I haven't fully recovered but I'm doing ok at the moment and can see improvements. Just thought I'd respond to this as I had something similar recently.

Basically I spent a few months being incredibly strict with myself regarding anything which caused any sort of symptoms, so no telly, computer, reading, hardly anything much at all. Very boring and quite depressing but I definitely was seeing improvement which kept me going.

After a couple of months of this, however, those improvements stopped and I saw a plateau very similar to the one you described. This made me kind of despair and my neuropsychologist advised trying to push through symptoms somewhat. As soon as I tried this my symptoms started improving again, in fact the things I was able to do if I just accepted that my head was going to be temporarily a bit fuzzy amazed me.

I didn't expect it to work but it seems to me like this - when you first, say, tear a muscle you get lots of pain symptoms, and trying to push through them and use the muscle normally would be very damaging; you have to just rest it.

However after a good while of resting the muscle has partially healed, but will still likely be painful, out of shape, stiff etc. At this point you should be doing some light physio, which will also cause pain, which needs to be pushed through to an extent.

I feel as though my brain has been through the same process, and enough healing has occurred that it is both possible and necessary to try to push through little more than was previously safe, in order for my brain to little by little get used to the demands I would like to be able to make of it.

If someone's been really taking it easy and has hit a frustrating plateau I'd reccommend giving this a try, of course being very careful - when you've torn a muscle likely a physio can tell you when it's safe to start exercising it, whereas with us it's all guesswork and we don't want to go exacerbating the injury.

I learned the hard way early on not to try to push through symptoms, but eventually I think following this rule too strictly and for too long was the cause of a very frustrating plateau in my recovery.

Thanks everyone for posting on this topic. I have been a bit depressed 3 months in thinking that I should be better by now. Knowing that others have gone through the same struggle and somehow emerged 100% better at the end gives me hope. Congrats, FreezerDoor, on your recovery! Hope you have a much better year this time around.

Nwsmith, I noticed the same. I think there is something to it.

Pamelarae, hang in there!