Recovery doesn’t end when symptoms improve—it truly begins when you start rebuilding your life. In this deeply personal episode of the POTS Podcast, Dr. Joseph Schneider shares insights from his own journey through stroke recovery and the emotional realities patients face after illness. From hopelessness to resilience, this episode explores how hope, courage, and support systems are essential for lasting healing.
Announcement: A major breakthrough in neurological care has arrived. In this episode of the POTS Podcast, Dr. Joseph Schneider introduces the Spryson NeuroAI system, a cutting-edge technology designed to transform how brain conditions are diagnosed and treated. After 18 months of development and integration, this advanced platform combines AI-driven diagnostics, multimodal therapies, and regenerative medicine to deliver highly personalized treatment plans for patients with complex neurological conditions.Spryson NeuroAI: The Next Evolution in Brain Recovery
Hope Is a Good Thing — Maybe the Best of Things
This episode shifts the conversation from clinical treatment to something deeper:
👉 What does it really mean to recover?
For many patients, recovery is not just about reducing symptoms—it’s about getting their life back.
When Physical Recovery Isn’t the End
One of the most important insights in this episode:
Even after physical healing begins, patients often face:
- Emotional trauma
- Anxiety about returning to work
- Fear of relapse
- Relationship challenges
- Loss of identity
Healing the body is one step. Facing life again is another.
The Hidden Impact of Hopelessness
Dr. Schneider shares a powerful truth:
👉 Hopelessness can slow—or even stop—recovery
When patients feel like they won’t get better:
- Motivation drops
- Progress slows
- Mental health declines
- Physical healing becomes harder
Hope becomes a clinical necessity, not just an emotional concept.
Brain Capacity and Trauma
Trauma—whether physical, emotional, or mental—reduces brain capacity.
This can lead to:
- Fatigue
- Brain fog
- Emotional instability
- Reduced ability to handle stress
Dr. Schneider compares it to an engine:
👉 Lose a few cylinders, and performance drops.
Recovery is about rebuilding that capacity over time.
Why Comorbidities Make Recovery Complex
Most patients don’t deal with just one issue.
They often face:
- Chronic pain
- Fatigue
- Digestive problems
- Immune dysfunction
- Hormonal imbalances
These overlapping conditions require a fully integrated treatment approach, not isolated solutions.
The Courage to Face Life Again
A powerful theme in this episode is courage.
As patients recover, they must confront:
- Stressful jobs that may have contributed to illness
- Unhealthy relationships
- Emotional trauma from the past
This often requires:
- Setting boundaries
- Making difficult life decisions
- Redefining priorities
👉 True recovery means choosing what supports your health—and letting go of what doesn’t.
Mental Health Is Part of Recovery
Dr. Schneider emphasizes:
👉 Emotional healing can be harder than physical healing
Patients may struggle with:
- Anxiety about returning to normal life
- Dependence on others during illness
- Fear of losing support once they improve
This is why psychological support must be part of the recovery plan.
The Power of Support Systems
Recovery is not done alone.
Dr. Schneider highlights the importance of:
- Family support
- Strong relationships
- Faith and spiritual connection
- Daily gratitude
These elements provide:
- Emotional stability
- Motivation
- Resilience during setbacks
Resilience: The Key to Long-Term Healing
Resilience is built through:
- Life experience
- Support systems
- Mindset and belief
- Consistent effort
It allows patients to:
- Push through challenges
- Adapt to change
- Continue progressing despite setbacks
A Holistic Vision of Healing
This episode reinforces a powerful philosophy:
👉 The goal is not just to treat illness—but to restore life
That means helping patients:
- Return to work or school
- Rebuild relationships
- Regain independence
- Find purpose again
A Message of Hope
At its core, this episode delivers one message:
👉 Hope is essential to healing
Combined with:
- Courage
- Resilience
- Support
…it becomes the foundation for rebuilding a meaningful life.
Start Your Recovery Journey
If you’re struggling with:
- Brain injury
- Chronic illness
- Emotional burnout
- Loss of function
There is a path forward.
The Hope Brain and Body Recovery Center offers personalized care that addresses:
- Physical recovery
- Emotional healing
- Life reintegration
👉 Visit https://hopebraincenter.com/ to learn more or schedule a consultation. You can find out more information at Spryson.
Transcript
00:00
Dr. Joseph Schneider
Good morning. It’s Friday, May 1st. This year is moving by so quickly. And I. I want to tell you some of my experiences that I’m having in the office with. With patients, real patients, and real life aspects that they’re dealing with. And so when you’re treating patients who’ve had a really profound life impact, when the illness that their experiences. They experience minimizes or goes away, then there’s another challenge that comes with that. So, you know, the hope, the word hope came from my stay in Jefferson after I had my stroke. So the word hope came to me. And it wasn’t the hope that came to me. It was hopeless. The feeling of hopelessness where there was no hope of getting out of this situation, of getting better at getting my life back.
01:18
Dr. Joseph Schneider
Getting your life back is the most important thing that should be on your mind when you have an illness. And if you give up and you’re totally hopeless, it’s. Things get worse and they get worse, and it gets worse really quickly. Now, My grandfather passed away when I was five and I watched him get ill. My father was still alive then, and my father would take me over there. He told me never to pet his dog. I pet his dog and he’d bite me. And then my grandfather was lying in the hospital bed and he was like, I told you not to pet the dog. I felt so guilty like that I disobeyed him because he was sick, got more upset about his. His dog. But the dog is like, you couldn’t bet him or he would bite you. So I get.
02:21
Dr. Joseph Schneider
I got bit a lot because I guess at that time I just never listened to anybody. But my grandfather was a really great man. He was pretty fabulous. He was postmaster and fire chief in Riverside, and he has a certificate from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which made him postmaster at the time in South Jersey. He sold stamps to all the businesses in the area. At the time. You know, in the 60s, there was a lot of businesses, a lot of growth in the area, a lot of jobs. And so the. The post office made money by selling stamps. Makes sense, right? And so I used to go into the post office with him and he. I. He had a big desk, big office, and it used to sit me on his lap. So. But I have one memory, some. One memory that has been.
03:25
Dr. Joseph Schneider
Been on my mind all the time. And in our neighborhood, we had a lot of kids at that time where kids were out. They’re always playing, you know, doing things and so forth and playing games and hide and go seek and running around in the Grass, climbing trees and all kinds of things. And it happened quite young. So When I was 4, I had a tricycle. Now some of the boys in the neighborhood were older than I was, so I was trying to keep up with the tricycle and I was just really upset about it. So I pull my tricycle into the driveway and my grandfather was on the front porch. And my grandfather always wore a suit, three piece suit. So that day, well, sometimes he had his vest on, but he didn’t have his jacket on.
04:24
Dr. Joseph Schneider
So he’s know, shirt and tie, vest on, you know. Then he looks at me and said, Jack, which is my father’s name. It’s timed by him, a two wheeler. And my father was like, hey, money for a two wheeler. He’s not getting a two wheeler. Jack, get in the car now. So my dad picked me up, put me in the car, and we drove off to a, a toy store. And I remember like I was feeling like really important. My grandpa’s buying me a bike. This is the, like the most wonderful thing that can ever happen to a little boy. Was your grandfather saying, I don’t care. It doesn’t, it doesn’t matter what it cost. He’s important. Let’s go. Let’s go, Joe.
05:19
Dr. Joseph Schneider
And so we get to the toy store and my dad was still in that frame of mind that we’re buying something cheap and then we’re getting out of here. So we go in and my father, my grand, my father wasn’t looking at any bike that was over a certain dollar amount. And my grandfather goes, you pick looks, points to me, goes, pick, what do you want? What looks good to you? So it was on the top shelf and it was a red bike, red two wheeler, had training wheels on it, of course, you know, and my grandfather said, that’s the one you want. And my dad goes, no, that’s not the one he wants. You don’t want that one. My grandmother says, yep, he said he wanted it. And we, out we go. Bought this beautiful red bike for my grandpa.
06:20
Dr. Joseph Schneider
Yeah, we called him Pop at the time. And it was a really a fantastic gift that he gave me. And then the ceremony continues. So when we get home, my grandfather just, you know, goes, leaves and he says, okay, Jack, it’s time to teach him to ride it. And my dad said, well, I can ride it with the training wheels for a while. My pop said, no, take them off and teach them to ride a two wheeler. And so then my dad put me on a two Wheeler, and he’s running down the street with me, huffing and puffing. And I got it that day. I got it that day. And I was riding my beautiful red bike in the neighborhood and I could keep up with the other kids and ride.
07:14
Dr. Joseph Schneider
I mean, I had a lot of accidents in that bike, I can tell you. But riding a bike became very special to me throughout my entire life because of that. I mean, I love riding bikes and I love to do distances on bikes and so forth. And that was the start of it. And. But that was. That came all from my pop up. And then unfortunately, my pop passed away when I was five and then my father when I was seven. And it was a big loss for me, like a big traumatic loss in my life to have the two really powerful patriarchs in our family leave because my grandfather was well loved in the town. Everywhere you went, people would come up to him, talk to him, shake his hand, annoyed me because I wanted him to pay attention to me.
08:08
Dr. Joseph Schneider
But I was always there with him in different places, have him talk about business, talk about this, talk about that. And the thing about my father and my grandfather, they took me everywhere. I was rarely home. I was rarely home when they were around because they were just like, okay, we’re taking me around town. Because people knew them. And Riverside was pretty thriving then, had a big business section, a lot of stores, and everybody knew them and everybody greeted them, even my father. And then when my grandfather passed away, my father was just as well known, and his funeral was like, huge. My father had so many friends. That’s where he grew up, in Riverside. And it was post war, right? You know, the 50s and the 60s was still post war for a lot of people who experienced that.
09:10
Dr. Joseph Schneider
My uncle Herb, who was my father’s brother, had been in the Battle of the Bulge, came home and he had some. Some shell shock and he wasn’t able to drive, wasn’t able to do a lot of things, and ended up getting hit by a car and dying. So there’s a lot of, like, really horrible things happened with a lot of the soldiers that returned because of the extreme post traumatic stress. Okay, so what are we getting today? We’re getting to post traumatic stress disorder. And it is a disorder. It is a disorder not for trauma, physical trauma, like an accident or a fall or being in a battlefield or something like that, but it also can be emotional trauma. Emotional traumas are part of it, and so are mental traumas.
10:06
Dr. Joseph Schneider
You know, having working in a stressful environment where there’s Deadlines and things like that. And there’s nothing that you can think about other than work, but you have other responsibilities too. And it creates a lot of conflict and it creates a lot of brain injury with it. So mental, emotional and physical stress can cause brain injury. And when you have that brain injury, it, you lose capacity. So one of my podcasts, I talked about having capacity. And capacity is dependent upon the number of nerves that you have in your brain, the number of interconnections, the number of axons, the number of supportive cells, the circulation that goes on in the brain, all that supportive structure and structure of the neurons affected, and you lose capacity.
11:05
Dr. Joseph Schneider
So in a stroke, we talked about, when you have a stroke, whether it’s ischemic or hemorrhagic or anoxic, you lose and kill material in your brain that cause your brain to function, so you lose capacity. It’s kind of like if you have an engine and you have an eight cylinder and only six cylinders are firing, well, you lose two cylinders, you don’t have the capacity that engine that you had before. Now, that’s a simple type of analogy, but it’s the truth. It’s really what happens with brains, and it happens with life too. Do you have the capacity after a post traumatic event, whether it’s a pathogen, whether it’s a physical trauma, whether it’s emotional trauma, whether it’s a mental and stress trauma, you lose capacity and then you’re not able to face life.
12:07
Dr. Joseph Schneider
So when you have a patient and your patient’s getting treated, all those things can come up. All those past events that they were stressed out about, regardless of the initial thing that they come in with. And then they have comorbidities. And those comorbidities. Can be a bunch of things. Pain, fatigue, digestive issues, immune function issues, hormonal issues for men and for women. So it can get very complicated and it gets very complicated. But the most complicated thing that I have hit, I hit a wall with our patients is that when they have a heavy life impact and they get their life back, then they have to face some of the traumas that they had experienced before. It could be in a relationship, it could be with a job. They don’t want to go back to the job.
13:23
Dr. Joseph Schneider
They’re saying, get me better so I can go back to a job. But then when they’re better and the job’s like on the horizon, it’s on the horizon, we’re ready to go, we’re going to get that job back, then there is anxiety that overtakes them, that I don’t like the job. I like being there. It was one of the reasons why I got sick in the first place. And so now I’m not a psychiatrist, I’m not a psychologist, and I’m saying that, all right, you’re going to have to work out the issues with it, the job, the issues with your relationships. It could be job and could be your jobs related to your family issues with it.
14:13
Dr. Joseph Schneider
There could be a lot of issues that you’re going to have to face, which takes courage to face that, and then resiliency in the face of that stress, which created the problem in the first place. And. I find that the resources sometimes can be there when you don’t think they’re there or the support that’s there that you thought was gone. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, if it’s a family thing, sometimes there’s misunderstanding between the members of the family and what you have to do, and sometimes there’s not misunderstanding. And sometimes members of those family, you just can’t have them around you anymore because they drag you down, they push you down, and you’re going to have to make decisions, hard decisions, about boundaries in your life and what you’re going to take on and what you’re not.
15:25
Dr. Joseph Schneider
Is it healthy for you to take it on? If it’s healthy for you to take it on, then there is positive solutions that benefit everybody. If it’s unhealthy to take on, then there’s no positive solutions for anybody, including yourself. These are the life issues other than the comorbidities, like the fatigue and the mental stress and being able to do math and read again and things like that. There are easy things to come back, but the courage and the resiliency to get back into your life can be difficult. It’s like when you look at an athlete that’s been injured or had a brain trauma. There can be a lot of anxiety about getting back in the game, getting back on the playing field. Will I get injured again? If I get injured again, how difficult is it going to be to rehabilitate?
16:28
Dr. Joseph Schneider
That takes courage, that takes resiliency. And those are qualities that we have to try with our patients to develop. Because you get used to being sick, and sometimes there’s a benefit to being sick. You may have more attention. You may have people that do more things for you that you may lose. You may think that your relationship is dependent on you being injured or being sick. So getting better is one thing, and then facing life is Another. So in my stroke and with my experience, I had three brain traumas and a stroke. I went through a divorce at the same time, which I regret. And also I need to set boundaries, too. It was a difficult road, and family and friends that you thought were going to be there for you were not. They just weren’t. And like, God put my.
17:51
Dr. Joseph Schneider
My wife in my path, and I believe it with all my heart that she was put in my life for me to be where I am now. She’s very supportive. She helps me in every way possible for my mental, physical and emotional health. She’s one of the best partners I think a man could have. And I thank God every day for her. As soon as I get up in the morning, it’s the first thing I have to say is I’m grateful for you and I’m grateful for God for putting you in my path. And our Lord Jesus Christ our Savior, we pray together, we work together. I don’t think there’s anything that we don’t do together, except she got her hair done yesterday and I wasn’t there, so that was good. So they are the things that happen in life that become difficult.
18:53
Dr. Joseph Schneider
And you need that courage and resiliency to get over. Get over the hump at the very end and make things happen. So. And I think that when you have examples of resiliency in your life, that. My mother and my Aunt Catherine were big players after my father passed away. For me, my mother was resilient, meaning she got. She had to go out and work. She had to take care of the family. She never remarried. Maybe that would have helped, maybe not, who knows. But my mother was resilient. She got a real estate license while she was working hard, taking care of her kids. Sometimes on Saturday nights, she’d come home after being a waitress at a restaurant, Pensalken, and she bring home warm rolls and things like that. And then she get up on Sunday early and then get to it, like, without question.
20:07
Dr. Joseph Schneider
We annoyed her a lot on Sundays, and a lot of times we didn’t behave and it did annoy her, but she was resilient. My mother was always resilient. And we had an aunt, my Aunt Marie, who was in a wheelchair. And my mother was resilient with that, too. And went to our aunt’s house. My aunt had eight children. And our family would go over there because when my mother was working, my aunt was available to take care of us. So my Aunt Catherine became very important in my life also. But my Aunt Catherine is resilient too. Amazing strength this woman has. And I love her dearly, love my mother dearly, and I love my aunt Catherine dearly. You know, no one can say anything about them to me at all because when the time came to be there, they were there.
21:06
Dr. Joseph Schneider
And they’ve been there my entire life. So my aunt Catherine now is over a hundred, so her birthday was in February, so we hit May now. So she’s over a hundred and I’m going to be seeing her tomorrow. But my aunt Catherine, over a hundred. Amazing, amazing woman that’s been through a lot in her life, a lot of struggles, a lot of post traumatic stress disorders, but she always came through. Always came through. So this is kind of like a podcast that talks about hope. Number one, hope that God gives you faith, hope and love. So our Lord Jesus Christ, Our Blessed Mother, St. Joseph, and all these people that faced horrible circumstances and out of love for us, they came through. So you need that hope.
22:22
Dr. Joseph Schneider
You need courage, you need resiliency and that’s the way you get your life back and that your life impact is tremendous with them. Have a great day. Click on the link above and get a consult. Come see what we can do for your chronic conditions that are related to brain injury and that taking your life away and you need your life back. So have a great day. Happy May, take care.
