There are two things I will do in response to a crisis. The first is that I will undertake a great many walks. The second is that I will resort to making blog entries. One sparks the other.
This morning I went for an extended three hour walk. During the walk, I tried not to think about anything other than the changing scene ahead of me. Despite this, ideas popped into mind.
There is a consistency between my periods of extended effort. The first effort was associated with the written appeal of the original insurance claim decision. That work commenced in late October 2012 and ran through to the first week of January 2013. My latest project started the last week of January 2015 and ran through to this past week. There was a third period of effort that concerned the development of the TBI Proposal. This was also a three month effort.
There have been other periods of concentrated effort but these three stand out at the moment. Each was roughly three months in length. Each involved me in a concentrated “push” to move the work through to completion. Each resulted in a burnout.
My hunch is that each of these episodes involved the application of the CCN network, that part of the brain unique to humans. The CCN provides our species with a “volitional over-ride.” It allows us to overcome our natural fear and make entry into a burning building, or to throw ourselves over a grenade that threatens to destroy the other members of our team.
Learning to invoke the CCN is critical to recovery from brain injury. The victim has a damaged brain with some form of impaired response. She is able to overcome that impaired response through cultivating the volitional action of the CCN and learning how to force a response which would otherwise be absent from her behavioural repertoire due to the injury. My hunch is that each of my “efforts” has involved this CCN network.
With the appeal, I forced myself into round the clock work in order to complete it by the imposed submission deadline. With the TBI Proposal there was an equivalent self-imposed deadline. I remember discussing this activity with my doctors and being told I was not ready to proceed with the project so it lay dormant for over a year. The most recent project also involved a self-imposed deadline.
During this morning’s walk, I realized there exists a commonality between these events. My hunch is that each one invoked the operation of the CCN network to accomplish work that is outside my capacity, work that required a forced effort. That I undertook this forced effort but one undesired outcome is that I drain the cognitive capacity of the CCN network. I overextend it in some way that gradually diminishes its functional capacity. The result is my sense of burnout, and an increasing inability to proceed with the activity.
This observation results in the hypothesis that the CCN incorporates some form of “cognitive reserve.” This reserve is initially available to me and I am able to apply it to the desired task. Continued utilization of the CCN burns through, or otherwise depletes, this cognitive reserve. This results in a degradation of my abilities and an increasing inability to continue at the same level of performance. I suffer a performance decline despite seeking to pace myself and despite incorporating both rest periods and extended breaks. Over time, these breaks fail to provide the refreshment they provided earlier. This inability to “self-repair” contributes to the gradual loss of functional capacity.
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