A Stroke Of Awareness
- justcalljenna2025
- 19 hours ago
- 26 min read
Two years ago, I suffered a stroke that was a complete, terrifying surprise. It wasn't just a medical event; it was my body finally screaming, "Stop!" after years of what doctors called stress poisoning. The constant hustle, the emails, the demands—they literally threw my mind and body out of alignment, resulting in a blood clot in my brainstem.
I almost completely lost my left side. I couldn't walk, talk clearly, or even hold an iPhone. Surviving death was horrific, but the recovery was the real battle. Yet, out of that hospital bed came a profound stroke of awareness—a blueprint for a life redefined by peace, joy, and freedom.
If you’re living in a state of overwhelm, pushing through without a pause, this journey is for you. Learn how to manage stress without being forced to make time for illness. I’m sharing the neuroscience, psychology, and woo woo lessons that helped me rewire my brain, turn a terrible prognosis into a life worth living, and develop a blueprint so you can avoid your own health crisis. Your stroke awareness starts here.
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A Stroke Of Awareness
My Stroke Story
Welcome back to the show. This is my journey to share the vulnerable side of me and what makes me qualified to do this. Two years ago, I had an unexpected stroke. It was horrible, I would not wish it on my worst enemy. The basics of that were that I was packing for a trip, busy with my family, trying to go somewhere, the hustle and bustle of life.
Just like all of us, emails coming in, text messages, phone calls, everybody needs this, you name it. It was overwhelming. I started feeling dizzy and overall unwell. I thought I had food poisoning. It was like being drunk with no alcohol. I just went to throw up in the toilet. I lay down on the cold floor like you do with food poisoning, because the cold floor felt good. When I woke up in the morning, my mom was there.
I had her take me to the hospital just thinking, let us go be sure I do not have COVID, and I am safe to travel. The doctor came back in and said, “Good news, you do not have COVID. Bad news is you are not going anywhere.” Basically, I had suffered three or more what they call mini strokes. I had a blood clot in my brainstem that was forcing me or enforcing balance issues. I could not walk clearly. I could not talk clearly.
I was inside of myself, feeling frustrated that I was not coming out the way I saw myself. They put me in a hospital bed for six days, down on my back. I could not go to the bathroom by myself. I almost completely lost my left side. I could not even hold an iPhone. On the left side, I have no fine motor skills to this day.. I cannot do a zipper. I cannot put on an earring backing.
I cannot even type with two hands. Surviving death was not the worst part. As horrible as that thing is, it was the recovery. When they explained to me that the cause of my stroke was essentially stress poisoning, the overall cortisol spikes and adrenaline shocks to my heart and blood pressure over time had literally thrown my heart and brain completely out of alignment.
My mind and my body could not work together. They were like a couple arguing. There was no common ground. They could not function. I had literally thrown myself so far out of alignment that my body spoke up and said, “You are going to stop right now.” In psychology, they will talk to you about how if you do not make time for your wellness, then you will be forced to make time for your illness. Sounds crazy to all of us who are going about thinking that we are healthy enough.
Recovery-Lifestyle Change
If you do not slow down and you do not stop, you might end up where I was. The great part about this is that what came out of me is the silver lining to this stroke. It was what I learned in the recovery of building a different life, a lifestyle change. It created a blueprint that I want to share with everybody in the world because I want you to be able to enjoy the life that I live now.
Two years later, peace, joy, happiness, content, freedom, give it any word you want. It is a life worth living, and I am pleased to be here alive to live it. The blueprint that came from it is why I am here. Let us go back to my stroke. Lying in that hospital bed, I had lost my left side completely. It could not function. My brain could not function.
When you are healing from a stroke, they use neuroplasticity. It is how the brain rewires. You may have heard the phrase, neurons that fire together, wire together. It is repetitive. Some of this journey will be about habits and how the brain works. It is also going to be a little bit of science, woo-woo, and psychology to get us there. It really takes all of these to build that life. It may seem totally far away now.
When I was in a hospital bed, and they were like, “You can walk and talk again if you want, it was a terrible prognosis.” If I had seen myself the way the doctors told me to be seen, I might not be here. I might still be on a walker or a cane or needing assistance to go to the bathroom. These were not things I was willing to do when there was a chance I could get better. “You mean I do not have to be on this walker like forever, ever?” That was okay with me.
Rick Allen And Bethany Hamilton Stories
I knew it was going to be work. I started with something that I knew growing up in the ‘80s. Rick Allen, drummer of Def Leppard, car accident, lost his left arm. At the time, lying in that hospital bed, I remembered that story. Rick lost an arm. He was able to come back and be the drummer of a major band. He had to do things differently. He created a new drum, but he was a one-armed drummer who managed to take a horrible thing, survive it, and come out better.
Neurons that fire together, wire together.
In all of that, I learned the story of Bethany Hamilton. Bethany was a surfer coming up in Hawaii. Amazing woman. At thirteen, a shark took her left arm. In a month, she was back on her surfboard, paddling, getting better, learning a new way to do everything, balancing differently. Her body was different.
In my head, if Rick Allen could drum again and Bethany Hamilton could surf again, just maybe I could get off a cane. They told me I would never golf again. Every time I go golfing, it is like, “I was not supposed to be able to do this.” I do not have a great drive anymore. My nickname now is Wonderputter. A new side of me came out. If you cannot play the long game, try to play the short game. What does this really mean?
Seeing Yourself Healed
It is really about choosing your mind is a thing. There is a mindset that has to come from it. One of the most important lessons through all of it for me was to see myself healed. As you see yourself healed, the brain does not know the difference if you are healed or if it is just in the mind. As you see yourself healed, it is not going to happen today, but you sort of create that, “I see myself walking again, I see myself talking again.”
At the time I was lying in that hospital bed, that seemed impossible. Remember, I was trying to tell my left hand to move my fingers. It could not even curl fingers around an iPhone. I could not text. I could not type. Again, to this day, it is still not where it was before. In seeing myself healed and holding that feeling, I am not a visual person who can picture in my mind, but seeing myself healed, feeling what it would feel like, imagining in my mind what it would feel like to move my hand, what it would be like to clap again, hold my children, high-five somebody.
Those things, just imagining the feeling, got there. The brain, when you see yourself healed or unhealed, will accept. It is neutral. It does not see the good or bad. It just will give you more of what you tell it you want to see. On this journey, you will get to go on it with me and understand the blueprint. What is really important is for you to understand it is not just psychology, it is not just science, it is not just the woo-woo law of attraction. It is the combination of all of them. At the central place is your brain. It is neutral. If you tell it, I feel good, it will give you more good.
As you see yourself healed, the brain doesn’t know the difference between actual healing and what exists in the mind. So when you visualize yourself healed, it may not happen today, but you begin to create the vision: I see myself walking again. I see myself talking again.
If you tell it, I feel bad, it will give you more bad. Go back to see yourself healed. I saw myself as healed. Not with a vision in my mind, because I am not a visual person. I am a feeler. I thought about what it would feel like to hold my children, what it would feel like to high-five somebody, what it would feel like to lift a spoon to my lips. Feeling those things, my brain said, “We started rewiring.”
I was back at work six months after a life-altering stroke. I should not have survived it. Medically, there is no reason I am here. Soulfully, my soul said I have a purpose. This is my purpose. To give you all a blueprint to not hit that overwhelmed state that messes with your mind, your body, or your soul. I want you to live the life I have now without having to suffer what I did.
Zero stars do not recommend, do not do it. If you can avoid it, please do not. I think thinking about those and understanding are the ways. I want to talk a little bit more about seeing yourself healed and the picture in your mind. Some stories that hit me hard in the learning, not things I knew on day one, but things I know now. Michael Phelps, a huge Olympian swimmer.
Physique, practice, everything else is going in his direction. One of the things, if you look into his story, is that he will play the videotape in his head. His coach would tell him to play the videotape in his head. What does that mean? To keep calm and keep himself together. The night before a race, he would just envision that videotape. How do I swim? What does that look like? How does that happen? Stay calm. Imagine how many strokes it is going to take to get to the wall, what does the turn look like, how many breaths do I have to take?
That is his videotape. Again, I am not a visual person. I could not imagine doing that. I am a feeling thing. I had to feel it. I had to feel what it would be like to be healed. What would it be like to return to my life? I can remember partway through my healing. Let us say it was about three months in. I called a buddy and was like, "I have been off the walker. Let us go golfing."
He was like, "Maybe we should just do lunch." Do not try to rush yourself through that. Everything has a gestation period. Everything has its process. I am not a patient person. The day they gave out patience, I probably left because the line was too long. I am not a patient person. That is not a virtue I possess. Some people are like, "I think you are really patient." No, not at all. Now, is my way.
If you see me driving on the road, it is probably a slow 80. It was very hard to slow down and go through that and take the pause to allow the healing to set in and follow the process. These are some of the lessons that I will talk about through this. I am glad that you are on this journey with me. I really want us to just take a pause, take a step back, and feel vision.
Stress Poisoning
Think about what the future you want is like, and this journey is going to give you all the tools and the roadmap to get there. Let us talk a little bit about stress poisoning. It makes sense when you hear the words stress and poison. Stress poisons you. Maybe you think of a woo-woo version of like you are out of alignment. Some people will say your mind and body are not coherent. However you want to look at it, stress eats the body.
You’re not going to eliminate stress, but you can listen to it.
The brain does not know the difference between imagining something and if it is really happening to you. Think about seeing myself healed. My mind, my brain, did not know whether I was healed or not. I just reinforced that. When we think about stress and being out of alignment, the first rule I want you to understand is that you are not going to eliminate stress, but you can listen to it. Life is going to keep coming. We live in a hustle and bustle society. We are adults with responsibilities, most of us. You cannot stop the pressure of life from happening. Stress is pressure. It makes muscles strain so that they can get stronger. It teaches character. You need a little bit of stress. There is healthy stress.
Neuroplasticity
We are going to learn to listen to it and accept stress, understand pressure, and learn to stop ourselves before we hit overwhelm. Overwhelm signs were hitting me before the stroke. I did not stop, I did not listen, and I tilted the machine. The whole computer rebooted. You do not have to get to that part. We are going to learn to listen to stress.
We are going to understand neuroplasticity. It is your brain's ability to rewire itself. We are going to start daily with little bitty habits that are going to make us better. There are a ton of resources out there. If you want to read books on habit, if you want to read psychology, if you want to watch video clips on the law of attraction, we live in a digital era where tons of information is at your fingertips.
Reshaping Habits
On your phone, you can find any resource you want. I think that those provided me with more overwhelm. As I looked at them, healing, where I was, on a walker, thinking, how could I get to some. Stress to me was going to the doctor and having them say, "At some point, you are going to need to walk a mile." I was like, "I cannot even walk down the driveway yet. What are you talking about?" I started with a plan. I had a fabulous physical therapist who would teach me to give myself grace.
It started with if there was a day I had physical therapy. I was so broken at that time, which did not have to be again forever. It was just my broken then. She would actually tell me that I could not take a shower if I was going to have physical therapy that day. My body would not be able to tolerate both. It could not walk a little bit and take a shower on the same day. It could not. We started small. She basically taught me that the body and the frustration in the mind, my brain was telling my body, "Walk to the end of the block." My body was going, "You are kidding, right?" Understanding that if it were in a manageable chunk, we started figuring out ways in which I could have little wins.
I could have had little successes that reinforced me in seeing myself as healed, but also enforced that I do not need to stress out about this. On this journey, you are going to get to hear a lot about that. You will hear me refer to just one more driveway that came from that fabulous physical therapist who would have me walk around in the corner with my walker and then a cane, but we would just try to get a little bit further instead of trying to get to the end of the block, which seemed impossible and would overwhelm the mind and freak me out.
The more dopamine you give the brain through those little wins, the better it’s going to do.
It seemed impossible. We would just go, "We are going to walk three driveways, and then we are going to turn around and go home." When you are healing, what people forget is that you are not just walking there, you are walking back. Everything you do is double the effort it seems like. Let us say today I walked three driveways, tomorrow I might walk four. By just going a little bit further, I was able to accomplish things, use a little bit of stress and pressure to push myself forward, but not hit the overwhelm where my brain would get frustrated because it was physically impossible at that moment to get to the end of the block.
Three driveways I could do. Tomorrow I walked three driveways. I know I can do it. I was successful at that. Maybe I am just going to try to get to four today. In that process, it is positively using stress. You have to stress yourself and push a little bit for growth. Growth is important, but trying to be perfect, it is overwhelming to the brain. By slowly having these successes and habit loops, you will start to see yourself improve.
It is a feel-good improvement. Remember, my goal is to have you enjoy your life, have a life worth living, and stack your wins. The more dopamine you give the brain or those little wins, the better it is going to do. If I had set my goal, "I am going to walk to the end of the block," that being impossible, imagine the pain that I would feel, and my brain would fight me on it. It would not want to go further.
Cue-Routine-Reward Habits
You have this part of your brain called the basal ganglia. It is a bunch of structures at the bottom of your brainstem, but it is where your habit loops are formed. Cue, reward, routine. That is a basic. If you look up books and science, you will see it. You will see that habits are formed by a cue that tells you to perform the habit, a routine you perform, and a reward you get from it. The reward is dopamine. It enforces neuroplasticity.
It is like that sugar hit, adrenaline rush, whatever you want to call it. It is that feel-good in your brain that makes you want to repeat things. When you do not get the reward of the dopamine hit, your brain goes, "No more of this, we do not like it." You are going to learn where those things in your brain are that help you out. There is a keystone habit that generally performs more and more things for you. For example, there is a book out there called Make Your Bed.
Story Of Eugene Pauly
Did he change his life by making his bed? No. Becoming somebody who every day makes your bed, other places in your life start falling in because of the habit loop. Cue, routine, reward. For example, many of us drive. When you back out of the driveway for the first time at sixteen years old, you might hit a trash can. You have to be super careful. Nowadays, most of us do it on autopilot, while talking on the phone, everything else.
It is wired in there and has become automatic. Back to that basal ganglia, those structures, they create the habit loop. Let us talk about a story that goes along with that. There is a guy who studied neuroscience and the brain, a guy named Eugene Pauly, often called EP. Eugene was an older man who got spinal encephalitis and pretty much lost his short-term memory.
The infection got into his brain, and he literally could not form short-term memories. It was not a manifestation or psychology that could help the man. His brain literally lost function in that section. A fascinating thing happened. His basal ganglia took over, so when they released him from the hospital, he started walking around the neighborhood. He was not sure how he knew how to get home. He literally could not remember the way if you asked him.
The Febreeze Story
Subconsciously, automatically, his brain told him exactly where to go. Step by step, he could go out on a walk, forget the entire walk, but make it back home and go by himself unsupervised. When we talk about stress, it is going to come back into there, understanding how the brain works and using stress for your good or propelling you forward. It’s important. Understanding a keystone habit you change can make changes in all other areas of your life. Let us talk about some other examples that might really help, or at least that helped me understand it. There is the story of Febreze. We all know what that is.
Understanding the keystone habit you change can create positive changes in all other areas of your life.
Febreze, when they were trying to put it out to market, had massive problems with their advertising. They could not get it to become a habit. They gave away free samples. You are talking about a time when women stayed home and cleaned the house. They would give it to women, and it would get stuffed under the sink and not used, even though it was fabulous at eliminating smells. There was no habit loop. One of the guys on the marketing team had actually studied monkeys. They had this monkey watch a TV screen, and if a yellow, blue, or red primary color squiggly showed up, the monkey would pull a lever.
When they pulled that lever, the monkey would get a little drip of juice on its lips. There was the reward. It became so craving for the juice by the habit loop that it would just pull the lever and wait for the juice. The same marketing guy went back to the Febreze thing and said, "How do we make people crave this or get it part of the reward loop?"
They changed their marketing campaign to make Febreze the reward at the end of cleaning. You go clean your house, you spray the sheets, you spray the room just to give you that clean feeling. All of a sudden, Febreze went crazy in the market. It is because they gave it to the reward center of the brain. Understanding habit loops in the brain is important to having a life you want to live. Understanding how your brain works can create the reward loop.
Definition Of Addiction
Cue, routine, reward. Old habits that you might have in there might still be there. I am a recovering party girl. I used to drink, smoke, and eat cheeseburgers. I do not think that my brain still thinks about those things. Do I do them on a different daily basis? No. It’s because I learned how to replace the routine. Still cue the reward or cue the routine and have the reward. I actually had an alcoholic father. I spent a lot of time in Alcoholics Anonymous for teens when I was younger. The American Society of Addiction Medicine defines addiction as a primary chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory, and related circuitry.
Does the habit loop cause addiction? Hold on, wait, stop. You mean I can actually change this or understand how my brain works and replace bad habits with good ones? Absolutely, that is a big part of this journey. We are going to learn what habits we are doing, little by little, that are adding all this stress to us, learn to eliminate some of those things, and we are going to create space to live a life worth living. Science, woo-woo, psychology, they are all going to come into play.
Managing stress from a psychology and neuroscience perspective is managing the brain. Look, you can see yourself healed all you want, but if you do not actually take that inspired action to start moving in the right direction, your brain might see it a little bit, but that does not mean you are going to live up to it. It is a combination. It is going to take action, just like the habit loop, cue, routine, and reward.
You have to give your brain those dopamine hits so it will filter in more of what you like, more of what you need to do. You also have to take action. The routine is you taking action. Just because you are cued to do something does not mean you get to do nothing. There is an accountability-responsibility part of it. Understanding that stress poisoning can be managed without a pill, it can be managed without running away to a mountaintop and meditating all day. Which, by the way, sounds lovely for a day, but not a week.
I need better things to do. Remember, I go a slow 80. That is way too slow for me. You are going to see through all these things in the journey, and I am hoping that all this comes out to all of you. I am hoping that you learn how your brain works. It is going to be a little different from mine, but there are some basics that we all share as human beings.
The cue, reward, routine, and understanding that will absolutely help you manage the stress poisoning in your life and avoid overwhelm. There is a double-edged sword to the habit loop and neuroplasticity. The double-edged sword is that the brain is neutral. It does not care if what you feed it is good or bad. It does not care if the habit is good for you or bad for you.
That survival response or survival mode that the brain goes into is all kinds of interconnected in there. The double-edged sword is that you are the observer of your life. You are the director. You are the one in control. You are going to have to get to a place where you can expand your containers, you can take the blinders off, and start letting in some awareness.
The brain is neutral. It doesn’t care whether what you feed it is good or bad, or whether a habit serves you or harms you. It simply reinforces more of what you give it.
You can start noticing how you feel about things. There will be more talk through this journey on noticing and awareness. My stroke woke me up. I did not know I was going through life on autopilot. I did not realize all the different traumas that had happened in my life, how they shaped it. I did not even understand how stress was affecting me. I just thought stress was part of normal life.
You start with thinking, becoming aware, and hopefully, you can start to live differently before you have to recover from something as horrible as I did. Hoping this journey gives you the roadmap, the blueprint. Hoping that you get to become the best version of you. You get to expand yourself, your awareness, your container, your resilience, whatever it is you need to fix in your life that is making you unhappy.
Remember, the double-edged sword is that the brain is neutral. There are no definitions for it other than what you place. For example, let us say you take two people, two brothers who grow up in the same household, same parents, same experiences, same block, same school, essentially all the same things. You look at the two of them, one of them says, "It was horrible, traumatic, bad, bad, bad."
The other one says, "It was great, it was wonderful, I was so loved, I had all these wonderful experiences." Literally the same experiences. What was different was their definitions. That is how your brain is going to work. That is the double-edged sword. It will matter what you put in the definition. Do you see it as good or bad?
The Secret Self
Those definitions will reinforce your habit loops, which will then reinforce whether stress gives you pressure to become better, or does it literally make you sick and overwhelm you? You have a choice of that. Remember seeing a guy who trained interrogation officials, CIA, whatever you want to call it. Basically, there are three versions for all of us. There is the external self that we show to the public.
There is the private self that you only see behind closed doors. There is the secret self. There is a piece of you that you do not tell anyone. Not your partner, not your best friend, not your mom. You do not tell anybody because that is your secret self. What would people think if they knew? That secret self. Once somebody knows your secret self, you probably are afraid to trust them. You know your secret self. You just have to become aware of it.
There are three versions of all of us. There is the external self we show the public, the private self that’s seen behind closed doors, and the secret self.
That will let you start putting on the definitions. Remember, double-edged sword. Habit loops are created whether things are good or bad. As Eugene Pauly, who learned how to walk again. Some other habits got reinforced by wiring, not so great in his story. Just like mine, some habits are good. I am an adult, I am human. Let me not sit here and say that I am perfect. I am trying to improve every day.
I still have habits and things that I need to change, but the habit loop and understanding how it works help me be patient with myself. Remember, I am not the patient one. It helps me be patient with myself, give myself some grace, notice how I feel about stress, and decide which habits I want to reinforce or not. Remember, I also understand how the basal ganglia work.
It is going to traffic control. It is going to, on its own, tell my brain more of this, less of this. “We got a reward loop. Let us go ahead and do more of this. It feels good. I got the dopamine hit I want. This did not feel good. It made me feel bad. Less of this.” Understanding that and understanding that you have control of the definitions and what you tell it.
Just like I saw myself healed. I was able to put those definitions on it. Brain, good if you can move that left hand. Good if you can walk without that cane. Reward. Good if you can make it three driveways. Now we went to four. Reward. If I tried to make it to the end of the block, it was going to go, "That does not feel good. No more of this." Think about your brain for a minute.
Think about it here on this day, and let us just take a pause and think. What is the one thing you would like to eliminate from your space? To figure it out, I am sure you did. Your secret self told you. You did not need me for that. That thing, just be aware of it. Is it that you want more of it because it is good, or is it that you want less of it because it is bad? Just being aware of it, you started step one into telling the brain stem, the basal ganglia.
You started telling your brain what to direct. You can start noticing the stress. You can start now, noticing the pressure and noticing the habits that form. You do not have to change your habit today. Congratulations, you do not have to be perfect today. You just had to be aware of it. Whatever that thing was, you literally gave the traffic controller in your brain a little stop or go sign.
You don’t have to be perfect today; you just need to be aware.
You are going to keep reinforcing that through the journey, and we are going to look back in a couple of months and go, "Remember when that secret self told you that one thing? Did you go in the right direction and get more of it, or did you stop it because you finally became aware that subconsciously you were doing a lot to reinforce it, good or bad?" One of the things that was really important in the healing of my brain, which by the way was my priority.
I can remember sitting in my living room, after getting home from the hospital, there were three of us in the living room, was literally trying to say cheeseburger. I knew it in my head. My lips could not form it. I was stuttering so badly, my mom thought I was having another stroke. The frustration of trying to get my brain to make me say what I could see. I could see it in my mind's eye. I knew the words. I just could not get it out.
I ended up getting a notepad and writing the word cheeseburger. My mom goes, "I thought you were having another stroke." It was so scary to her, and it was so frustrating to me. What they figured out was that there was a piece of my brain that I could readapt, and it came through reading. Reading is one of the few exercises that you can use to train your brain.
Reading To Train Your Brain
It lights up like a Christmas tree. I highly recommend reading. It uses the center of your brain that does translations of the words and symbols to make you understand them. It uses the language centers of your brain as you translate the words into thoughts. It uses the creative sides of your brain while you are taking in the stories and fantasizing. I read more business books and knowledge-based books.
I know people who are history buffs. I know people who are science fiction freaks. I know people who like murder mysteries. I love a good murder mystery. Understanding that reading was something they gave me as part of my recovery. It came out of the experience of trying to say cheeseburger and being able to write it down because a different center of my brain was able to function and communicate in a different way than I had not done before.
I have written things down. I have read before. I can remember when I was a young kid, my mom was a retired school teacher. I read tons of books when I was younger. Before the stroke, I had probably had my books go on vacation with me. They were well-traveled. I pack a book in a suitcase and say, "I am going to read on vacation." Never picked it up once. Reading a book cover to cover before the stroke, 3, or 4 years maybe? I do not know for sure.
I just did not do it. I never had the time. I always wanted to. I always liked reading, but I just never had the time. When reading became part of my healing, it was just as frustrating as everything else to start out. I started with, "I am going to try to read a page. I am going to try to read a paragraph." I started working on that habit loop. Reward. The first day I read a page was the biggest reward in my mind.
My brain felt like what you might see in the movies when they take those special effects and show somebody reading, writing, working on something in their mind, numbers, letters, everything jumping off the page. You cannot make sense of it. That was my brain trying to read. It took me two months to be able to read a paragraph. Once I started, as it became part of my therapy, or part of my healing journey, again, do not stress out about how far you are reading. You are not reading to finish the book. If it takes you a year to finish, that is okay.
The reward loop came from maybe two months in. I had been trying to read the same paragraph for 3 or 4 days. It was so frustrating that I could read it and then go, "I do not know what I just read." It was painful. I knew my brain was smarter than that, but it could not remember. Somewhere magically, the day I read the paragraph, it was remembered. All of a sudden, I remembered what I read.
I read a page. The joy was that I went down the room screaming at the top of my lungs, "I read a page." My family thought I was absolutely nuts. I was more excited than I can even explain to you. My brain worked. “It worked.” As that lighting up of the brain centers went with the healing, it became reading more and more.
On average, I read 75 to 100 books a year. One to two books a week is my average. It was part of what I had to. It was important that I did. Once the reward loop worked, like my keystone habit, reading, other habits started forming well. That reward loop started, and I get the joy of reading and understanding.
The joy is that it helps me manage stress because of how I placed it in my life. For me, reading is in the morning. Every morning, it is my space. I read. I have not woken up to an alarm in over a year. I cannot tell you the joy and peace in that. No snooze button to hit. I wake up on my own. I let the dog out. I sit in a certain chair, and I read.
Reinforcing The Habit Loop
I order books and keep them on rotation. I recommend books to friends. I lend books to friends. Why does all that matter? At the end of the day, I get to learn and fill my brain with knowledge that is important, but I am also reinforcing the habit loop. My brain is constantly expanding. Every day to me is still healing, expanding, growing. Going back to that hospital bed, and being in a stroke, needing help to go to the bathroom, overwhelming myself to that level, that is a hard pass.
No, that is a one-and-done. I am never doing that again. If it happens, just go ahead and take me. I am done. The recovery road was painful. Every day is still healing. Every day, I reinforce that habit loop. Being aware of what is going on, being aware of how my brain works, how my secret self works, and noticing how the stress works. I can learn from it.
I can pay attention to it, but I am not going to eliminate stress. Life keeps coming. It is never going to stop coming. There is always somebody who wants another piece of you. There is always something demanding your attention. The more connected our worlds, the more demands there are on us. I think a lot about how every day is still healing. Every day I read, I am expanding myself.
For me, I actually like to think of reading like having conversations with some amazing individuals that I am never going to get the chance to meet physically in person. I am having conversations with people who have passed. I am having conversations with people who have done amazing things, and I am learning from them.
I am expanding based on what they can tell me. I can add that awareness back into my life, understand how my brain works, pay attention to my stress, and see myself. If I want to take those things on, how does this enforce my habit loop in the direction I want to go? Thanks for joining me on my stroke of awareness journey. Remember, karma is real, your energy is contagious, so check your VABs.
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