I think that I was misleading using the term return to play. I just meant to say that we are employing a method of slowly returning to various forms of activity.
I'm actually not attempting to return to sports of any kind at the moment and the only physical exercise that I'm doing is short 5ish minute walks every hour or so. It's the mental activities like reading, playing piano, having conversations and using screens that I'm trying to slowly build up.

The concussion therapist has suggested what you said, of not increasing the time on the various activities until I am symptom free at the current amount of time spent on any activity. She had me do a bunch of self evaluation at first in order to determine how much I felt each type of activity affected me. I gave "points" to each activity and the idea is to limit the total number of points in a day so that I don't have any more symptoms at the end of the day than I did at the beginning.


The bulk of my days are made up of "0 point" activities like listening to podcasts, light stretching or organising, and mindfulness. I try to take a short walk and do a quick 5 minutes of sitting eyes closed rest at the end of every hour. Then every other hour or so I do a short bit of an activity that costs some points. For example, maybe easy reading for 10 minutes costs 1 point at the moment and if progress was being made then 12 minutes would cost 1 point in a couple of days.

I asked about pushing a bit more into the symptoms because I haven't noticed much progress and somebody told me that they felt an increase in their recovery when they started "going to a 5 out of 10" in terms of the onset of symptoms with various activities instead of a 1 or 2 out of 10. This went contrary to what my therapist said and that's why I was curious for another opinion.

Yes I've reduced the brightness on all my screens and I've experimented with different colored plastic dividers over my computer screen but I still have the very beginning of symptoms come on after 5-10 minutes or less in some cases.

Thanks again