Attention can be affected in many ways following a brain injury. As a result, a personalized approach to treatment that focuses on each individual’s specific attention deficits is ideal.

Below, we’ll go over some of the best practices for improving concentration skills after brain injury:

1. Focus on Your Overall Health

As we mentioned above, sometimes it’s not just cognitive issues that lead to attention problems. Lack of sleep, a poor diet, pain, stress, and side effects from medications may contribute to attention problems. Therefore, along with other specific treatments, it can help to also focus on your overall health to maximize recovery.

The mind and body are closely connected. If you keep your body healthy, you’ll likely notice your mental strength improving as well. Here are a few tips that can help you improve overall health:

• Exercise regularly. Try to get at least 30 minutes of exercise every day. Exercise helps promote circulation to the brain, which can improve overall cognitive and physiological functioning.
• Eat a healthy brain injury diet. What you eat can significantly affect your ability to focus. Try to also incorporate important vitamins for brain injury, which may help supplement essential vitamins and minerals lacking in your current diet.
• Get enough sleep. Sleep repairs brain cells and helps the brain recharge so it can focus throughout the day. If you have trouble falling or staying asleep, consult with a sleep specialist.
• Stay hydrated. If your brain doesn’t get enough water, it may affect your ability to concentrate. Try to drink at least 64 oz per day.

2. Work with a Cognitive-Behavioral Therapist

One of the most effective ways to improve attention after a brain injury is to work with a psychologist that specializes in cognitive-behavioral therapy.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy focuses on identifying the situations in your daily life that can be affected by attention problems and encouraging more effective ways to manage them.

Simple strategies like writing things down, setting reminders on your phone, and reiterating what is going on during a conversation can help you work through attention problems.

3. Practice Attention Exercises Consistently

Consistent practice plays a crucial role in improving attention skills after brain injury. The brain has an adaptive healing mechanism called neuroplasticity, which allows it to rewire itself and relearn functions affected by injury. The best way to promote it is through consistently practicing the skills you want to improve.

Repetitively practicing attention exercises helps stimulate the brain and reinforces demand for attention skills. The more you practice, the stronger the neural pathways for that function become.

4. Download Cognitive Therapy Apps

An excellent way to practice attention exercises is to download a cognitive therapy app on your phone or tablet. For example, the CT Speech and Cognitive Therapy App includes over 100,000 exercises designed by speech-language pathologists to help improve cognitive skills like attention after a neurological injury.

Having access to attention exercises whenever you need them can empower you to practice more repetitions throughout the day. The CT app’s smart artificial intelligence technology helps ensure that the exercises you’re practicing are just the right difficulty level to keep you engaged and optimize your results.

5. Ask Your Doctor About Medications

If your attention problems are severe, ask your doctor about medications that may help improve your ability to focus. However, medications may not be ideal for all individuals due to potential side effects, so do not take any without permission from your physician.

Now that you understand some of the most effective ways to improve attention problems, let’s discuss helpful tips to keep in mind when practicing attention exercises.

Helpful Tips for Improving Attention After Brain Injury

To improve attention after brain injury, focus on making simple changes to your everyday routine. Although they may not seem like much, they can yield significant results.

Here are three tips that can help you manage your attention problems and improve your concentration:

• Clear your environment. It helps if you make your work as distraction-free as possible. When you need to focus, try to keep your desk organized, turn off the TV or radio, and use noise-canceling headphones or earplugs.
• Start small. If your attention problems make it challenging for you to focus for more than a few minutes, try breaking whatever you are working on into smaller tasks. This helps make each task more approachable and less overwhelming.
• Build up slowly. Once you break an activity down to a manageable level, start gradually increasing the load. You should feel challenged, but not overwhelmed. This should help gradually accustom the brain to handling a greater workload.

Every brain injury survivor will have a unique starting point. As long as you continue to challenge yourself by consistently practicing activities that require focus, your attention should improve.

Attention Problems After Brain Injury: Key Points

After a brain injury, individuals may experience a wide range of attention problems at varying severities. This is because many regions of the brain affect one’s ability to focus. Fortunately, there are several ways to help improve your focus so that you can overcome attention difficulties.

We hope this article has helped you understand why attention problems may occur after brain injury and how to successfully manage them.

It’s essential to properly manage incontinence after brain injury to prevent further complications from developing.

Complications_[1],[2] associated with urinary and fecal incontinence after brain injury include:

• Skin irritation
• Pressure ulcers
• Skin infections
• Leaking
• Urinary tract infections
• Formation of bladder stones
• Kidney failure

Moreover, lack of bladder and/or bowel control can significantly affect one’s functional independence and social life. Individuals may develop avoidant behaviors due to anxiety about bladder- and bowel-related accidents.

Fortunately, incontinence after brain injury can often be successfully managed, enabling individuals to live their best quality of life.

How to Manage Incontinence After Brain Injury

Overcoming incontinence after brain injury requires patience and dedication, but it is possible for many.

The following are some of the best methods for managing incontinence after brain injury.

Bladder/Bowel Retraining

Bladder/bowel retraining exercises help retrain your brain to hold back the urge to release waste. It works by activating your brain’s adaptive healing mechanism, neuroplasticity.

Plenty of task-specific repetition is essential for promoting neuroplasticity, which means you will need to practice bladder and bowel retraining consistently to see results.

First, schedule bathroom visits at least every hour. Then, while on the toilet, try to hold back for ten seconds before letting yourself go. Gradually increase the amount of time between bathroom breaks (but try not to wait more than a few hours) and how long you hold.

Additionally, it helps to keep a “bladder diary” to record when you last visited the restroom and when any accidents occur. If you notice that incontinence tends to occur at a certain time, schedule your bathroom breaks about 30 minutes before that.

Dietary Changes

Adjusting your diet will help keep the bladder and bowel healthy and reduce accidents. Some advice for a good diet includes:

• Eat foods with plenty of fiber. This will prevent constipation and other digestion problems.
• Stay hydrated. While it may sound counterproductive, be sure to drink lots of water. Even though that will make you produce more urine, it will also reduce the risk of bladder infections and teach your bladder to hold more fluid at once.
• Avoid caffeine and alcohol. Do not consume drinks containing caffeine or alcohol, as they may irritate the bladder and make incontinence worse.

Pelvic Floor Muscle Exercises

Pelvic floor exercises will strengthen the pelvic floor muscles, the muscles that control the release of urine and feces. Kegels are some of the most common exercises used for both men and women to increase control over the pelvic floor. To complete Kegel exercises, simply squeeze the muscles you use to stop urinating.

There are two different types of Kegel exercises you can practice: slow contractions and quick contractions.

Slow contractions will increase your pelvic floor muscles’ stamina, which will allow you to hold your bladder for longer periods. Here’s how to do them:

• Slowly tighten the pelvic floor muscles and squeeze them for as long as possible. Try to avoid squeezing your thighs and/or abdominal muscles, and don’t hold your breath.
• Relax for 10-20 seconds, then repeat.
• Increase the number of seconds you hold until you can do ten slow contractions for ten seconds each.
• Do these exercises three times each day.

Quick contractions, on the other hand, will increase the strength of the pelvic floor muscles. They will also help prevent leaking when you are coughing, laughing, or exercising. To perform quick contractions, follow these steps:

• Quickly squeeze the muscles
• Hold for just one second
• Relax for three seconds, then repeat
• Do ten squeezes, three times each day

The more you do these exercises, the stronger the pelvic floor muscles will become. Eventually, you should regain more control of your bladder.

For more specialized treatment, consider asking your doctor to refer you to a physical or occupational therapist with specific training in pelvic floor therapy. There, they may give you different pelvic floor exercises to work on and can use methods such as electrical stimulation and biofeedback to help improve the connection between the brain and the pelvic floor.

Catheterization

In severe cases of incontinence after brain injury, doctors may recommend using a catheter.

Most of the time they will give you an indwelling catheter, which can be removed easily. If you require a more permanent solution, doctors might install a suprapubic catheter, which is surgically implanted into the bladder.

Individuals who use a catheter should also make sure to regularly check that there are no bends or clogs in the tube to prevent the development of further complications.

Generally, it’s recommended to avoid prolonged catheterization and encourage individuals to start a bladder/bowel retraining program and/or pelvic floor therapy as soon as possible. This helps individuals develop the skills necessary to recover bladder and bowel control. As previously mentioned, the key to recovering skills affected by TBI is to continuously practice them to promote adaptive changes in the brain.

Medications

Depending on what type of bladder and/or bowel problems an individual experiences after brain injury, a doctor may recommend various types of medications.

For example, Botox injections or anticholinergics can help relax the bladder muscles. When the bladder muscles are too tight, individuals often feel the urge to urinate, even when the bladder is not full.

Likewise, individuals who struggle with bowel control after brain injury may benefit from bulking agents, laxatives, or stool softeners.

However, medications can have adverse side effects and may not be safe for all individuals following brain injury. Speak to your doctor to determine what medications may help your specific type of bladder or bowel problem.

Up next, we’ll discuss tips for living with incontinence after brain injury.

Tips for Living with Incontinence After Brain Injury

Even though it is possible to overcome incontinence after a head injury, it will not be a quick or easy fix.

In the meantime, here are some helpful tips for dealing with the effects of incontinence after brain injury:

• Use incontinence pads and pants to keep fluid away from your skin.
• Keep an extra set of clothes in your car.
• Wear pants without zippers or buttons so they can be removed quickly.
• Keep hand sanitizer and wipes with you wherever you go.
• Set alarms on your phone to remind you when to visit the restroom.
• Check your skin using a mirror regularly to ensure that you are not having any skin breakdown, which could lead to a pressure ulcer.

These tips should help you manage the worst aspects of incontinence while you work on retraining your bladder.

Remember, the more you practice controlling your bladder and bowel movements, the better you will get at it. As your brain continues to heal, you should start to see your incontinence fade.

Incontinence After Brain Injury: Key Points

Incontinence after brain injury is the result of disrupted communication between the brain, bladder, and bowel muscles. This can present challenges to one’s functional independence as leakage or discomfort may occur.

Luckily, many individuals learn to effectively improve their incontinence and consequently boost their quality of life. We hope this article helps you understand why incontinence occurs after brain injury and how to manage it.

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