Traumatic Brain Injury: Understanding Fatigue

The TBI Coach, Nathalie Kelly, explains cognitive fatigue in a way that everyone can understand. Brain fatigue is a huge debilitating issue for those with brain injuries and concusssions. See the full transcript below.

Do you want to understand one of the biggest impacts of Traumatic Brain Injury that is often misunderstood? 

Do you want to know what happens when the brain is overloaded?

Do you want to know what to do about it? 

Well, stay tuned, because in this video, I am going to explain it all to you!









Hello my beautiful and courageous friends,





Do you find it hard to understand that at some moments someone with a TBI can appear to function pretty well, and a minute later they are stuttering and stumbling? 



It’s called Cognitive Fatigue. Cognitive fatigue happens because the injured brain is working very hard . Since the old pathways are broken, your amazing brain is having to find new paths. when the brain is overloaded and it is like your brain switch being turned off. One minute you are there, and the next minute, it was too much, a fuse blew, and you are gone. 



It can be so extreme of a contrast, that people get accused of faking their brain injury. That hurts!



The best explanation I have ever heard comes from Dr. Clark Elliott in his fabulous book “The Ghost in My Brain”. He came up with a great metaphor. It is as if we have 3 energy batteries, an A, B, C battery. 



The most efficient battery is the A battery. For most people, it gets charged up each night with sleep,and lasts throughout the day. When the A battery gets used, we have to turn to our B battery. The B battery does not last as long and takes a lot longer to charge.

When the B Battery runs down, we have to turn to our emergency battery, the C battery. The C battery should be for dire emergencies only. It only lasts a short while and it takes days to recharge. It’s kinda of like your laptop tells you you have 2% battery left. And then it shuts off and the screen goes black. 



When you have a TBI, your A battery gets used up processing things that took no effort before. An enormous percentage of our brain’s energy goes toward processing vision. While it was no problem before, now Processing vision and sound, balance and motion, now takes most of your available energy. So your A batteries are always depleted. 



You are now running on B batteries to do anything else, getting groceries, driving a car, going to work. They are not going to last long. And so you are dipping into the C batteries on a daily basis and not just during an emergency.