Daily Practice Is the Key to Brain Injury Recovery

Source: 3D Animation Production Company/Pixabay

Toddlers practice toilet training. Some young children practice cursive writing while others practice riding a bike. Teens practice problem solving and essay skills through daily homework. But as established adults, we don’t expect to have to practice basic skills, whether cognitive or motor.

After brain injury, that changes.

“The goal of repetitive task training is to practice particular motor functions repeatedly and consistently. This method facilitates the reacquisition of motor skills by encouraging synapse strengthening and cortical reorganization. Both [Constraint-Induced Movement Therapy and Repetitive Task Training] emphasize the idea of experience-dependent neuroplasticity and show promise for enhancing the results of rehabilitation.” (Zotey et al, 2023.)

Practice—that is, repetitive training—matters in healing brain injury. My first psychologist told me that when I don’t practice reading, my brain returns to its default state: The injured state. Not the pre-brain injury state.

In 2002, Carey et al studied intensive finger tracking training in 10 chronic stroke subjects. This training lead to significant improvement in finger dexterity in these individuals.

“We concluded that individuals with chronic stroke receiving intensive tracking training showed improved tracking accuracy and grasp and release function, and that these improvements were accompanied by brain reorganization.”

Repetitive training is like my advanced high-school math class. The teacher taught class for five, ten minutes tops. The rest of the time we solved problems in the textbook, either getting help from classmates or from him. It was supervised practice in school instead of unsupervised practice (homework) at home. I received my highest marks in that class.

It’s one thing to practice new math skills in school or writing skills at home; it’s another to relearn what one had long mastered.

I learnt that practice doesn’t work for cognitive skills until the damaged neurons and neural networks are treated with neurostimulation therapies.

It’s frustrating and grieving trying to regain reading and writing without neurostimulation or neuromodulation.

It’s easy to give up. Left to their natural healing speed, damaged neurons and neural networks regenerate at a glacial pace and learning doesn’t stick. Just as a child must practice over and over, so must an adult with brain injury—not just for a few days or weeks; but for months and years.

Having someone in your corner keeps you encouraged and persisting through the endless months. But what if you don’t have that person, someone to ensure you practice?

After my eye surgery, my brain had to relearn how to perceive and see with 3D binocular vision. As I wrote in my book, Concussion Is Brain Injury: Treating the Neurons and Me:

My eye surgeon advised me “to practice using my eyes in walking, reading, using the computer, etc. Practice would get me back to independence. Movement, of myself, people, dogs, or cars would be the last thing my brain would adapt to.

I had no one to practice with. In my home, I could hang on to my walls. Outside…

Eventually, I received virtual help for walking practice along with gamma-brainwave training and using prescribed neuromodulation 15 minutes ahead of practice time. I improved.

For a time, I received virtual help with reading practice as well. I’d read over the phone to someone; sometimes they’d read to me. But my reading comprehension didn’t progress much that way. I continued to struggle to the point that I gave up in 2018; that’s when I learned about Lindamood-Bell’s Visualizing and Verbalizing program.

After I completed my reading comprehension retraining at Lindamood-Bell, I received virtual support by phone to practice my relearned reading comprehension. Unlike up to 2018, where I read over the phone to another, this time I was encouraged to read for five minutes on my own if I hadn’t already. Gradually, I built up my reading practice time.

Traumatic Brain Injury Essential Reads

The Impact of Head Injury on Brain Health

Traumatic Brain Injuries in the Modern Age

Today, I practice on my own, setting loose reading-level goals—for example, read easy, light, and short novels then move on to easy but more complex mysteries—or physical goals such as reading on a Kobo Libra H2O with text enlarged to shrinking the text size to reading paperbacks. I also monitor how long I read in one go or over the day.

Video calls may provide better support. Like virtual write-ins where writers gather together through video to write silently for a set number of minutes then discuss for a few minutes before writing again, virtual read-ins could provide tangible real-time support. It also normalizes the experience so that you don’t feel the sting of having to relearn a cherished skill.

Almost seven years after I regained reading comprehension, I continue to practice it. The only time I omit daily reading is when I’m writing or revising a novel. I find the cognitive load of creating a fictional story prevents me from reading, no matter how light the novel. At best, I may be able to read for less than 15 minutes one day in the month I write. Until you suffer a brain injury, you don’t realize how complex a cognitive skill reading is and how much energy your brain requires to use it.

Is all the effort worth it?

Yes, when you receive neurostimulation therapy upon which you can build daily practice. You experience permanent, dramatic improvement after the therapy. Practice not only lets you retain that improvement, it increases it over time.

Practice then turns into a daily habit.

In a way, that’s how you can rebuild a lifestyle you used to enjoy. Perhaps it’s daily walks in a local park. Or starting each morning with coffee and a newspaper. Or maybe it’s journaling nightly. Whatever it is you yearn to regain, daily practice is the key to getting there.

Copyright ©2025 Shireen Anne Jeejeebhoy