I listened to a presentation by a rehabilitation psychologist at Brain Injury Support group last night. She reiterated the need to recalibrate our lives. This includes helping others around us to understand our need to live at a recalibrated level. It is no easy task. But, first, we must accept where we are and do the recalibrating.

When with friends, we can rarely tolerate a lively discussion where people talk over each other. It fries our brains. It helps when we can explain our condition.

The most important concept is filtering. The concussed brain often loses its ability to filter stimuli. Background noises and voices are not filtered out. Visual images are not filtered out. As a result, those thousand words in a picture all hit us at the same time where we usually can look at different parts of a picture and ignore the rest.

I have these visual struggles. I explain them this way. If somebody uses bold text in a document or online forum, my brain struggles to read the non-bold text near it. It is like driving down the road at night and somebody drives toward you with their high beams on. All you see is the bright light. When they switch the high beams off, the other images suddenly are visible.

This same thing happens with sounds, especially voices. Our brain tries to track every voice so it switches between all of the different voices without fully understanding any of them. This means we do not remember what was said because we did not fully process it when we heard it.

At work, you need to try to identify the distracting stimulations so you can take steps to minimize them. In the US, the Americans with Disabilities Act requires that your employer use reasonable accommodations to help you. You also need to recognize the fatiguing events, too much screen time without a break, etc.

Once you figure out how to recalibrate your work and home/social life, you will recover better. You've never said what kind of tasks you do in your job. We could help you more if you could tell us.

Things will get better.

My best to you.