Used to have the absolute worse concussion anxiety, was worried about everything from walking to sneezing, to sex, to tiny bumps and so on and so forth. I still have concussion anxiety and you’ll see me make posts about this fairly often but really only when something extreme happens like a bad fall or hitting my head hard or something like that.

First thing that caused me to change was that my ex gf broke up with me because she couldn’t take my obsession anymore and it kind of opened my eyes and changed me in a lot of ways. I sort of realized to myself like ‘wow we seriously only live once, is this really how I want to live my one life, wtf kind of life is this?’ It took that huge emotional jarring to sort slap some sense in to me.

There are so many uncertainties in life and if you focus on it, so many things to be afraid off, concussion anxiety being one of them. At a certain point you kind of just have to tell yourself like ‘you know what, this is not how I want my life to be and so therefore my life will not be this way, I am taking back control and I am choosing how I want to live’. It’s the same as if you had any other form of health anxiety or ocd. Take back control, live how you want to live and focus on having fun and enjoying your damn life. If you don’t then I guarantee you will regret it years down the line **.

I’ll give an anecdote from my life, not to show off or anything, just to prove how I’ve taken this mantra into my own life. On Saturday I was working a show all day, I creative directed an event and so all day I was running around doing stuff, talking to people, etc. By the end you can bet I was feeling pretty lousy, pretty exhausted. But then one of the models texted me and asked if I wanted to get drinks with her at a bar that night. I said screw it, this is something I should be doing as a 19 year old boy, and so I went and hung out and had an alcoholic beverage and ended up hooking up with her. She was being very aggressive **but I thought ‘Is this really something I want to worry about? Nah I’m gonna live my life how I wanna live and that doesn’t involve worrying about something small like this’. A couple days after, I was walking out to see some friends and I fell hard on the ice. Actually made a post about it on here due to how bad it was. You can bet I was feeling really lousy after that but the day after (yesterday) I was supposed to see the model again and so, regardless of the huge fall, I did. **These are all things I could very well worry about but I thought ‘do I really want to worry about this stuff or do I want to just be free **These are just decisions I made on how I want to live my life and not have regrets when I’m older.

Second thing that happened to me is that I switched my mentality from viewing incidents that happened as devastating new injuries but instead ways to get stronger and desensitize myself. This happened after a bad fall on the ice a while back that had me in the depths off despair. That is until I kind of realized that a week after the fall, I didn’t feel so bad. Maybe my body is strong enough to take a fall like this? Maybe I’m not quite so fragile? I’ve been assuming I’m fragile as an egg but maybe that’s not the case, maybe this fall will make me stronger because it will show myself that I’m able to take incidents like these and be ok and that I’m not a fragile little flower like I thought I was. It’s like an extreme version of exposure therapy I guess. Not I’m not recommending at all that anyone fall on the ice or hit your heads on signs or anything, but if you ever happen to do so on accident, take it as an opportunity that your testing your body to see what you can endure. People here always say they wanna live a normal life again, but stuff like this is part of normal life. The only way to know if you can take it is to actually take it and view it as an opportunity to get stronger and desensitize yourself and normal people don’t worry about their brains when they fall on their butt on the ice.

Finally, my advice would be to look at someone who’s had way more brain trauma then you and therefore should theoretically be much more fragile then you and just see how they live they lifes. Take Cowboy Cerrone for example. He’s a ufc fighter who fights a ton and has undoubtedly taken way more damage then anyone on this site. Yet if you look at his Instagram, he’s out on his ranch riding horses, wakeboarding, cave diving, building things, training mma, drinking and basically living exactly the life he wants to live, having fun. Would Donald cerrone worry if he slipped and fell on his *** or if he bumped his head or had a rough wrestling partner? I’m gonna go out on a limb and say probably absolutely not, don’t think he’d worry for more then a few seconds. So if he can live his life that way and be happy, then maybe I can to and maybe a lot of the stuff that happens to me now that I worry about isn’t actually all that damaging.

All this may very well not be of much use to you but it’s stuff that has helped me a lot. Now I’m still far from free of the grasps of concussion anxiety but I’m better and these kind of mentality switches have helped me.