Brain Injury Usually Improves Rather Than Degrades
As a general rule, brain injuries improve rather than degrade. Unlike dementia or Alzheimer's, which get worse over time, brain injury's symptoms usually improve with time.
Your life, your brain, you're healing!
As a general rule, brain injuries improve rather than degrade. Unlike dementia or Alzheimer's, which get worse over time, brain injury's symptoms usually improve with time.
These links are great to help family and friends better understand brain injury. I recommend reading them aloud and then explaining what is similar and different for you.
These are things that help me enter life as fully as possible, giving myself permission to go “as fast as I can, as slow as I must.”
I have been asked why I speak so freely about my experience with faith and about praying for others. The bottom line answer is I am a Catholic deacon and it is integral to how I approach everything, including TBI support, both here and elsewhere through the decades. However imperfectly, I express my faith, and welcome others to do the some of theirs.
I encourage you to do a web search for: – faith mental healing study, and; – faith study tbi mental health
Brain injury leads to many challenges, and many of them are the state of our countenance, or mental health. I approach these things very differently, as a Catholic. That different approach may be helpful.
Under the blend-our-own-cocktail of fear, anger, anxiety, depression, and/or despair are the fundamental questions of life. Who am I? Who made me? Why am I here? Is there a God and if so, who is God? In my experience, how we address these questions
TBI and PTSD often occur together and, in my years of working with folks with brain injury, including vets, many people have no idea how they interplay or how to help untangle the wild mess of confusion and rage that can downward spiral terribly.
There is a way forward. Be kind to yourself,
These come in many flavors and with brain injury they seem to ramp up exponentially to the point that a “regular” migraine looks like a friendly kitty cat. Sardonic grin. Oh, and they can go on for days, weeks, months and even seem perminant.
Homeopathy has helped me a LOT here, to the point that I rarely get them anymore and when I do, they are usually gone before they really get started, within a few hours to half a day. I use two different Banerji protocols:
There is so much that we lose with a bludgeoned brain, and it is invisible to others, who often can't begin to understand, or, more humorously, think they understand because they sometimes lose their keys. Grin.
The need to grieve a loss of capacity isn't often understood because they are usually associated with the death of a loved one, or having a terminal illness. Brain injury, however, is a mini-death, or a series of mini-deaths. We lose capacity. The planet we live on is simply harder on us that the planet everyone else lives on.
You read that title correctly. Autophagy is a very useful biological “clean-up crew” process that helps get rid bits and parts floating around that no longer need to be there. Trouble is, the conviences of modern living stop the clean-up crew from coming around disrupting our feasting and lounging. Regular, long-term, responsible fasting exercise, ketogenic diet (or at least low carb) were build in parts of daily life for thousands of years before we became agrarian.
Bottom line, living in such a way that your body regularly engages it’s self-cleaning mechanisms, autophagy, not only promots long, healthy living, but it can help heal the brain because the body is restoring #Godsengineering, working as God created us to work.
I’ve been on a ketogenic diet, including with regular intermittent fasting, for over ten years and have noticed improvement in mental clarity, focus, and other aspects of cognition I struggle with because of my brain injury. It seems I’m not the only one noticing the effect of high-fat ketogenic and intermittent fasting on improving brain function.
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A fascinating study out of Isreal that reveals what every person with brain injury intuitively discovers, even if we fight against it because sleep is “inactivity.” Far from being inactive, sleep, science is discovering, is part of God’s engineering that helps us heal and function as fully as possible.
Combine 8-10 hours of sleep (or more, as needed) per day with regular exercise, also shown to aid brain function and healing, and we are well on our way to a solid long-term brain injury healing plan!
May God startle you with joy!
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