You do not have an issue with screens. You have an issue with the intensity of some screens. Can you tolerate intense screens ? Yes, but likely only to a limit. You state confusing cases. I was not aware that your good days were weeks at a time.

Most have just a few days of good days before a crash. That usually indicates lots of room for improvement to get to weeks of good days like you have already achieved.

It sounds like your good days are the rule and your bad days are the exception. You should be grateful.

I don't think the issue is with screens at all. The issue is with the intensity of how you relate to the activity visually and responsively/reactively. Getting excited. Getting adrenaline flowing. Needing to make the right move on the controller. There may be some intolerance to fast movement but if you were looking out the car windows with cars speeding by, you would likely have the same struggle.

A 3D video game uses intense visual processing power, audio processing power, cognitive processing power and motor control processing power. That is a lot of mental energy. The screen is only a small part of the whole equation.

Keep in mind that 3D video games are in 2D. The image tricks the brain into processing the image as 3D. That takes a lot of brain processing power. Any time the brain is tricked into perceiving an image as different than it really is, some of the brain power over-worked.

I cannot process 3D or surround sound. It is just too much to process. It does not change my life except I need to avoid surround sound environments or expect to struggle.

You are still trying to get definitive answers. There are none. You have to discover what your limits are and deal with them.

You want finite concepts. There are few. One would be, Your brain will never return to its prior state. That is not changeable.

A general concept is you can likely live most of your life as if your brain fully recovered to its prior state knowing that from time to time, your brain's past injury will manifest symptoms.

So, please take everything I have said and understand it as general concepts.

I'm quite a literal person, so such a vague injury is a bit of a struggle for me.

The other thing I was reading about is that the damaging chemical chain reaction in brain injury can last for years, if that is the case can this condition get worse? Or does the body generally always attempt to correct itself and this instance of a progressive condition quite rare. I've only ever had the one concussion and it's caused me all of this turmoil.

Again, you ask a broad non-specific question and expect a specific answer.

Which condition, chemical or PCS physical symptoms ?

It appears you get an idea in your mind and ask questions as if that is the only context.

As I mentioned previously, getting help to learn how to loosen your thought processes will reduce your stress levels.

btw, High stress levels are a leading cause of the prolonged chemical cascade you ask about.

The problem is 14 months experience vs 40 years. My questions make as much sense to you as sometimes your answers make to me. So at times something gets lost in translation.

It's impossible to predict whether I have healed to my full potential or not. People improve all the time, I don't think you can call whether I have healed fully or not. Nobody knows. I still suffer on a daily basis, the times when the inflamation goes down for a period are rare. Mostly I'll get a few days off, then it'll come back. Assumptions and comparing other people to your own situation I don't think are helpful. My daily symptoms have improved since the few weeks of total symptom free periods, this would suggest that I still have a way to go.

I am finding this thread quite interesting. Thank you Mark, for all of the information I have gathered from you by reading through this. I am at almost 10 months, and am now able to accept the things that I cannot do...at least for now. I have pretty much had to stop working at both of my jobs (as a city worker And mortgage broker) for now. I am hopeful that my acceptance of how I need to handle things now, will actually help me recover a bit...because if I'm happy, I feel much better than when I am stressed and worried.

I, too, shut down when there is a time sensitive project that involves stress.

What I've learned is that in the broad scope of life, things don't Have time limits so I can allow myself to relax. I believe things happen for a reason.

I tend to jump around from thought to though so please forgive the rambling. I've been like this for almost 10 months so sometimes just have to laugh at myself.

That's kind of the important thing I wanted to bring up in this post. We are a little different with our issues since the concussion. It seems you may both be getting a bit frustrated with each other, and that may be partially because one is not able to focus on one thought and tends to jump from one concern to another, at times not explaining himself fully. I totally understand this because I still cannot have a normal conversation without getting stuck or even saying, mid sentence " look at the Squirrel!" Then we have Mark who has a huge heart and is trying to do the best he can to help. I'm sure things need to be somewhat orderly for you, and trying to help someone who's a bit all over the map can be difficult, and really challenges the limits of what you can deal with as well.

To sum up perhaps Doozer needs to do a bit more research on his own rather than relying on Marc for answers. The only ones that know us well enough to truly know what our limits are is Us. Even my Husband doesn't know sometimes when I'm at my limit, so what does that say?

And Mark, everything you say and all of your responses help us so much. Just try to remember some of us struggle to explain ourselves properly. Because we have trouble organizing our thought.

Oh and Doozer...come to terms with the fact that you may always have set backs, and you'll be less stressed, and therefore less likely to have them.

Love you both!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

From what you said previously, it sounded like you meant that you would have weeks of symptoms free days then a set back and recovery to weeks of symptom free days. If the extended symptom free periods are rare and the day to day ups and down are the norm, then it would appear you still need to identify the day to day triggers.

So, what weren't you doing during the symptom free weeks ? Were there family activities that kept you moderately occupied ? Was there a change in your daily activity pattern just before your symptoms returned.

For some, the trigger is just an intensity of thought, ruminating, frustration, forceful thinking, etc.

Sleep patterns can make a huge difference. Hopefully, I'll have a better understanding about sleep tomorrow. Our brain injury support group is having a sleep specialist talk tonight.

What many people fail to grasp is that many with PCS recover by learning to work with their limitations rather than get frustrated pushing against them. Some have defined their life by the intense activities they are involved in. They struggle to live without those activities.

I have learned that I needed to step down the intensity level of my life. I've had to make changes a few time over 40 years as my aging brain needed me to scale back on intensity. It may be my acceptance of lost functions that has helped me in these areas.

For example, I learned that the intensity of commute traffic was not good. So, I sacrificed 45 minutes of productive time to avoid having to drive in congested traffic first thing in the morning. I had that option since I set my own schedule with my customers. At the end of the day, I needed to either finish before rush hour or work through rush hour and go home after it was over. A friend had told me how such a schedule reduced stress in his home life.

I learned how to recognize intense customers and chose to not do business with them. This choices cost me some income but my sanity was worth the sacrifice.

The same concept can benefit us with our PCS.

But, most important was learning to reduce my thinking intensity level. I learned that I did not have the right or the need to be so intense. When I did this, my outbursts and over-reactions were much less. My sleep was better. My relationships were better. The roller coaster of PCS leveled out somewhat. The dips were not as low.

If I remember right, you are home with rambunctious kids. Have you done anything to reduce the impact of their voices, sound reducing head phones, ear plugs, etc. I know that screaming or excited kids can be wearing on ones need to relax.

I have found that I tolerate noisy kids best when I am interacting with them. When I am participating and my brain puts the sounds in context with an action, I tolerate it much better. When the noise is without this context, it is very stressful. Same goes with other noises. I can run noisy tools and equipment without a problem. My brain see the source of the noise and puts it into a proper context. But, if I am trying to focus elsewhere and the noise is interrupting, I don't do as well. My stress level will rise substantially. This is one of those work-arounds and accommodations I talk about frequently.

I can get stress by the neighbor kids squealing and screaming. I can resolve that by going outside and watching them for a bit or teasing them about having too much fun. This puts context to what would otherwise be a stressful stimulation.

It is amazing how well this works. It's just like hearing the train horn. I imaging the train at the road crossing and my mind lets go of the annoyance. We have 20 or more freight trains each day.

The key point is the PCS brain does not know how to tolerate stress like it could before the injury. We have to take active steps to reduce or accommodate these stimulations. We cannot reduce the stimulation cause by 3D games or fast action movies. They are designed to maximize stimulation. So, we have to make choices.

Joannetb,

You made some great points. What I was trying to get across is the need to self-examine how we communicate and realize that what we think we are saying is not what others are hearing, often because we have context to the comment in our mind but that context is not passed on to others. I know this because it was one of my biggest struggle. I would expect others to understand my context without explaining my context. It was part of my intensity of my thought processes.

The issue for people to understand is a very common PCS symptom is "Rigidity of thought." This can manifest where we have a very defined meaning to what we are saying but others can be at a loss. This also can result in wanting a specific answer that fits that context so when others respond, we may try to force fit their answer into that rigid context.

It is why I have learned to use the word 'likely' and other words of probability to reduce the rigidity of my comments. Unfortunately, many do not see these words as they read.

When we accept that we may be exhibiting rigidity of thought and projecting that rigidity on others to negative benefit, choosing to try to change can be beneficial. But, it is a tough issue because the natural response is rarely the better response.

Believe me, I know this issue because my thought process was Black and White in High Definition 3D. It has taken a lot to soften to my current level of intensity. I know it would help if I could lower my intensity more. I'm trying.

No you are not too intense or rigid. You are a Godsend! That being said, people are so desperate to find answers but shouldn't expect you to be the Fix. That all. You are an amazing person who has encouraged me unknowingly to learn how to deal with this whole thing.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

"or some, the trigger is just an intensity of thought, ruminating, frustration, forceful thinking, etc."

This is spot on for me. I do this, when I am symptomatic, I think about it a lot. My thought process goes round and round in circles, making my symptoms worse, making my thought process worse. And so on. In the end on many occasions I get depressed. Getting help for anything in this country is also a big struggle, unless you are a millionaire.

I remember, before one of my symptom free weeks I was working in the garden one summer every day. I guess the stresses and strains of my condition went unnoticed because I was busy. This made symptoms vanish for a while. The other two times was when I was suffering from illness for a couple of weeks at a time, oddly enough. So again, my mind was on other things. I'm guessing some cognitive behavioural therapy may help, but as I said, getting it on our health service is like trying to get blood out of a stone.

I appreciate your time Mark.

I think your good week(s) last summer had two reasons. One, you were distracted so you did not engage in the stressful thinking. Second, you were doing productive tasks that were well within the capability of a struggling brain. As I have said many times, manual tasks cannot over-stimulate the brain because the hands cannot work faster than the brain can process.

Think of the difference between a remote control car and a video game. Similar manual inputs but the car is limited by what the controller signals. The video game is controlled less than 10% by the controller and more than 90% by the computer and graphics processor.

When we can control the stimulation, we do much better. When the stimulation is beyond our control, we will be more likely to struggle.

One of the struggles with PCS is the lack of any sense of true order. We try to make order when none is to be made and end up spinning our wheels. Accepting this lack of order and letting go of the search for such order can be a start to reducing our stress load.

Maybe a good thought would be when we get hit with a return of symptoms, If I can just relax, this too will pass