I have this bad habit of pushing myself too hard after my brain injury. There’ll be a few good days and I’ll be over ambitious, leading to the not so good days. Stress has a lot to do with it. And I’m not talking about just the stress a flaming argument causes, I’m talking about, just trying to be normal stress.

This can be as simple as trying to explain your query to customer services in a way that sort of makes sense. When you struggle to find the right words and construct sentences, it can be stressful just trying to have your voice heard.

And then there’s that question, “What do you do today?”

Nothing, apart from work 100 times harder at everything you find so flipping easy!

So as brain injury survivors we can easily suffer more from stress than the average person, but that’s a big problem. It has long been accepted that PTSD can cause alterations in the brain structure, but researchers are only just starting to understand the effects chronic stress has.

The white matter of the brain is made up of axons, the neurotransmitters that carry messages between the different areas. Chronic stress decreases the number of brain stems that mature into axons and could explain why chronic stress also affects learning and memory. This happens because when we are stressed we produce the hormone cortisol. Cortisol is great for getting us up in the morning, but you don’t want high levels of it for long periods, which is what chronic stress causes.