Strokes & neuroanatomy — what’s your monkey mind up to?
left brain, right brain, wallpapername.com
May is Stroke Awareness Month. According to the World Stroke Organization, there are over 12M strokes worldwide per year. Strokes are becoming more frequent (1 in 4 over a lifetime vs 1 in 6 thirty years ago). Strokes are affecting younger and younger people too (22% are younger than 50, and almost 70% are younger than 70). Let that sink in - 70% are younger than 70.
Over the years, strokes have become more prevalent in women. Here in the US, strokes kill twice as many women as breast cancer according to the CDC. Surprised? So was I. The good news: 4 out of 5 are preventable.
According to the World Stroke Organization, elevated systolic BP and poor diet are the leading stroke risk factors. And although stress isn’t listed in their top 10, there are more and more studies being conducted on the effects of stress on our bodies (e.g. Harvard, British Heart Foundation).
Thinking back to my series of strokes … Yes, my blood pressure was high. Yes, my cholesterol seemed a bit high. And definitely, there were physical lifestyle changes I needed to make, which I eventually did over a 3 1/2 year period.
One of the changes was managing my monkey mind.
“Calming the Monkey Mind”
Psychology Today
By watching our monkey minds and mental chatter we each have an opportunity to meet ourselves as ourselves, according to Natalie Goldberg. We can learn to accept our running commentaries while knowing our relationships are very much a part of who and how we define ourselves too.
My mental chatter or monkey mind as Buddhists coined (think of drunken monkeys running around in your head and you get the idea) needed some remodeling.
Some days, I ask — “Where is the off button to fall asleep without my personal director’s cut turned on? Even monkey mind needs her beauty sleep and downtime — right?”
But, from personal experience, my “unexplained strokes” held an unhealthy dose of stress swirling around in my head trying to “juggle” everything. There wasn’t much time for exercise or personal time to better manage my BP. Correction, I didn’t prioritize exercise and personal time.
Until … a moment right before Thanksgiving in 2007 when my brain went off-line with my to-do list and all of a sudden I had a lot of time to prioritize me. I was 49, way too young to have a stroke, or so I thought.
What’s the saying? “If you don’t have time for exercise, you better make time for being sick.” Once I focused on creating a healthy ecosystem, I had more time for my inner space, despite not being able to share it with anyone at the time because of aphasia (speech issues).
I will say what was going on in my head (and I don’t mean the ischemic stroke blockage of blood flow to my brain) was equally important. The mental chatter running laps around my mind seemed just as consequential to understand and work with during my recovery — if I wanted to stabilize my long-term health.
A year after my strokes, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor gave a TedTalk in 2008 about her stroke called: My Stroke of Insight. To set the stage: there are 3 types of strokes:
Ischemic (blockage of blood to the brain) - most common, mine
Hemorrhagic (bleeding in the brain) - Dr. Jill’s
TIA (Transient Ischemic Attack) or warning stroke - my first stroke
As a neuroanatomist, Dr. Jill had a rare opportunity to study a stroke from the inside out. She explained the differences between our right and left hemispheres. I appreciated her comparisons to computer processing with my computer science background juxtaposed with the poetry of how our minds work.
right hemisphere: like a parallel processor focuses on the present moment, thinks in pictures, learns through kinesthetic movement, and absorbs sensory input (my poetry exists here)
left hemisphere: as a linear processor operates linearly & methodically, can envision past and future while picking through current time arranging and sorting (lining up my M&Ms by color exists here)
left brain, right brain, wallpaper.com
Dr. Jill discovered she was spending more time in her right brain during her stroke and recovery, a place where we’re all connected. She believes everyone should spend more time there; same here.
“I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be.”
— Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor
My goal is to share my experience and hopefully save others from the off-line tunnel of feeling you might be disappearing and not knowing if or when “you’d be back to normal.” I’m with Dr. Jill on prioritizing more time with the right sides of our brains through:
meditation
time in nature
creative endeavors, whether writing or cooking or painting or dancing or photographing or making beer
Why does this matter? Because creating a healthy personal ecosystem isn’t just about healthy eating and exercise. Spending more time with the right side of our brains and how we channel our creative selves in the moments of our lives contributes to balancing our ecosystems. For me, that’s evolved into day trips to the Oregon Coast, listening to music with my husband, vegan cheffing, time alone going on walks, and my morning ritual of coffee and writing.
How do you make time for your creative selves in your healthy ecosystem?
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