Psychology Today - Fatigue and Brain Injury
- ‘I’m So Over It!’: Brain Injury Provides Insight Into COVID Fatigue
- Fatigue: Does It Ever Go Away?
- Pandemic Stages Are Like Brain Injury Stages
- Is Mental Work the Same as Exercise?
Increasing mental work while not decreasing physical exercise commensurately was a really bad idea after brain injury. This lesson no one taught me.
NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month—is a month of writing every single day in November to create a 50,000-word novel. This writing community and event includes anyone, no matter your ability; it releases your imagination; and it’s taxing. Typing is physical. Striding out the front door to meditate in nature or on a long city walk is physical and mental exercise. Writing is mentally onerous for obvious reasons.
Knowing NaNoWriMo’s physical exertion and mental work, I plan my month out carefully. Writing daily drains energy resources, stiffens my neck, and cramps my fingers. Creating a story challenges my still-repairing imagination and my healing cognitive abilities of concentration, memory, organization, planning, initiation, and motivation. NaNoWriMo is set up so that it fires up the latter two; still, some days I have to be able to get myself to look at the website or NaNoWriMo’s Twitter in order to receive that firing up. Even a half-hour of daily writing consumes energy. By the time I’m done writing for the day, I’m fatigued in every way possible.
The standard medical model of brain injury care is…
