Is Your Brain “Okay”?

Once in a while, when I can’t remember where I put my keys or forget someone’s name, I think about my brain, and wonder if I take good care of it.   After all, it is one of our biggest organs, weighing about 3 pounds. I think my hips are next in weight, but not defined as an organ….but I digress!

A few years ago, I needed an MRI of my brain as I was having some sudden scary dizziness (fortunately it turned out that I  just needed to tweak my thyroid medicine…who knew??).  After I got off the MRI table my first thought was that I was relieved they found a brain in there! Good to know.  As a boomer, sometimes I experience things that make me think mine is shrinking.

Our brains have a HUGE job!  The brain consists of some 100 billion nerve cells. It is comprised of two kinds of matter…gray and white. (mine probably has orange in it-my fav color). The brain houses our thoughts and highly coordinated physical actions, and regulates our unconscious body processes, such as digestion and breathing.  It gives us the capacity for creating and enjoying art, language, moral judgments, and rational thought. It’s also responsible for our individual personality, memories, movements, and how we sense the world.

So what happens if that brain becomes injured? How does it heal? How do you find your path to being “Okay” again?  Ruth Curran, author of Being Brain Healthy shares the car accident that resulted in her brain injury and then she meticulously walks us through the recovery from that injury and how it taught her how to build better thinking skills and changed her life. You feel like you are inside her brain, experiencing it all firsthand.

Curran shares the most cutting edge research (in layperson speak), helps us understand how the brain works, how it works together with our body, and shares the stories of others who are in recovery from brain challenges.  She very cleverly divides the book into easy to understand sections: Be Active, Be Engaged, Be Social, Be Purposeful, and Be Complicated.  Don’t you just love these?

As Curran puts it, “The journey to wellness when coming back from a brain injury can be a long one.”

For Curran, there was a point in her recovery process where she made a shift in focus that moved her from seeking treatment and looking for intervention to empowering her to turn up the volume on the quality of her life.  You can almost feel her move that volume control.

Thank you, Ruth, we hear you loud and clear!  Your road to “Okay” is not only an inspirational one of a brain injury survivor who empowered herself by thinking, acting and doing, it has also encouraged me to want to elevate my thinking and expand the use of my brain!

Be sure to read Ruth’s wonderful book, Being Brain Healthy: What my recovery from brain injury taught me and how it can change your life.

Gotta go to Be Active, Be Engaged Be Social, Be Purposeful, and of course, Be Complicated!