Your Weekly Dose of #5ThoughtsFriday: A description of what we think is important at BIAMD
  #5Thoughts Friday
The "Bolero" Edit ion
11/22/2019
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Here are the 5 things we thought were
worth sharing with you this week:
Photo by  Sharon McCutcheon  on  Unsplash
This Article is part of BIAMD's Original Content Initiative, and will become a part of the Member Exclusive content available on the BIAMD Member Portal coming soon.

Self –advocacy. We hear this phrase a lot when people are looking resources, or when families are looking for help for their loved one who has had a brain injury. So what does that really mean? Self-advocacy is the process of speaking up for yourself and your needs, and, if the situation calls for it, also doing what you need to, to make sure your needs are met (Madison, 2018).

Examples of self-advocacy include working with professionals, family members, and loved ones to help make life choices, being able to control your quality of life, and voicing your own wishes and needs. These examples could also be categorized as self-determination. Self-determination is the idea that all individuals deserve to have control over their lives and their futures. People with disabilities are often told they cannot or should not control their own lives, but all people deserve to direct their lives and supports.

One way to do this is to learn self-advocacy skills. Developing these skills often requires taking stock of your unique strengths and possible challenges. If you or the people close to you anticipate issues, you can then work on identifying strategies to help navigate those challenges. Self-advocacy can also mean giving support to a cause. Since your experience with brain injury is unique, you have a special opportunity to contribute your knowledge and experience within your community, whether it is at a legislative level, in support groups, or through helping another individual navigate the system you have been through.

CLICK HERE to read the article.
Photo by  Sharon McCutcheon  on  Unsplash
Experiences like hearing voices are leading psychologists to question how all people perceive reality.
There’s a good chance you’ve hallucinated before.

If you’ve ever felt the buzz of your phone against your thigh only to realize the sensation was entirely in your head, you’ve had a sensory perception of something that isn’t real. And that, according to the psychologist Philip Corlett, is what makes a hallucination.

To many, this definition may seem shockingly broad. Hallucinations were long considered the stuff of psychoses or drug trips, not a regular and inconsequential part of life. But Corlett operates on the idea that hallucinations exist within a hierarchy. At the highest level, according to Corlett’s collaborator Albert Powers, they would be something like hearing “whole sentences of clearly spoken speech of a being who seems quite real.” But, moving further down the line, hallucinations can be far more banal: an imagined text message, a phantom raindrop, a new parent’s mistaken sense of her child by her bedside.

This hierarchy perspective represents an ongoing revelation in how widespread and varied hallucinations can be. A survey in the early 1990s found that 10 to 15 percent of the population of the United States experienced vivid sensory hallucinations at some point in their lives. And scientists have begun to take seriously the idea that voice hearing and other forms of auditory hallucination can be benign or “nonclinical.” This newfound ubiquity has come with a host of questions. Why is it so common for people to perceive what isn’t there, and how does the brain allow this to happen in the first place? To find answers, researchers have turned to the mechanics of how we perceive reality itself. 

CLICK HERE to check and make sure the rest of the article is actually there.
Photo by  Toa Heftiba  on  Unsplash
If you’ve lived and breathed and owned a phone in the 21st century, chances are high that you’ve participated in what I like to call cancel-reschedule ping-pong: You make plans but somebody has to bail, so you move the date; sometimes it only takes one reschedule to pin things down, but some encounters stretch into full-on tournament mode, each of you lobbing proposed times at each other until you’re both fatigued by the whole thing. Things go one of two ways: Either you eventually abandon the meetup, or you let it sink further and further into the future, hoping that one day, by some astrological miracle, your calendars will finally align. (For reference, The New Yorker’s “ Let’s Get Drinks” nails this phenomenon pretty well.)

It’s annoying, sure, but if you’re being honest with yourself, doesn’t it also feel at least a little good to bail? Comedian John Mulaney once quipped: “In terms of instant relief, canceling plans is like heroin … such instant joy.” I can’t disagree. As a reformed former chronic canceler, I knew that feeling all too well — the relief that would flood me like an endorphin rush after I flaked on brunches, after-work drinks, Tinder dates (a specialty), yoga classes, and networking events.

CLICK HERE then graciously beg off that Friendsgiving Party!
2) What We are Reading to We Think
You Might FInd Interesting
We spend a shocking 43 percent of our day doing things without thinking about them. That means that almost half of our actions aren’t conscious choices but the result of our non-conscious mind nudging our body to act along learned behaviors. How we respond to the people around us; the way we conduct ourselves in a meeting; what we buy; when and how we exercise, eat, and drink―a truly remarkable number of things we do every day, regardless of their complexity, operate outside of our awareness. We do them automatically. We do them by habit. And yet, whenever we want to change something about ourselves, we rely on willpower. We keep turning to our conscious selves, hoping that our determination and intention will be enough to effect positive change. And that is why almost all of us fail. But what if you could harness the extraordinary power of your unconscious mind, which already determines so much of what you do, to truly reach your goals?

Wendy Wood draws on three decades of original research to explain the fascinating science of how we form habits, and offers the key to unlocking our habitual mind in order to make the changes we seek. A potent mix of neuroscience, case studies, and experiments conducted in her lab, 

CLICK HERE and get a jump start on your 2020 resolutions?
1) Quote We Are Contemplating...

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.”


Have you ever clicked on the pictures posted at the end of every #5ThoughtsFridays? Try it. You might learn something fun!
Photo by Todd Ruth on Unsplash
HAVE A SENSATIONAL WEEKEND
and a MARVELOUS
THANKSGIVING HOLIDAY. 

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  Thanks for reading! Have a wonderful weekend.