Suitable Activities for Brain Healing
 

Now that I am officially unemployed and withdrawn from college for this condition (PCS - a little over 5 months since the injury), I have an important question:
What am I supposed to do with all of this wonderful painstaking free time?

I know that using electronics is not smart and I have grown up using them to occupy most of my days. It has been quite a transition here. I can tell that music and television are not helpful activities. The point is I don't want to hinder the healing process by these activities.

I've been reading some light novels and it doesn't seem to be causing too many problems. Any suggestions would be really appreciated.

I've picked up playing solitaire, drawing, light exercise and journaling from posts on this site. I would love for any input. I am afraid of getting depressed or going crazy with anxiety if I don't find somewhat constructive things to look forward to and spend my days doing.

Thanks,
Danny

Danny-

I have a couple suggestions as I struggle with this too. Electronics seem to be (sadly) our main connection with the world. When taken away or greatly reduced for healing it is hard to figure out what else to do.

Suggestions for another card game is pyramid. I also find doing tasks around the house helpful like dishes or mopping the floor. I am not fond of chores but it gives you a sense of completing something.

Do you have a library near? You could volunteer to stock books if symptoms allow. It helps me to be around others but I can't do the long conversations so a library would seem fitting for that.

Get outside if you can. Find some walking trails

Hope this helps,
Sharon

Arts & crafts?
Gardening, even if pots or planters?
Water feature, fish tank? usually a calming thing to watch the water & fish moving around..

Listen to a meditation or guided relaxation podcast
Do easy yoga or stretching
Do 5-10 minutes of mindful breathing
Walk outdoors
Do nails
Listen to nature sounds (lots of free apps available for this)
Play with Playdoh
Color - google "coloring pages for adults" or "mandalas to color"
Floss teeth
Take a bubble bath
Take a nap
Snuggle with loved one or pet
Call friends on the phone
Buy and taste exotic fruits
Mindfully smell herbs, potpourri, scented candles, perfume samples, etc
Mindfully smell & eat oranges
Have hair petted
Have back scratched
Make & drink tea mindfully
Experiment with your hair/makeup/clothes
Bake cookies or some other easy recipe

Hello,
My daughter is the one concussed and she also had to leave college.

You are much better off then she was when she first came home, but here is what keeps her occupied.

Volunteering at a hospital in the cancer ward--very quiet. She would organize and distribute art bags for people receiving chemo. Not too much talking but very grateful people to be around.

She now volunteers for Save Our Shores and is in charge of beach cleanup.

She also started taking pictures of our local surf community. She takes pictures and then talks to the surfers. They give her their email and she sends them her pics of themselves surfing from that day. All free. Over the past two years she has lots of surfers who know her. Because she can't take photo classes, she befriended two professional photographers. They look at her work every couple of months and give her two things to work on. Yes they know that she has a brain injury.

She also plays cards--pinochle ever T early evening.

She can't twirl (vestibular issues) but she just took an intro salsa dance class. She says that it is hard at first but it's just the same steps so not too hard.


If there are elderly people in your area...you might offer to walk their dog.


These are just a fews ideas....

I can recommend walking, painting and gardening as very therapeutic, certainly helped me.

Thank you so much to all who contributed ideas for me. You can't know how much this means to me. I am going to go through the ideas one by one and see what I am able to accomplish. I know that I still have some physical and mental limitations due to ongoing symptoms, but I hope to try each and one of these activities.

I struggle daily with questions like:

Will I ever be able to live my life again?
Do I deserve this?
What happened to all of my hopes and ambitions?
Will I be able to make it through the day?
What is the point in all of this?
Am I all alone in this nightmare?

These are not obsessive thoughts, but they run through my mind as I attempt to rest and I can't seem to shake them entirely. That is why I need to occupy with mind with something else.

These activities you all have suggested will help in cleansing my mind of these negative thoughts and hopefully allow me to regain some positive energy for me to push forward on my journey.

Please feel free to provide more ideas. And I will update you on what seems to be helping. I just finished my first guided meditation on YouTube which quickly brought me to tears as I released the negativity.

Thank you so much. I wish everyone a good day and the ability to achieve all the goals in your life that you have ever wanted.

-Dan

I find releif from my negative thoughts through mindfulness meditation which I am fairly new to. Yoga and swimming and just going out for a walk can ease my mind and loosen all the tension from my body. Sitting quietly and letting my body be still was impossible early on and still impossible on my bad days - so for me movement is the key.

It takes a lot of time but it does get better. Everything felt hopeless and I felt very suicidal at the beginning, but things got better around Christmas and in February (8 months) later, things really turned around for me. I still have somewhat worse days (right now), but I've gone through some incredibly creative days lately too. I improved a lot of software, came up with new and better software solutions to existing problems, spent whole days coding and drinking relatively lots of coffee, woke up several times early in the morning just to put great ideas that came to me in my dreams to code. Basically I've been getting out of my brain what I never thought it would give me and I want to say again, but this is all new--I think I'm a better coder than I've been before, and the headaches might have played a little bit of a positive role in that. I simplify a lot and focus on the essentials instead of getting lost in bells, whistles, and pointless complexities like I used to, and that makes me more productive and my code more maintainable and shareable, not to mention often faster.

Back to you.
>>>Will I ever be able to live my life again?
Yes. You have to come to grips with it, accept it, and move on.

>>>Do I deserve this?
No. I've often felt like "this never should have happened."
Life's not fair. Worse and much better things happened to people without them having much of a say in that. You have to accept the cards you've been dealt and start from where you are.

>>>What happened to my hopes and ambitions.
Give yourself a break for a while. You've been through some nasty stuff and life hasn't treated you so well, giving you an MTBI, so you might as well treat yourself nice and not beat yourself up. Hopes and ambitions will come back.

>>>Am I alone in this nightmare?
Forget about abstaining from electronics and find some connections online, if only passive where you just read or listen to about what some people have gone through. After this experience, I feel more connected to people around me than ever.

On Resting and Getting Depressed
===========================
I remember I used to try to forcibly rest like you are, hoping that it would help me heal faster, but it would only make me more depressed and afraid I'd lose what I'm not using.
So I kept on trying to learn, write code, and design things regardless. I don't know if it slowed down my healing--it may well not have--the studies done on that often yield contradictory results (some suggest that mental effort is good)--but I think it was better than the alternative of being depressed.