Building up stamina
 

I am hoping the knowledgeable people on this forum can advise me on 2 questions related to building back my strength and stamina.

I am trying to figure out how best to gain back the abilities now lost to me. For example: listening to podcasts. Right now I am able to listen 7 minutes before I start to get a headache and needing a 2-hour break. Is it better to listen until I get a headache, or to completely lay off trying to listen to podcasts for a while?

The second question concerns pain-relieving drugs that mask the headache. Is it best to do everything I can do when taking drugs that relieve the headache, or to continue to limit activities?

Thanks, Joe

I was advised to limit activities so that I am staying below the threshold of symptoms whenever possible. That is, don't push myself to the point where I get a headache.

If I get a headache, I was advised to take pain medication but stop the activities. This can be extremely challenging to try to manage. The advice I keep getting is to try to avoid the symptoms as much as possible, and get sufficient rest to allow healing to occur.

I wish you well.

Listening and sound
 

Hi there

I would suggest that you just let go of listening to the podcasts for now. It sounds like they are overwhelming your injured brain and thus the headache. That headache is telling you that listening is too much comlex work right now, so, just let it go.

I found a lot of comfort in classical music, but the if sounds got to me, had to turn it off.

There was a time too when conversations were soooooooo tiring and I had to just not have too many.

As for pain relief, I have learned too that the active ingrediant in Advil is better for your brain than what is in Tylenol.

Good luck!!

Joe,

Are you using ear buds or speakers to listen to the podcasts ? Using ear buds will lower the audio processing load by excluding ambient sound. If you have not tried using ear buds, I suggest trying them. You can reduce the processing load by increasing the contrast between the target sound and the ambient sounds. Ear buds, ear phones and such can do this.

The Buffalo protocol is based on finding the pain threshold of effort and staying just below it for repeated efforts then slowly increasing the level of effort in week to two week stages, always staying below the pain or other symptom trigger threshold.

Yes Mark, I do use ear buds for podcasts and even other times to screen out ambient noise.

About the Buffalo protocol, do you think the same principle would work for things like talking and listening to podcasts, or does it only refer to exercise?

The drugs I was referring to in my original post were prescription drugs like nortriptyline, which I just increased from 40 to 50 MG daily. When I was on the prednisone, I did more activity because I did not have a headache, but when I cameoff the prednisone, my condition was worse than before I started it, possibly because I increased activity .

Thanks again for all the help I am getting.
Joe