Hey Sam,

I experience similar issues.

I believe you've identified a significant factor in why you may feel this badly at times, but I don't think you've completely put things together. That is, I believe your activity level is putting your mind into a dark place, and that this dark place can be mostly avoided by curtailing your activity.

I know that every concussion is different, as are the resulting issues we experience. However, since my concussion I've learned that activity and stimulation have a profound impact on my physical and mental state.

For me, too much activity and/or stimulation have a tremendously negative impact on my physical and mental state. The impact of such events (I call them triggering events) typically lasts 4-7 days, but sometimes for 3-4 weeks. During this period I am a very different person in every way; my wife and children have come to learn this and tend to give me space and time alone. In this state I look for conflict, can feel extremely depressed, I ruminate, feel alienated, and am impulsive, and do not see the good in anything. My head feels different, I think very negatively and darkly.

So, in my experience, these things ALWAYS correlate with too much activity; if I am careful and not in a recovery state, I have humour, can tolerate more family interaction, I don't brood or look for fights, and I'm more open-minded.

Perhaps what you should do is keep a daily activity and headache/mental state log. My guess is that you'll see a correlation between too much activity and how you feel during the next day or days that follow.

If that's the case, and as Mark has pointed out in other threads, try to learn what your indicators are for too much activity or over-stimulation. Once you are familiar with them, you can taper your activity so that you avoid triggering events. I used to be good at identifying these for myself, but recent changes to don't allow me to catch the early queues.

Anyways, I hope this might be helpful. Once I learned that could avoid being in that "bad" state, it helped a lot with my hope. It also made me think that "healing" is likely hampered by the stressful state associated with my recovery periods.