Decision-Making

Decisions require emotions, so writes Lisa Cron in Story Genius. Maybe that’s why for years my decision-making skill vanished. It returned bit by bit. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I asked fewer and fewer people for advice. Yeah, I had fewer to ask, but I also told myself not to ask every single person I knew but…

AVE For Energy: Lifting Brain Injury’s Suffocating Fatigue

I’ve been using SMR/Beta audiovisual entrainment (AVE) session most mornings for a very long time. Clinical experience and research showed this session has a paradoxical relaxation effect on people with brain injury, not just boosting my brain function. And years ago, with my original DAVID Delight device, I discovered beta 18Hz sparked my thinking back…

Is Mental Work the Same as Exercise?

This entry is part 5 of 4 in the series Psychology Today - Fatigue and Brain Injury

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…

‘I’m So Over It!’: Brain Injury Provides Insight Into COVID Fatigue

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Psychology Today - Fatigue and Brain Injury

We feel stuck in COVID fatigue. That’s what they’re calling the feeling of being in the middle of a marathon with no end. That’s how brain injury feels, too. But with a difference. I’m stuck. We’re stuck. In COVID fatigue. The feeling of weariness, of being in the middle of a marathon that was supposed…

Fatigue: Does It Ever Go Away?

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Psychology Today - Fatigue and Brain Injury

Does increasing functionality after brain injury mean no more fatigue? Fatigue is such an inadequate word to describe the unutterable weariness that comes on to a person with fibromyalgia or brain injury just because one got up in the morning. When someone who has a chronic illness or injury, particularly brain injury, fibromyalgia, or chronic…

My Covid-19 Begins

Brain injury is an isolating injury; the fatigue can build up to the point you have no choice but plant yourself on the couch for a couple of weeks. So I’ve had plenty of “self-isolations.” Welcome all! Like many of us with brain injury, most of you don’t actually have the plague but no one…

Brain Injury Pacing Tip for Teeth

I swear there’s nothing more exhausting than brushing one’s teeth. In the years following my brain injury, I struggled to remember to brush my teeth and to actually do the full monty when I remembered: brush, floss, gargle. In these covid-19 times, when worry about coronavirus hiding in toothbrush bristles, when fatigue worsens, it suddenly…