Hello Kacee

As for exercise, you can do some exercise like walking, and maybe swimming is good too. You do want to oxygen into the brain, but not in a hard, heart pounding kind of way. No pumping iron or going to exhaustion.

I got better by walking. At first it was just to my mail box or the stop sign down the road. That was about .2 of a mile. I added on to this very gradually. It took about a month and I could walk a mile. I waited for a few weeks and if I felt better, I added on to it.

I can't give you all the medical, docotor reasons for doing gentle exercise, but I do know it helped me.

I hope this helps you too.

All for now

pm

Just an update. My experiments with "pushing myself" in exercise didn't seem to do much to speed along my recovery. Although I didn't have any symptoms while I was working out (in this case, jogging for 25 minutes at a time), later that evening, and the next day, I experienced worsening brain fog and depression.

I'm starting to realize that this is just going to take a while. In the hundreds of hours I've spent researching online, I still haven't found anyone who has discovered anything to speed up the process of recovery. It just takes time. I guess this will be an opportunity to grow in patience, which has never been a strong quality of mine.

Indeed, recovery rate for anyone who has an injury is different for each person. The strategy that I took on my road to recovery is to incrementally push myself towards the healing direction. I knew that if I did certain activities at a certain pace, then raise it only after I reached a comfortable level, I would recover a lot faster than if I did nothing for the longest time.

However, in the beginning, a few weeks or even a few months after the concussion, I did absolutely nothing (or very little if anything). I gave myself that allowance. You have to give yourself that allowance.

But once I had the motivation for recovery, I started to do "normal" things in small bits. For instance:

1. Play video games for a short period of time in "sessions". Increase the time incrementally to increase cognition;
2. Ride my bicycle - I rode indoors for 10 minutes up to 30 minutes or more until I felt comfortable again that my brain can handle physical movements. Then I rode outdoors, starting again from smaller timed sessions to larger ones as recovery progressed.
3. Read books - even reading was a chore. Again, used the same approach there. Read for 5 minutes, increase each time.

Do this with all activities you normally do and before you know it, you're not thinking about doing it.

It's also important to know when to back off and make yourself rest from your efforts. Take longer rest periods if you have to.

Hope this helps.