2025-10-29
This is a pretty niche topic; I don't imagine there are many of us out there.
Actually, to be strict, I'd say this advice is tailored to people who've had hemorrhagic stroke in the parietal lobe with residual epilepsy...
I was 29 and around 12 years into my career when it all happened, and in the six years since then I've had time to learn a bit more about my new self.
The first tip is to just stop. Fatigue, fuzziness, nausea, or affected-sided weird sensations are non-negotiable stop signals. So go lie down, hydrate, reset. Close your eyes and think about the cottage or lonely mountain you want to retire to. Escape the overwhelming mental or physical space.
HEADPHONES, blinders, and 'No'. Eliminate unwanted inputs at the earliest point of entry. Work from home or environments where you can control most variables. Routes of escape and rest are important.
Health above performance every single time. Metrics and productivity be damned. Self-advocate, and all that. Reject with directness any demands made of you that cross the threshold.
Laws. Use them. You don't have to rely on good behaviour and kindness. You are, depending on your location, usually protected by all types of anti-discrimination legislation, implicit and explicit. Use your employee assistance programs too.
Single-thread it all! Less context switching. Batch your work, finish one thing, then move to the next. Externalize working-memory. Use notebooks, whiteboards, and lists instead of juggling state in your head. I am not good at this, and over-stretch my brain, leading to auras, overwhelm, and general sickness. Terrible idea.
Related: Sssh to the AI naysayers. Use it as your help and scratchpad. Let it hold state so your brain can judge rather than store and needlessly cogitate on stuff. You don't have to do this alone out of some purity fetishism. You, too, have a limited context window. Sorry!
Do the heavy thinking in your peak window (for me, that's the morning); push everything else to later. Spend your time more carefully than your money.
Pick the route of least attention. Attention is expensive, and rarely needed as much as we think it is. It's a heavy toll to pay. Unless you're in an ops or monitoring role, you don't need to be synchronously active. DISABLE NOTIFICATIONS.
AVOID long meetings. Emails are good. Oh god am I bad at this? YES, I like people so I like some meetings, but communicating is so so expensive. Being polite is also expensive; It's not nice to have to tell people they're draining you.
I think that's mostly it. I'm still working on this stuff. And would probably grade myself pretty poorly. One day I'll be better at saying no, at advocating for myself, and knowing how to navigate the disappointment of others.
Footnote & some casual research: If you're into this, here's some stuff I found out related to my specific injury location and how it might apply to my work. This was gathered with help from gemini when I was struggling with left-arm and eye prodromes after long coding sessions:
Frontal and parietal cortices form a flexible control system that holds goals, routes attention, and updates task sets; this "multiple-demand" network scales with task complexity and underpins how we store, manipulate, and decide on information during work[1][2][3]. Superior parietal cortex is especially taxed when we transform or reorganize information in working memory rather than simply maintain it, which is why mental navigations, refactors, and other transformations feel costly[4][5]. Frequent context switches recruit lateral prefrontal and parietal regions and increase control load, so hopping between threads repeatedly spikes demand on this same circuitry[6][7]. After AVM resection (what I had!) or stroke generally, tissue near the lesion can remain hyperexcitable with impaired neurovascular coupling; heavy cognitive load lowers seizure threshold and can produce somatosensory auras and body-image distortions from parietal cortex[8][9][10].
Thanks for reading :) Tonnes of love to all the stroke survivors out there <3