Hey dude, welcome!

I think almost everyone here has been through the symptoms you're describing with dizzyness and lightheadedness. If I would sum up what has worked for me, getting better after almost 5 months of PCS it would be active rest. If something makes you dizzy, stay away from it. If it doesn't make you dizzy, you can keep doing it (until you feel symptoms returning, then stop). One could say that you experience symptoms when your brain is trying to tell you to stop doing what you're doing because it doesn't have the resources to process that task.

Computer games really messed me up when I tried playing some League of Legends after a long day, just a month after I hit my head. I experienced a really significant setback from doing so. You don't need to activate your brain in order to get it healing, you just need to rest. You won't lose processing power from taking it easy for a while, and your brain really needs it. If you want to do anything - that is, if you're feeling energized and it doesn't induce symptoms - you can try exercising. And when I say exercising I don't mean going for a run or going to lift weights (or god forbid, skating again, look up second impact syndrome, don't die on us), I mean taking a walk until you start feeling tired/dizzy. Remember how long it took you to get symptoms and stay below that threshold next time you take a walk. When you've been taking walks and going about your days without symptoms for some time (general consensus seems to be two weeks), you can ramp up your intensity slightly.

Take your brain injury seriously. I don't know if I could have shortened my period of illness by much, but if I could, it would have been by taking the injury more seriously. I went on to complete a university course with client interactions even though I had pretty severe symptoms and now I've been unable to function at more than 50-60% of my healthy capacity for almost 5 months. You can shorten your stay in bed if you take it seriously.


Things I believe have helped me recover, apart from resting:
- Vitamin regimen. You can find it linked in the forum head. Don't skip curcumin! Studies have shown that mice improve greatly from traumatic brain injury if they are supplementing curcumin. Buy a curcumin pill that has piperine included, without it the curcumin has poor bioavaliability.

- Meditating consistently. Studies have connected increased density in white matter in the brain to meditation, and PCS is believed to be caused to a large extent by disruptions in axons in white matter.

- Doing as much exercise as I can do without inducing symptoms. For me this has been walks and recently running for short sessions of 6-7 minutes on a cross trainer. Physical exercise is much, much more efficent than cognitive exercise when it comes to improving cognitive functioning and secretion of sweet, sexy proteins that our brain uses to rewire itself. If you want to you can look up BDNF (Brain Derived Neurotropic Factor), but if not, take my word for it. Exercise and specifically cardio is the bomb when it comes to brain function.

- Getting good quality sleep. Turn down the lights an hour before you go to bed and try to chill out, listen to/read some fiction to get your mind focused on something that you can't really stress out about. Get your room pitch black or buy yourself a sleeping mask. Earplugs help me too.


Things that are fun that I've been doing to not want to jump off a cliff when resting:
- Audio books. Man, I've gone through a few. Goodreads is great to get some recommendations if you haven't read a whole lot (I hadn't). Podcasts get stale after a while because they are designed to keep you occupied for an hour at a time. And with PCS, you need to kill a lot more than an hour. I see audio books as a way for me to do something constructive while I'm impaired due to my PCS and I've read and learned a lot during these months.

- Podcasts. If you have a particular favourite that is just a couple of people hanging out and talking, this can provide you with a great comfort-entertainment when you're in a slump and experiencing symptoms. Whenever I feel like crap with symptoms I come back to a particular podcast that makes me feel better. Makes the anxiety go away.

- Youtube videos of relaxed things. If you're well enough to look at screens (took me about two months before I could), you can start looking at calm things that are just engaging enough to not make you want to turn it off. If you can find some channels that feature some interest that you can watch for longer periods of time, these are a great way to kill off some time. For some reason I come back to car- and cooking shows. I don't even have a drivers licence.
Watching movies and series often seems to be a bit much for me, in comparison to youtube stuff. The question of following a narrative set by someone, I find myself reviewing aspects of the movie/show from the perspective of what the director wanted to achieve, different symbolic interpretations of the story and so on. Watching someone chop an onion or installing a turbo unit on an old piece of junk seems to be working better for me - look up Roadkill if you're into cars and Brother Green Eats if you're into food!


There's a bunch of knowledgeable people on here, so don't be afraid to ask for help. Mark in Idaho has a lot of info and always wants to help out, a real stand up guy.