What Makes a Concussion Better? What Makes a Concussion Worse?
I’m not a medical doctor, but concussions are now my passion. Or, more accurately, for the last 9 days have become my passion having received a Grade 2 (Moderate) concussion a little more than a week ago. That is 9 days of hellish conditions that ebb and flow: headaches, nausea, dizziness, incredible fatigue, and oddly enough for one day, deep sadness. And those were just my symptoms, others may experience blurred vision, sensitivity to light/sound, memory loss and cognition impairment, and sleep disturbances. This can last from a day to many weeks, (typically 2-4 weeks) and this has only been my first asymptomatic day. I’m not sure I am out of the woods yet. But, while it is so fresh on my mind I also wanted to try to help others — perhaps some of these are idiosyncratic to me but I have also come up with a heuristic that may prove helpful. And I do want to help, so let me start there.
Anything in the world that you are interacting with will make the concussion worse. If you are simply passively consuming something, not nearly as much.
What does that mean? Texting is awful (and I suspect electronic screens come into play more than we yet know — we know surprisingly little about concussions it turns out). Texting is a prime example of interacting — you have to receive the message, read it on a screen, process it, and if you have a guilty conscious like me, then respond and input back. You’ll see where this falls on my harm list below. On the other side, I found the laying down, closing my eyes and listening to documentaries on TV or podcasts to be helpful. You actually don’t want to totally cocoon as the old advice used to say. Research supports that sitting in a dark room doing nothing is harmful. Why? Because the second you leave that space you’ve created much worse conditions for yourself. Most things are indeed harmful, I found, so what helps and what hurts on my personal scale?
Helpful
Walking slowly in nature for short but frequent bouts +5.
Being outdoors +5
Sleep +4
Rest (laying down but not napping) +4
Listening to music, TV, podcasts +3
Hydrating with JUST water +3
Tylenol (aceteminophen) + 3
Reading +3 (I suspect this may hurt some and I just got lucky here)
Talking to friends on the phone +3 (at times and I was pretty picky here on making sure it was a meaningful conversation or with a close friend — I knew I had to limit this to maybe 6 calls/day)
Omega 3 Fish Oil +1
Magnesium +1
Harmful
Video Games (I tried 1 a day as a diagnostic tool) -5
Texting -4
Email -4
Eating -3 (obviously you should eat, it just would make me nauseous and thus kinda sucked.)
In-person interactions indoors -3
Caffeine -3
Grocery shopping -2
Watching a show on my laptop -2
Watching a show on TV 0 or -1
Work calls -1
Again, these are just mine. But also, again, concussions are still a mystery in many regards despite incredible amount of interest (e.g. military and athletics alone) and they can be miserable. My advice while it is on my mind (there’s a horrible pun) is entirely limit your multi-tasking interactions. You can and should do things, but things that don’t require processing. Your brain has turned the energy it usually gives to thinking almost 100% toward healing. Let it heal. For the vast majority, time will do that trick.