You Are What You Eat

This expression popped into my head recently when I was talking to a friend about memory problems. I wasn’t actually referring to eating specifically, just building new habits. Successful head injury treatment is all about the way you move forward, not back. I have found that the most effective treatment for a head injury is more about education than medical intervention. Successful rehabilitation depends upon how much work you’re willing to put into learning new habits, and it’s really just up to you.  I have spoken with so many people who are frustrated with the lack of medical attention available to them. Any head injury is a serious injury, yet they seem to be left to their own devices with no answers to the questions they keep forgetting! I hope I can be of some help through my experience as a Special Education Teacher:

The bottom line in helping students with learning disabilities is to recognize any difficulties the learner faces, then to figure out how to work with what you’ve got. Well, a head injury can cause impairments to the brain’s function that are similar to learning disabilities. So my approach to my own head injury is based on my educational philosophy: I need to adapt if I want to continue to learn, work, and have an enjoyable life.

Upon the advice of my sister (my wonderful coach through this whole experience) I took some time this week to make an inventory of the post-concussion problems that seem to have stuck with me, and matched each problem with the strategies or tools I use to deal with them. Your symptoms are likely to be unique to you, but see if you can adapt my strategies to create solutions for your own specific hurdles. The bottom line of today’s post is this: Accommodate your brain with the tools that are available to replace the injured areas, and then put in the time it takes to build new habits to help you to build new, lasting memories. 

Open the link to the chart below:

memory problems and solutions chart for blog