Four Steps To Rehabilitate Your Mind At Home After a TBI

By Michael Cerreto, MS, CSC, CPCRT, LDR, Edu-K

Your home is a place for you to receive the comfort, support, and enjoyment that sustains your life. After a brain injury, home continues to be an oasis from a world that is sometimes hard to navigate. It is also a wonderful place to continue your efforts to strengthen your mind and emotions in a safe, supportive place.

There are four steps you can take at home to rehabilitate your mind, emotion control, and life. They are listed below in an order that can give you the quickest results. For instance, making adjustments to your home environment can help you quicker address certain cognitive struggles than cognitive exercises on a computer that can take longer to show benefits.

Follow The Four Steps

Step 1: Change Your Environment

The first step after a TBI is to make changes to your home environment so your senses, mobility, thinking, and emotions are not overwhelmed. This can include adjusting the lighting, sounds, temperature, furniture, and over-stimulating activities.

Step 2: Use Tools and Aides

You can give your mind concrete tools and aides to help perform daily memory, communication, and organizing tasks. You can become a master at using helpful technology, lists, written instructions, and reminders.

Step 3: Use Strategies

You can use mental strategies to improve your ability to pay attention, remember, control emotions, and communicate. Think of the strategies as mental routines you can follow when certain behaviors are needed.

Step 4: Retrain Your Brain

You can do mental exercises on a computer or tablet each day to strengthen different areas of your thinking, communication, and emotion control. These exercises can improve inconsistent mental abilities to enhance your life.

Whatever step you start with, remember to be consistent and don’t be hard on yourself. It takes practice and patience to improve your life. You have come a long way already, keep up the great work.