My speech therapist gave me a strange assignment after brain injury: keep a written log of my day. I didn’t know it would become the thing that rewired how I process my emotions. There’s a saying and principle in the worlds of neurology and psychology: Neurons that fire together, wire together. Writing makes things in our brain fire together. It can change your brain, and change your life. It’s not an overstatement.
My neurologists gave me one piece of advice that sounded like fluff until he explained the neuroscience behind it — the words I speak after I fail are literally rewiring my brain, for better or worse.
This is first in a series on rewiring your brain. My neurologist told me that some “roads” my brain previously took to help me function were now closed. They would never reopen. That was bad news. The good news, however difficult to hear, was that I could build new roads, or neural pathways.
Life can be frustrating for a person who has a brain injury. Living with someone who does isn’t easy, either. I can’t eliminate those situations, I can only try to manage them consistently.
Life can be frustrating for a person who has a brain injury. Living with someone who does isn’t easy, either. I can’t eliminate those situations, I can only try to manage them consistently.
If you’ve ever cared about everything and nothing at the same time, you already know what anxiety and depression feel like. Here’s what nobody tells you.
Anoxic brain injury is like an F5 tornado. Imagine yourself standing in a pile of rubble.
Imagine someone picking up a piece of wood from the rubble, and asking if you know where it belongs. It’s nearly impossible.
The friendly young man behind the counter asked if I wanted my tuna to be on a wheat, tomato, or a spinach wrap. That’s when things turned south for me.
Who doesn’t understand a wheat wrap? At that moment, I didn’t.
“I apologize. I had a brain injury, and I don’t understand any of this.”
I explained to my neurologist how a previous doctor told me I reached my cognitive limit. There could be no more improvement.
My neurologist looked at me and said, “That’s a terrible diagnosis. You’re going to get better.”
He said words that have stuck with me since: “I believe it. I need you to believe it. When you believe it, your brain will put itself in a position to heal, and it will begin to heal.”
There are so many people with serious health conditions that suffer from what doctors call invisible illness. Invisible does not mean a patient is fabricating a health issue. It means that the condition is not observable by others. This makes sense. It’s logical. Yet, most people falsely believe if they can’t see a clear indication of illness, then whoever they are looking at must be healthy. This is very common with neurological disorders.
“When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stone-cutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
— Jacob Riis, Danish-American social reformer
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