved since 2024 and remains above their target of 2% annual growth. They support keeping rates where they are to combat inflation. Others, however, have grown worried that hiring has nearly ground to a halt and have supported lowering borrowing costs to spur spending and growth.
November’s job gain was revised slightly lower, from 64,000 to 56,000, while October’s now shows a much steeper drop, with a loss of 173,000 positions, down from previous estimates of a 105,000 decline. The government revises the jobs figures as it receives more survey responses from businesses.
Nearly all the jobs added in December were in the health care and restaurant and hotel industries. Health care added 38,500 jobs, while restaurants and hotels gained 47,000. Governments mostly at the state and local level added 13,000.
Manufacturing, construction and retail companies all shed jobs. Retailers cut 25,000 positions, a sign that holiday hiring has been weaker than previous years. Manufacturers have shed jobs every month since April, when Trump announced sweeping tariffs intended to boost manufacturing.
Wall Street and Washington are looking closely at Friday’s report as it’s the first clean reading on the labor market in three months. The government didnt issue a report in October because of the six-week government shutdown, and Novembers data was distorted by the closure, which lasted until Nov. 12.
Job gains have been subdued all year, particularly after Aprils liberation day tariff announcement by Trump. The economy gained just 584,000 jobs in 2025, sharply lower than that more than 2 million added in 2024. Its the smallest annual gain since the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the job market in 2020. Outside of recessions, it’s the smallest annual increase since 2003.
Still, Trump boasted on social media late Thursday that since January, all the new jobs have been in the private sector, while government jobs have declined. Yet his figures included December’s jobs numbers as well as revisions to previous months, which the White House receives Thursday afternoon, before the figures are publicly released.
Trump’s post on Truth Social said that 654,000 jobs were added by businesses since January, while government jobs declined 181,000, so it wouldn’t have been immediately clear that the post had new information from December. But new jobs data are generally closely guarded since they can move financial markets.
The hiring slowdown reflects more than just a reluctance by companies to add jobs. With an aging population and a sharp drop in immigration, the economy doesn’t need to create as many jobs as it has in the past to keep the unemployment rate steady. As a result, a gain of 50,000 jobs is not as clear a sign of weakness as it would have been in previous years.
And layoffs are still low, a sign firms aren’t rapidly cutting jobs, as typically happens in a recession. The low-hire, low-fire job market does mean workers have some job security, though it’s become harder to find new work.
Ernesto Castro, 44, has applied for hundreds of jobs since leaving his last in May. Yet the Los Angeles resident has had just three initial interviews, and only one follow-up, after which he heard nothing.
With nearly a decade of experience providing customer support for software companies, Castro expected to find a new job pretty quickly as in the past.
Its been awful, he said.
He worries that more companies are turning to artificial intelligence to help clients learn to use new software. He hears ads from tech companies that urge companies to slash workers like him in favor of AI. His contacts in the industry say that employees are increasingly reluctant to switch jobs amid all the uncertainty, which means fewer open jobs for others.
He is now looking into starting his own software company, and is also exploring project management roles.
Subdued hiring underscores a key conundrum surrounding the economy as it enters 2026: Growth has picked up to healthy levels, yet hiring has weakened noticeably.
Most economists expect hiring will accelerate this year amid solid growth, and Trump’s tax cut legislation is expected to produce large tax refunds this spring. Yet economists acknowledge there are other possibilities: Weak job gains could drag down future growth. Or the economy could keep expanding at a healthy clip, while automation and the spread of artificial intelligence reduces the need for more jobs.
U.S. stocks are rising toward records Friday following a mixed report on the U.S. job market, one that may delay another cut to interest rates by the Federal Reserve but does not slam the door on it.
The S&P 500 climbed 0.5% in midday trading and was on track to top its all-time high set earlier in the week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 237 points, or 0.5% and was also heading toward a record. The Nasdaq composite was 0.7% higher, as of 11:45 a.m. Eastern time.
The gains came after the U.S. Labor Department said employers hired fewer workers in total during December than economists expected, though the unemployment rate improved and was better than expected. It reinforced how the U.S. job market may be in a low-hire, low-fire state.
On Wall Street, power company Vistra soared 11.9% to lead the market after signing a 20-year deal to provide electricity to Meta Platforms from three of its nuclear plants. Big Tech companies have been signing a string of such deals to electrify the data centers powering their moves into artificial-intelligence technology.
Oklo jumped 12.3% after saying it also signed a deal with Meta Platforms that will help it secure nuclear fuel and advance its project to build a facility in Pike County, Ohio.
Homebuilders and other companies involved in the housing market were also strong in their first trading after President Donald Trump announced a plan to lower mortgage rates. Trump on late Thursday called for the purchase of $200 billion in mortgage bonds, similar to how the Fed in the past has bought bonds backed by mortgages to bring down mortgage rates.
Builders FirstSource, a supplier of building products, jumped 8.5% for one of the biggest gains in the S&P 500 after Vistra. Among homebuilders, Lennar rose 5.1%, PulteGroup rose 4.9% and D.R. Horton climbed 4.8%.
They helped offset a 3.3% drop for General Motors. The auto giant said it will take a $6 billion hit to its results for the last three months of 2025 related to its pullback from electric vehicles. Thats on top of the $1.6 billion in charges GM took in the prior quarter. Fewer tax incentives and easier fuel-emission regulations have been eating into demand for EVs.
WD-40 tumbled 5% after reporting a weaker profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Chief Financial Officer Sara Hyzer said the soft numbers were primarily because of timing issues, not weaker demand from end customers, and the company stood by its financial forecasts for the upcoming year.
In the bond market, Treasury yields were mixed following the mixed jobs report.
The improvement in the unemployment rate was enough to get traders to ratchet back expectations for a cut to interest rates at the Feds next meeting, which is scheduled for later this month. Traders are now forecasting just a 5% chance of that, down from 11% a day before, according to data from CME Group.
But traders nevertheless still largely expect the Fed to cut rates at least twice this upcoming year. Whether theyre correct carries high stakes for financial markets. Lower interest rates can goose the economy and push up prices for investments, though they can also worsen inflation at the same time. And inflation has stubbornly remained above the Feds 2% target.
Until the data provide a clearer direction, a divided Fed is likely to stay that way, according to Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management. Lower rates are likely coming this year, but the markets may have to be patient.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury eased to 4.17% from 4.19% late Thursday. It tends to track expectations for longer-term economic growth and inflation.
The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks forecasts for what the Fed will do with short-term interest rates in the near term, rose to 3.52% from 3.49%.
A separate report released Friday morning suggested sentiment among U.S. consumers is strengthening, particularly among lower-income households. Perhaps more importantly for the Fed, the preliminary report from the University of Michigan also said expectations for inflation in the coming 12 months may be at their lowest level in a year. That could prevent a vicious cycle where worsening expectations lead to behaviors that accelerate inflation further.
In stock markets abroad, indexes rose across much of Europe and Asia.
The French CAC 40 rose 1.3%, and Japans Nikkei 225 jumped 1.6% for two of the worlds bigger gains. In Tokyo, Fast Retailing, the fashion company behind Uniqlo, jumped 10.7% after its quarterly operating profit surged about 34% year-on-year. It revised its full-year forecasts upward.
By Stan Choe, AP business writer
AP Business Writers Chan Ho-him and Matt Ott contributed.
Some words are far too mild for the violence of what they describe. Migraine is one of them. For many people, it evokes a simple headachean inconvenience solved with an aspirin (or Tylenol) and a glass of water. For those whove never experienced it, migraine is almost a cliché: a lame excuse to stay in bed or avoid a meeting.
But for millions of peopleand Im one of themmigraine is anything but benign. It is a debilitating neurological disease that can force life to grind to a halt for days at a time. It is an invisible disability that millions are expected to simply push through.
The Mild Version Everyone Seesand the Severe One No One Understands
I often compare migraine to carrying a 60-pound bag everywhere you go. On mild days, you still walk, work, answer emailsbut you do it while pushing through a fog of pain that absorbs all your energy. Many migraine sufferers perform normal life while their brain fights a private war.
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Ironically, this functional version of migraine contributes to the disbelief faced by people who cannot work during severe attacks. They hear, But I know someone with migraines and she still workswhy cant you?
Because not all migraines are the same. Some are annoying. Some are so ferocious you cant imagine enduring another minute of it.
A Neurological Reality That Hijacks the Entire Body
When a severe migraine hits, everything stops. I find myself in bed, motionless, in the dark. I shuttle back and forth to the bathroom to vomit. I cant read. I cant watch a show. I cant think clearly. My brain is overwhelmed by pain and sensory overload. The outside world simply disappears.
More than one billion people worldwide experience migraines. One in seven adults. And yet . . . it remains an astonishingly misunderstood disease.
It disproportionately affects womenroughly 80% of migraine suffererslargely because of hormonal fluctuations that influence the sensitivity of the nervous system. Its driven by an abnormal excitability of brainstem neurons that triggers a cascade: CGRP molecules flood the system, blood vessels dilate, nerves ignite with pain signals, and the body spirals into nausea, hypersensitivity to light and sound, vomiting, word-finding difficulties, and exhaustion. Some people experience visual disturbancesaurabefore the pain even hits. But whether with or without aura, the result can be incapacitating.
The Monastic Life Migraine Demands
Migraine forces me into a kind of monastic discipline. I dont drink alcohol anymoreits an instant trigger. Ive cut out lactose completely, because even a small amount can set off a crisis. I follow a tightly controlled diet. I guard my sleep like its sacred, because one night thats too short or too long can derail an entire day. I limit screen time as much as I can. I monitor my stress levels (not easy in the world we live in). I avoid harsh light, loud spaces, sensory overload.
And even with all that, I still cant fully prevent the attacks.
For some, its chronic. A migraine that never really leaves, a pain that becomes the background noise of existence. I honestly cannot imagine living like that. I dont know how people with chronic migraine keep goingtheir resilience is extraordinary.
A Workplace Blind Spot With Enormous Costs
The gap between lived experience and workplace perception is enormous. Migraine is still not widely recognized as a disabling condition at work. Many employees fear being judged as unreliable or weak. And too many managers still respond with skepticism or impatience.
Yet migraine is one of the worlds leading causes of productivity loss. The economic costthrough absenteeism, presenteeism, and cognitive impairmentruns into the hundreds of billions globally each year. And behind those numbers are real people who spend days each month barely able to function.
Treatment ExistsBut Access, Awareness, and Understanding Lag Behind
Traditional preventive medications (like beta blockers) help some patients, but only a fraction of them. Acute treatments like triptans can workuntil they trigger rebound headaches that are worse than the original pain. Many of us know that spiral all too well.
Newer therapies, especially those targeting CGRP, are genuinely promising. Some patients describe them as life-changing. But they remain expensive, inaccessible for many, and often unknown.
And because migraine is still not taken seriously, an astonishing number of people never even seek medical help. They just live with it. They sometimes mention it in passingoh, and I get migrainesif they mention it at all. For a condition that can derail entire lives, the gap between the severity of the disease and the lack of treatment is staggering.
Despite how common migraine is, very few workplaces have policies that address it.
The Question We Avoid: What If Migraine Affected Mostly Men?
History gives us a pretty clear answer. Across medicine, conditions that disproportionately affect womenmigraine, endometriosis, autoimmune diseaseshave been minimized, dismissed, or psychologized for decades. When women describe pain, it is more likely to be labeled as stress, anxiety, sensitivity, or overreaction. When men describe pain, it is more likely to be investigated.
Migraine sits squarely in this long lineage of medical bias. For generations, it has been seen as a womens complaint, something vaguely emotional rather than neurological. In the mid-20th century, many doctors literally described migraine as a manifestation of female hysteria. The stereotype still lingers today: the fragile woman with “her headaches.”
If a condition that disables one in seven adults were perceived as a mens disease, it would almost certainly have received more research funding, more public awareness, more employer adaptations, and far earlier recognition as a legitimate disability.
Instead, millions of women have been told for decades to push through it, take something, or manage stress, as if willpower could override a neurological storm.
What Can Employers Actually Do? More Than They Think.
Migraine shouldnt be a private burden. Workplaces can make a profound difference by recognizing it, adapting to it, and supporting those who live with it.
1. Give people autonomy over how they work: Flexibility in location and schedule is the single most important accommodation. Many of us can avert a severe attack if we rest at the earliest warning signsbut only if work allows it.
2. Accept sick leave for migraines without suspicion: No eye-rolling. No raised eyebrows. No unspoken judgment. If someone says, I cant work today, believe them. Trust goes a long way toward reducing stigma.
3. Reduce sensory triggers in workplaces:
reduce harsh lighting,
limit strong fragrances,
manage noise levels,
provide quiet rooms when possible.
These changes dont just help migraine sufferersthey benefit everyone!
4. Train managers and HR teams: A simple awareness session can avoid years of misunderstanding. Managers need to know what migraine is (and isnt), how it affects cognition, and why flexibility is not indulgence.
5. Normalize disclosure without forcing it: People should feel safe sharing information about their condition without fear of bias. A culture of psychological safety helps enormously.
6. Support access to treatment: Health insurance plans should cover modern migraine treatments, including newly approved CGRP-targeting medications. These therapies can prevent attacks entirely or significantly reduce their severity. Supporting access is cost-effective compared to the productivity losses of unmanaged migraine.
We Are Manyand We Deserve to Be Believed
Millions of people navigate migraines in silence. We endure the pain itself, and then the second burden: the disbelief, the minimization, the cultural shrug.
Migraine is not an excuse to avoid work. It is a neurological disease that destroys days and derails careers.
We deserve to be heard and supported. We deserve autonomy, flexibility, empathy, and access to effective treatment. And above all, we deserve to be believed.
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Less than three months ago, the world watched the Trump administration reduce the White Houses historic East Wing to a pile of rubble to begin construction on a massive new ballroom. But it looks like the dust from that demolition will have barely settled before Trump starts another project to turn the presidential residence into his own personal real estate development endeavor.
This week, Trump and the head architect behind the ballroom construction, Shalom Baranes, revealed several heretofore unknown plans for the nations most symbolic building. They include multiple proposals that would add considerable architectural bulk to a White House thats already set to be burdened by a 90,000-square-foot East Wing (for context, thats nearly double the square footage of the White Houses main residence).
East Wing demolition, November, 2025. [Photo: Andrew Leyden/Getty Images]
Trumps ostentatious vision for the White House feels alarmingly similar to the ethos behind Americas suburban monstrosity, the McMansion: Maximizing for square footage by adding a hodge podge of extensions, additions, and flourishes, with no actual regard for architectural sensibility. Heres everything we know so far about his latest plans.
A new “Upper West Wing”
The most eyebrow-raising aspect of Trumps latest scheme is to construct what he calls an Upper West Wing: an entire additional level on top of the existing colonnade that connects the West Wing to the White House residence.
In an interview with The New York Times on January 7, Trump said this concept was currently in design phases, and proposed that it could serve as first ladies offices for future first ladiesan ironic proposition, given that he just destroyed the East Wing, which historically served that very purpose.
Baranes added a bit more context to this proposal at a public meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission on January 8. He told attendees that the West Wing addition will serve to restore a sense of symmetry to the White House after the East Wing renovation is complete by ensuring that both wings of the building stand at the same height. He did not provide any specific timetable for this new project.
Many experts have pointed out that the 90,000-square-foot East Wing addition will dwarf the rest of the White House by comparisonin fact, that concern is reportedly one main reason that Trump cut ties with the ballrooms original architect, McCrery Architects, back in December. It seems unlikely that simply slapping more architectural mass onto the White House will offer an elegant solution to this problem.
New details about the East Wing ballroom
At the commission meeting, Baranes also offered a bit more insight into the future of the new East Wingan addition that Trump has repeatedly demanded be made both bigger and more costly, according to multiple reports.
Architect Shalom Baranes shows elevation drawings for a new $400 million White House ballroom to members of the National Capital Planning Commission on January 08, 2026 in Washington, DC. [Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]
Baranes told commissioners that the entire East Wing project will encompass 90,000 total square feet, 22,000 of which will be taken up by the ballroom. The ballroom is set to feature towering, 40-foot ceilings, with enough seating to accommodate up to 1,000 seated guests. He added that it will be attached to the White Houses East Room via a two-story colonnade, hence the idea that an added story to the West Wings colonnade might help to even things out.
In his interview with The New York Times, Trump also added a bit more color to his ballroom concept, explaining that he sees the space as a secure site to hold a future inauguration, complete with four to five inch thick bulletproof glass.
Its being designed very much with the inauguration in mind, he said. Itll be able to hold six times what the Capitol can hold, and its all bulletproof glass, drone-proof roof, yeah, serious. The biggest drone could crash into ityoud hear a noise up there. It wouldnt be bad.
Other plans
Trumps apparent concern with the White Houses security from outside threats was echoed in his plans for Lafayette Park, located just north of the White House. He told The New York Times that he plans to tear up the park’s brick walkways and replace them with granite, in part due to fears that protestors could use the paths bricks as weapons.
Unlike the ballroom, whose current estimated cost of $400 million is being bankrolled by a hefty list of corporate donors, Trump claimed the park renovation would be self-funded. Im spending my own money and Im going to redo it, he said of the project’s estimated $10 million price ag.
Run a small business and you probably feel like you make dozens of decisions every day. Whether to cut a quality corner, or miss a ship date. Whether to respond to a customer complaint, or hope the problem goes away. Whether to address an employees behavior, or kick that can down the road.
Then there are all the personal decisions. Whether to get up and going, or hit the snooze button. Whether to ditch the food you packed, or go out for lunch instead. Whether to keep grinding, or work out.
None of those are actually decisions, though, since you already know you should do so. Nearly everything you decide already has an answer.
Quality problem? Fix it. Customer complaint? Respond. Underperforming employee? Address the behavior now; a performance issue takes care of itself.
The same is true for personal decisions. The nine minutes of sleep you get after hitting the snooze button isnt restorative sleep; youre better off setting your alarm for nine minutes later. (Or going to bed earlier.) The food you packed isor should bean integral part of your healthy lifestyle; going out for lunch when you didnt plan to is almost never better for you. Work out? Exercise can be your physical (and mental) competitive advantage.
Thats the beauty of processes and routines. Rules arent restrictive. Rules are liberating, because rules free you up from having to make decisions. Over time, those actions become habits. Then you definitely dont need to make a decision, because habits are effortless. (In both good and bad ways, obviously.) Instead of wasting mental energy and willpower on choosing, all you have to do is act.
As Jeff Bezos says, you dont get paid to make thousands of decisions every day. You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions.
As Bezos wrote in Fast Company:
You need to be thinking two or three years in advance, and if you are, then why do I need to make a hundred decisions today? If I make three good decisions a day, thats enough, and they should just be as high quality as I can make them. Warren Buffett says hes good if he makes three good decisions a year, and I really believe that.
Clearly, theres a huge difference between making three good decisions per day, and three good decisions per year. Yet that difference is also easy to explain.
Launching a startup, like starting anything from a relatively blank slate, requires making seemingly countless decisions. Infrastructure, branding, pricing strategies, marketing strategies . . . everything is up in the air. Its impossible to work in the future when you havent figured out the present.
But once youve made a decision, you no longer have to decide. Barring evidence that decision was wrong and needs to be revisited, all you have to do is act. With time, the number of decisions you need to make every day should rapidly decline.
Which means you can focus all that mental energy on making strategic rather than tactical decisions. You can focus on making decisions that set the course for the next months, or even years. To launch a new product line, or not. To open a new location, or not.
To take your lifehealth, education, relationships, etc.in new directions, or not.
Making fewer decisions (better yet, constantly revisiting fewer decisions) frees you up to think about the things that will make the biggest difference in your professional and personal life. Think of it that way, and you really dont need to make more than three good decisions a year.
Especially if those decisions help you become the person you want to be, and to build the life you really want to live.
Jeff Haden
This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc.
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