My Stroke of Insight: Four Ways to Rethink Life’s Hardest Moments

When neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor was 37, she suffered a massive, paralyzing stroke that left her unable to speak and shot her memory. Over the course of many years of recovery, Jill rebuilt her life.

Here are four pivotal lessons Dr. Taylor shares in her book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey.

1. Everyone is carrying something you can’t see.

Before her stroke, Jill described how it was hard for her to be patient with other people’s mistakes and to not take things personally. After her own struggles, she realized how much people are carrying inside of them that we can’t see.

She writes, “It’s really easy for me to be kind to others when I remember that none of us came into this world with a manual about how to get it right. I consider how much painful emotional baggage we are biologically programmed to carry around. I recognize that mistakes will be made, but this does not mean that I need to either victimize myself or take your actions and mistakes personally.”

A cardinal mitzvah of Judaism is to love your neighbor like yourself. Just as most people have no idea of what you’re going through, remember that you usually can’t see the challenges in someone else’s life, and everyone is going through something.

2. Re-evaluate your first reaction.

One of the crucial insights that Jill shared during her recovery is how the seat of your emotions, the limbic system, essentially stays the same your whole life. So when you are first triggered in any situation, your first reaction may actually be the same as it was when you were a toddler. So it’s critical to pause and decide if your reaction is appropriate in the current context.

“When our emotional buttons are pushed, we retain the ability to react as though we were a two-year-old, even when we are adults. When we compare the new information of our thinking mind with the automatic reactivity of our limbic mind, we can reevaluate the current situation and purposely choose a more mature response.”

As psychologist Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”

Human beings have free will to pause and reevaluate their emotional response and to choose a more mature course of action.

3. Use Gratitude to Change Your State.

Following her stroke, there were many days when Jill felt pulled towards despair. She had to relearn everything – how to walk, talk and read. Whenever she felt exhausted and hopeless, she would search for something to be thankful for. “The easiest way I have found to humble myself back into a state of peaceful grace is through the act of gratitude.”

No matter how difficult life seems right now, there is always something you can find to be grateful for. In Judaism, there is a prayer of gratitude for every moment of your day, starting with Modeh Ani in the morning. As Rabbi Zelig Pliskin writes: “Every moment of life is precious and can never happen again and therefore is a reason to appreciate, be grateful for and celebrate the fact that you are alive.”

4. Have a plan for your negative thoughts.

You may be stuck in endless, negative thought loops and not know how to stop them. When Jill was stuck motionless after her stroke, the doctors were not sure how much she would be able to recover. For someone who was a busy, active researcher one day and speechless the next, Jill had to fight relentlessly to redirect her hopeless and depressed thoughts.

She wrote: “To experience pain may not be a choice, but to suffer is a cognitive decision. I keep handy a list of three things to turn my consciousness towards when I am in a state of need: 1) I remember something I find fascinating that I would like to ponder more deeply. 2) I think about something that brings me terrific joy or 3) I think about something I would like to do.”

The Mishna in Ethics of the Fathers teaches this timeless lesson: “If there is anxiety in a man’s mind, let him overcome it and transform it into joy with encouragement.” (12:25)

Dr. Taylor’s book teaches that while you can’t always control what happens in your life, you can choose how to perceive your experiences. Jill did not return to exactly who she was before the stroke. She embodied the words of Rabbi Noah Weinberg: “Don’t be afraid of discovering that the ‘real’ you may be different than the ‘current’ you.” Her new insights allowed her to rebuild her life and ‘recover’ a new way of seeing the world around her.

As she writes, “I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.”

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