The Wall and My Forehead
 

Well, it's 5AM, and I've just bonked my forehead on the wall next to my bed. I was just trying to readjust in bed after waking up, and I lean my head forward and smack the wall. This wall is pretty thick, but here I am scouring the web and this forum because my anxiety levels have skyrocketed. I'm at college, and getting a concussion here would be ruinous. I've got this weird cool feeling in my forehead now and a headache. I'm really hoping this isn't a concussion, but I'll guess I'll have to wait and see. Has anyone dealt with this sort of thing before? Obviously, it's vague how hard I hit it, but I'm wondering how easy it is to get a concussion from a thick wall.

An anxiety-fueled rant,
Tyler

it would be very hard to be injured....but worry is your problem, it never fixes or changes anything...just makes it worse

Exactly. I'm not a medical expert but I highly dought you'd get a concussion from what you described. Anxiety is a sneaky devil that can always convince us of the worst

Tb.....

I've seen this same question at least 100 times on NT.

Ask yourself.

What difference does it make to get some off-the-wall diagnosis?

What will you do different tomorrow or next week or next month or next year?

Why worry about things you cannot change?

Why worry about things that you have no evidence of happening?

Many ask "Was this a concussion?" and "Did I get brain damage?"

No one except ONE person ever answers my questions of "What difference does it make?"

That shows the irrationality of the question.

And, nobody ever describes experiencing concussion symptoms when these bumps happen. Anxiety causes headaches and weird feelings.....

As others have stated, Your biggest risk for the future is your anxiety.

Anxiety ruins lives. It weakens the immune system.

Of all of the various health conditions that can contribute to dying with Covid, anxiety ranks number 2.

So Tb...

Are you going to answer my questions, starting with "Why does it matter?"

Hey Tyler

I haven't been on the boards in a little bit. I'm 3 years out and doing pretty well, so as a consequence the bump-anxiety stuff doesn't plague me as much as it once did. But of course, last night I had the EXACT thing happen as you've described in this post. Woke up at 4am or so, misjudged the space around me and smacked my forehead into the wall. This is the most fearful of a symptom regression I've been in a while. Partially because my original hit was a result of me (forcefully) slamming my head into the wall.

But thankfully, I'm quite optimistic. These days I teach for a college, so I relate to what you said as well; there are quite a number of tasks in my queue at any time, and the disruption of a symptom relapse would not be super fun. I have found that the minor bumps i've had in the past few months, while they can definitely evoke a 'spaced out' feeling from the anxiety, I basically tough it out for a day, maybe i feel a bit slow teaching my class that night, and then the next day I'm back in the groove.

Anyways, not sure where I'm going with this, but hopefully you're feeling back to your normal self now, and I'm gonna try my best to put it aside and just do what I gotta do to ignore my anxiety and in doing so reassure my brain that everything is going to be okay. I often think of mark's metric of 'bowling ball from a foot up' level of force needed to cause any real damage. Even though a wall is of course pretty rigid, there would have to be some serious velocity involved to approach that territory; so since my head just meandered into the wall I think i'll be fine...