Tools to Help You Fix Your Brain

Here are resources to help you and your loved ones recover from TBI / concussion

Self-Therapy for TBI Recovery – Teaching yourself to prevent head-injured moments

Helping Your Family Member to Recover from Head Injury – Part 1

Helping Your Family Member to Recover from Head Injury – Part 2

Helping Your Family Member to Recover from Head Injury – Part 3

Daily Experiences Journal (Wide) – Word Document

 

This summary of how to fix your brain comes from the
Give Back Orlando TBI Self-Therapy Guide, which has been incredibly helpful to me – download it here

CHAPTER TWENTY: Summary of How You Fix Your Brain

1. Know that you have a new brain, one that can work well once it is reprogrammed. It needs to be reprogrammed because your old programs don’t run quite right on your new brain. Help yourself to keep this fact in mind as you go through your day.

2. Since your old habits don’t quite work well enough, you need to TAKE CONTROL of your brain and get it to think through the things you are going to do. Your BRAIN no longer does its job well enough on automatic pilot. Now, your MIND has to make sure it does its job properly, whenever you do anything in which the results are important. Any time you need your actions or your words to have quality, your mind has to make sure that your brain produces quality at every step. It’s as if your mind now has to be the boss. You need to be MINDFUL so that you can be an effective boss.

3. Don’t depend on your brain’s weak systems for organizing and memory to manage your time and your activities. Get your brain to use your full intelligence to plan your day thoughtfully, a day ahead of time, when you can think everything through well. Write that plan down on a schedule form so that you take no chances of forgetting what you need to do. Develop the habit of writing plans and following them, and soon you will be in total control of your time and your productivity.

4. Learn how your new brain works by studying your head-injured moments. If you study them carefully, they will teach you a great deal about your new brain. The more you become an expert on your new brain, the better you will be able to make it do what you want it to do.

5. By analyzing your head injured moments, you will realize that you make most of your mistakes when you are not mentally prepared. By writing a good daily plan, and by warning yourself whenever you are about to get into a situation in which you tend to make mistakes, you will help yourself to become well prepared for almost everything. As you do this, you will have fewer head-injured moments.

6. Your analysis will teach you how often you get overloaded, what overloads you, and how overload affects your thinking and your ability to do things. Once you know what overloads you, you will be in a position to plan to prevent it from happening. This will make a big difference in reducing head-injured moments.

7. Every time you discover another head-injured moment, that is another step toward recovery. Celebrate the discovery, just like finding a twenty-dollar bill in the street. Develop a great attitude about recognizing when your brain malfunctions, because that is what makes a great self-therapist.

8. On the other hand, if you analyze a head-injured moment, it shouldn’t happen again. If it does happen again, you should be ticked off at yourself. What did I miss? How could I let this happen to me? I’m supposed to be in charge of these head-injured moments, and this one snuck right past me! Figure out exactly what went wrong with your plan, and be determined to never let it happen again.

9. Be sure to understand that fixing your brain is not like fixing your car. This is an ongoing fix-it process. Whenever something important in your life changes, the change creates a flurry of head-injured moments that need to be fixed. Whenever something stresses you out or makes you ill, you have more head-injured moments. As you do self-therapy, you will also discover new, unexpected and quirky head-injured moments, even after years of self-therapy. So self-therapy is not a task. It’s a way of living.

If you live this way, you control your head injury and keep head-injured moments from interfering with your life, but if you slack off, the head-injured moments will be back. So help yourself to welcome self-therapy as something good you do for yourself, and avoid thinking of it as a chore. That will help you to make it a part of your life.