Have you ever tried an activity for the first time and feel completely drained or exhausted beyond repair for the rest of the day? Have you experienced this exhaustion following activities such as, learning how to cook a new meal (or learning to cook for the first time), after your first yoga class, or after starting school? Yeah, you are not alone. I realized that I had been experiencing this self-perceived fatigue during my years of being a graduate student and after then again after a full week of my first clinical internship. I experienced low energy, decreased work performance, and altered mood. Even reading, a seemingly easy, daily task, became a difficult one. I felt like my brain was having to work in overdrive to overcome the brain fog that I had been feeling. After attending one of Heal the Brain’s weekly workshops, I discovered my mental exhaustion is known in the brain injury world as neuro fatigue. Being a brain injury survivor myself, I set off to discover what I could about this topic.

In a nutshell here is what I found:

· Neuro fatigue is experienced by least 50% of brain injury survivors throughout recovery.

· Neuro fatigue can be triggered following physical activity as well as activities that require a lot of thinking. Following a brain injury, simply remembering steps to an activity, such as dressing or bathing, can lead to fatigue. The brain is having to work on overdrive to compensate for the damage that it has sustained. This increase in brain work causes mental fatigue to be experienced more frequently than healthy individuals.

· The type of activity that bring about mental fatigue is different for every individual. Just as one brain injury is different from the next, the same goes for the amount and frequency of neuro fatigue that a brain injury survivor experience.

· Neuro fatigue is different from what would consider “normal, physical fatigue” that one may feel after exertion from an exercise. Neuro fatigue is a mental tiredness that, unlike physical fatigue, cannot simply be resolved by taking a water break and resting for a short amount of time. It may take several hours to recover, potentially leading to an increased sedentary period.

· How fatigue is defined has appears to be in question in many medical studies. In one article, they refer to the term fatigue as how one describes their fatigue symptoms (i.e. “I feel like I don’t have any energy” or “My brain feels like it is in a fog”). Then they describe the physically signs of deceased performance during an activity as fatigability. All this to say, is that defining fatigue is not a simple task.

· Many individuals who experience neuro fatigue feel misunderstood by family and friends.

All this to say, it that neuro fatigue is real, can be more debilitating than physical fatigue, and should be taken seriously. However, neuro fatigue is not an unbeatable villain. It can be managed through strategies and methods known as energy conservation. To learn more about what energy conservation is and how to implement it into your daily schedule, read this article: How to Become an Energy Conservation Ninja: The Three Ps, AF.

Bio: Brennan Newberry

Graduate Student, Heal The Brain Occupational Therapy Intern, Brain injury survivor, Retired NASCAR Driver
In November of 2014, Brennan was involved an accident while he was competing in a NASCAR race at Phoenix International Raceway. Four days later, he suffered his first seizure episode and learned that he had a serious traumatic brain injury. That day, he retired from a career in racing and shifted his life path to help others who experienced a brain injury. Brennan discovered Occupational Therapy while attending California State University, Sacramento, where he received a Bachelor's in Kinesiology. Today, he is a Master of Occupational Therapy Student from West Coast University and an intern at Heal The Brain. He hopes that providing the knowledge from his program and sharing his experience as a brain injury survivor will give a fresh perspective to members of Heal the Brain.

Student column: My perspective on neuro fatigue by Brennan Newberry