Mindfulness and meditation techniques are both effective methods for lowering blood pressure after head injury.

Mindfulness simply means staying mentally present to your surroundings and the current moment. This helps you ignore the constant chatter that our brains normally produce, which is often the source of our stress and anxiety.

To stay mentally present, it helps to have a point of focus that pulls your attention to your body. For most people, this point of focus is their breath.

When your mind focuses on your breath, it’s much harder for thoughts and worries to get in. It gives you a chance to step back from the constant tailspin of anxiety and observe what you are feeling with a clear mind.

Mindfulness is one of the principles behind yoga, which is an excellent technique for reducing blood pressure.

In fact, studies have found that yoga practices can decrease diastolic blood pressure by 3.6 mmHg, which is comparable to many blood pressure medications.

High Blood Pressure After Head Injury: Key Points

High blood pressure is a rare but serious secondary effect of head injury. If left untreated, it can lead to cognitive decline and increase your risk of stroke.

Treating high blood pressure may also help improve mental clarity after head injury. Therefore, if no other treatments are helping, get your blood pressure checked. It’s possible that it is making your cognitive function worse.

Lifestyle changes such as meditation, exercise, and a healthy diet can all help lower blood pressure. If these changes do not work, some medications may help.

As always, talk with your doctor before starting any new drugs or making any changes in your diet. They can help you make the best decision for your health.

Persons who experience flat affect after brain injury often show certain symptoms, such as:

• Monotone speaking
• No change in facial expression
• Avoidance of eye contact
• Neutral body language (i.e. relaxed and staying still in a situation where they should be tense)

It’s important to realize that patients with flat affect can still experience emotions, they have simply lost the ability to express themselves.

People with brain injury can also develop a condition known as blunted affect or “emotional blunting.”  Symptoms of blunted affect are similar to flat affect, but instead of showing no emotions, the person’s expressions are simply restrained.

Blunted affect is most common in patients with PTSD.

These symptoms can make the person appear as though they do not care about anything or other people. But for most brain injury patients, this is not true. They do care, they just are having difficulty showing it.

Treating Flat Affect After Brain Injury

The best way to treat flat affect after brain injury is to address the root causes.

For example, it is possible that your depression or PTSD is causing you emotional problems. Addressing them with a therapist and medication may help lift your flat affect.

Sometimes, flat affect can occur jointly with other cognitive effects that make it difficult for patients to understand which emotions they feel. In those cases, cognitive-behavioral therapy can be useful.

Using Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Flat Affect

CBT therapists can teach patients how to identify their emotions and react appropriately. They do this through a series of exercises that help a person better understand their behavior and the emotions that might have caused it.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy can also retrain people to use facial expressions when interacting with others. For example, a therapist might help you learn to smile and make eye contact when you say hello to someone.

The more you practice these behaviors, the more you will rewire your brain until these actions feel natural again.

Speech Therapy

Another therapy that can help you overcome flat affect is speech therapy. Specifically, speech therapy can help you eliminate a monotone voice.

A monotone voice usually occurs after a right hemisphere injury. The brain’s right hemisphere controls a person’s awareness and appreciation of music. This awareness also plays a part in the way we speak.

When a person suffers damage to the right side of their brain, not only can their ability to appreciate music be diminished, but they may also have trouble picking up on the subtle changes in pitch or tone during speech.

This diminished musical ability can cause the person to sound monotone when speaking, giving them an almost robotic voice.

Speech therapists can help you regain the ability to control the pitch and tone of your voice. They do this through a therapy called melodic intonation therapy (a.k.a. music therapy).

Once again, the more you practice music therapy, the better you will get at controlling your voice. That’s the power of neuroplasticity!

Caring for Someone With Flat Affect After Brain Injury

When a loved one has flat affect, it can often feel like they have become cold and withdrawn, which can put a strain on relationships.

It might help to remember that your loved one most likely is just as frustrated by their lack of emotions as you. But while they can’t translate their feelings into physical or verbal expressions, that doesn’t mean they don’t care.

Still, it’s important to take care of your own mental health too. You might want to consider talking to a therapist familiar with brain injury. They can offer more personalized advice for coping with flat affect.

Overcoming Flat Affect After Brain Injury

Flat affect can be a challenging symptom of brain injury to deal with. But fortunately, there is hope for recovery.

Whether your lack of emotions is caused by depression or brain damage, cognitive and speech therapy can help. By practicing emotional expression with a therapist, you can rewire the brain to express emotion again.

Even if you don’t feel emotions right away, learning how to better communicate non-verbally can help improve important relationships in your life.

If you like our content, you’ll love our ebook and newsletters! Get instant access to our TBI recovery tips ebook with 20 pages of helpful advice by signing up below.

You’ll also receive our emails that share survivor stories and more useful TBI recovery tips, which you can opt out of at any time. (We know you’ll love them, too.)

We will never sell your email address, and we never spam. That we promise.