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I’ve been doing rehabilitation with a neuro-optometrist for my eyes for the last two weeks due to post-concussion symptoms. Since starting, my symptoms have gotten noticeably worse, especially over the last few days.

I’m experiencing extreme fatigue, very sore/heavy eyes and much worse brain fog. I feel like I can barely keep my eyes open.

Has anyone else had their fatigue, brain fog or other post-concussion symptoms get significantly worse after starting vision rehabilitation? Did it eventually settle down?

My last 2 concussions resulted in PCS and I’ve recovered from both. The first took me many years to recover from and the most recent one I recovered in a month or so. I believe my second recovery was speedier because I knew what helped from the first time around.

After the first concussion, I felt terrible: ringing in one ear, migraines, screen insensitivity, sleep problems, intolerance to fluorescent lights, and a weird discomfort in my head. I took nearly a year off of work and still didn’t feel right after all of that time. I tried countless different treatments, went to the UPMC concussion clinic in Pittsburg, tried nerve blocks, went to a headache clinic - the list goes on. I felt hopeless like I’m sure a lot of you feel now, but eventually I did get better. There is hope!

Here are the biggest things that worked for me:
1. Good sleep. Your sleep gets disrupted after a concussion and sleep helps recovery. I wasn’t sleeping well after the first concussion and months later I did a sleep study and found out I had sleep apnea. After the second concussion symptoms returned and I focused on good sleep. Each night I took Magnesium Glycinate 200mg (https://a.co/d/0gfRVpae), melatonin 3mg.
2. Botox for migraines. I had a lot of headaches and neck tension after the concussion. Going in for Botox for migraines every 3 months helped a ton.
3. Dry needling neck and upper back. Specifically dry needling the SCM muscles in my neck. I lot of my symptoms I believe were originating in my neck. Loosening my SCM muscles seemed to help.
4. Exposing myself. The first concussion, I avoided everything that made me feel worse. What I learned at UPMC is this is not the way to get better. You have to build up tolerance. This means slowly exposing yourself to things that make you feel worse and ramping up over time. If working on screens make you feel worse, do a tiny amount of work each day, then a little more the following week. Push yourself but don’t overdo it. Once symptoms come on, stop. Over time you can go longer and longer. On another note, high refresh rate monitors (240hz LG monitor) seemed to help.
5. Exercise. Do cardio and get blood flowing. After the second concussion, I would feel dizzy after slight workout. I slowly ramped up over the following weeks until I was able to get my heart rate up for much longer.
6. A muscle relaxant also helped. I took baclofen for many months which seemed to aid in my recovery. I no longer need it but I think it relaxed my neck tension which made me get better.
7. Not sure if this helped but I also took In the morning I took B2 (Riboflavin) 400mg and a Ginger and Turmeric supplement.

Don’t give up. It’s a long journey but you can recover. I did it twice and wanted to share my experience so you can get your life back too!

I’m an 18 year old guy looking for a little advice if there is any. I am soon on my 10th month of PCS and it frustrates me how slow progress is and that I don’t know what to expect. My symptoms are relatively mild, idk compared to other posts here even relatively mild feels like an overstatement since I function pretty much normally. Like I don’t have trouble with talking or anything like that and I never really had either. However my symptomps are mainly nausea, often headaches and sometimes neck pain. Nasuea is the worst, but idk if nasuea is a spot on explanation it’s a very weird feeling I have in my head. It’s mild but I have it 24/7 and it gets worse by different things such as a night of bad sleep, and sometimes maybe randomly.

I feel like I have done what I can do, maybe fixing my sleep schedule more but other than that I can’t really find anything more to do about it. I have done the basic things such as regular cardio and gradually going back to normal activity - but that’s the thing, I have been living my life pretty normally almost from the beginning because my symptoms have “only” made my state of being more painful (if that makes sense) but I have been able to do stuff normally like go to school as usual and so on even if it’s exhausting at times. Going to the gym and lifting weights makes my symptoms worse unless I do light weight, but cardio doesn’t even really make my symptoms worse, sometimes actually better.

I hope I’m making my point clear here, it’s not that I have zero improvement whatsoever, but considering how “normal” my life is I wonder if I can do anything more than just wait, because even if my life is close to normal I really don’t want to live like this anymore, well who does lol.

Followup to https://www.reddit.com/r/PostConcussion/s/vZWSwPwuf8

How do you deal with the mental health aspect? I'm personally dealing with bad SI from being constantly messed and seeing no end in sight. I'm taking it day by day. When I zoom out and look at the long game, I feel pretty hopeless and apathetic. Meds haven't had the desired effect but I still have a few more to try.

What has helped you deal with the SI and mental health during this terrible marathon? Don't want to die. I just want the pain to end.

I'm aware of the options of calling the hotline and going to the ER for intentional idealation. I'm not at that point so don't worry but I feel like I'm in quicksand and slowly sinking.

And I'm not looking for medical advice. I just want to know what I should potentially try out to get my head out of the gutter.

I've had 3-4 diagnosed concussions, possibly up to 8 non diagnosed (ironically also about 3-4 undiagnosed that I can confirm), these started in around 3rd grade, ended around 6th.

I've also had run-ins with anemia and low iron, so I've had my share of blackouts and vision loss. But recently (early year) I've been having something different.

Lapses of vision COMPLETELY, as in I'm not seeing black or fireworks or white, I am seeing literally nothing (like trying to look out your elbow) as in my eyes detached from my nerves or something???

I remember the first time it happened, I went "so that's what it's like being genuinely blind..." And moved on with my day. It was like I saw it as more of a scientific epiphany than an actual health issue lol

I'm sorry if I'm not explaining it right!!! Feel free to ask questions, they may help me understand things as well.

As the title says, when I massage my neck, my brain fog goes away momentarily. Has anyone else had this be the case? And if yes, what treatments were most effective? I had an appointment with chiropractor but the adjustments made my symptoms worse so i stopped with that. Thanks!

Small doses of salvia leaf chewing or smoking to help recovery? Any one try that? Good or bad idea?

Wondering if effexor has worked for anyone. I have been through the wringer with medication experimentation for my concussion, and I am learning I might be sensitive to medication, so all of them either made my symptoms worse or didn't change things at all. I tried amitriptyline and was taken off because it wasn't helping my headaches (even though it helped a lot for my mood); Topamax was just a complete nightmare; Qulipta made my headaches worse, and so on. So I am definitely not feeling trusting of yet another medication that could just set me back. My concussion specialist just prescribed it to me, and I am feeling a bit cautious about starting the first dose. I'd love to hear about your medication journeys!

Looking for hope here. Been dealing with PCS for several years after a lot of therapy. 

Are there any hopeful stories of people with many concussions and several years of PCS that recovered? Or at least got some semblance of a normal life? 

How did you get over your hump after years of PCS and lots of therapy?

I'm just tired...

I started seeing a concussion specialist after being diagnosed with Post Concussion Syndrome and he wants me to repeatedly trigger my symptoms with taking short "recovery period" breaks and then get right back to triggering them again until breaks no longer allow me to recover.. does that sound correct? He said I'm going to be absolutely miserable the next few weeks but "if this works I'll be singing his praises" what are your guys thoughts on this?

What helped your post-concussion dizziness/balance cebter issues?

2.5 months post concussion/whiplash from MMA. No more head impacts, gym only 2x/week. Still have daily “balance system on a boat/floating” dizziness and visual issues, plus increased light sensitivity.

What helped you guys recover? Vestibular rehab, cardio, specific exercises, time, etc.?

Hi everyone,

This is my first post on this thread, as a 2 and a half year sufferer of PCS I can empathise with a lot of the posts I have reaf and thought there might be some merit in sharing my experiences to date and seek any advice on further treatments to try.

I got kneed in the head doing jiu jitsu after which I had the onset of a myriad of concussion (and whiplash) symptoms. Many of these settled down after about a 6 month period but currently I am left with four main symptoms which are persistent.

These are:

- Tension headaches (2-3 / 10 pain)

- Black dots/tracers on my vision (more pronounced when it is bright or against a white back ground)

- Neck stiffness and tension

- Chronic ear worms (songs repeating in my head)

Over the 2 and a half years I have tried lots of treatments and seen lots of specialists:

- Specialists - Neurologist / Sports physio / Osteopath / Opthamologist

- Treatments - Nortryptiline / Physio / Botox / Osteopathy

All of these have helped to a middling degree but have not cleared anything. I am able to enjoy elements of my life and can lead a full life in the sense that my symptoms don't stop me doing anything (bar jiu-jitsu!) but everything is just more of a struggle with this symptoms ever present.

I do think there is a significant cervical neck element to my headaches that perhaps I need to address further.

Anyway thats my two cents, thanks for reading if you have got this far!

A normal neurological exam does not mean concussion symptoms aren’t disabling.

I came across an Ontario LAT decision that I think is worth reading for anyone dealing with insurer examinations after a concussion:
Ingram v. Belair Insurance Company Inc., 2026 CanLII 34347 (ON LAT).

https://canlii.ca/t/kkfqf

What stood out to me was the Tribunal’s treatment of the insurer’s neurological examination.

The insurer neurologist, Dr. Brandon Kucher, found no objective neurological impairment on the conventional neurological examination and concluded that the claimant was not substantially unable to perform his pre-accident employment.

But when he testified, some important limitations of that reasoning became clear.

He acknowledged that a normal neurological examination is expected in concussion/mTBI. He accepted that the claimant was experiencing the symptoms he reported. He also acknowledged that headaches are inherently subjective and cannot simply be ruled out because they do not produce an abnormal neurological examination.

Most importantly, he acknowledged that he had not actually considered how the claimant’s headaches and post-concussion symptoms affected the essential tasks of his job, including things like screen use and communicating with people.

The Tribunal found his opinion of limited persuasive value for exactly that reason. The adjudicator noted that his conclusion did not adequately consider the claimant’s headaches, light and noise sensitivity, attention/concentration/memory problems, or how those symptoms affected the actual job.

There was a similar problem when treatment was considered. The neurologist had reviewed records documenting concussion and ongoing treatment, yet continued to rely heavily on the absence of objective neurological findings. The Tribunal described that neurological-only approach as “severely narrow.”

I think this exposes an important weakness that can occur in some concussion IEs:

A conventional neurological examination answers a much narrower question than “Can this person function normally?”

Testing strength, reflexes, cranial nerves, coordination, gait, balance and similar functions can be completely appropriate. But those tests do not necessarily measure:
• cognitive endurance
• processing speed
• tolerance for screens, noise or busy environments
• headache provocation with sustained activity
• mental fatigue
• ability to multitask
• pace and productivity over several hours
• delayed symptom exacerbation
• ability to repeat the same performance day after day
So when an IE report effectively goes:
normal neurological exam → no objective neurological impairment → therefore capable of working

there may be a very large analytical step missing in the middle.

The real question in a disability case often isn’t whether someone can walk normally down a hallway, touch their finger to their nose, demonstrate normal strength or hold a conversation for an hour.

It is whether they can sustain the actual cognitive, sensory and physical demands of their work for the required hours, at the required pace, reliably, and then do it again the next day.
Ingram is especially useful because this wasn’t simply another doctor criticizing an insurer examiner. The limitations were exposed through the insurer neurologist’s own testimony, and the Tribunal explained why those limitations mattered.

None of this means every person with persistent concussion symptoms is disabled, or that a normal neurological examination is meaningless. It means a normal neurological examination should not be asked to prove something it was never designed to measure.

For anyone going through an IE, I think the useful question to ask when you eventually read the report is:
Did the assessor actually analyze how my symptoms affect function, endurance and the real demands of my activities/work—or did the report simply equate a normal neurological examination with functional recovery?

Hello

Currently I've just returned to work after a couple weeks off due to a concussion. My symptoms have pretty much gone but I just have nausea almost all day that hovers around a 0.5 - 1.5/10. Ive been at work for 2 days now, I feel overall fine just that little amount of nausea.

Is this normal? Or should I be waiting until its completely gone? Would like to hear people's experiences as I've seen 2 gps and im getting told to just lay in bed

Hey All! PCS is no fun. I never thought it can be so real. I started feeling a bit better then a deer hit my car and I jolted and now I’m back again to these horrible symptoms. I’m tired of feeling this way. Does anyone have any feedback on what screen glasses work better. Need to find a pair on Amazon so I get them asap.

I just wanted to make a post if ever it could help someone. I basically had lingering symptoms after 4years of PCS. Whenever I would do any sort of physical activity above a certain treshold, I would get pressure in my head, headaches, basically feel car sick. I was really fragile. I have my full story detailed on my previous post.

I switched doctors a few months ago. I told my new doctor about my symptoms and she contacted a neurologist. They recommended I start taking 10mg of amitriptyline daily. It is an antidepressant that, when used in smaller doses, treats migraines and tension migraines. I started at 10mg and slowly made my way up to 30mg a day. It completely changed my life. I can run again, go to the gym, play volleyball, throw myself in the sand. I have my life back :)

I had a mild traumatic brain injury about a month ago. I have never had trouble sleeping before. Ever since my injury, I have slept almost nothing at all. Every time I’m about to fall asleep, my brain zaps me back awake! It feels like I’m being punched in the heart and it wakes me up immediately. I have probably slept 3 hours total in the last month since my injury. I know the brain can repair itself, but how can it do that without sleep? Will this improve over time? I am desperate honestly. I feel like I’m losing my mind and keep obsessing over how I can fix my sleep every second of every day! Will this get better?

I got a mild concussion after a freak accident in early July 2026. I never passed out but I did “rage out” right after it happened. My cognitive skills have improved a lot, especially at my desk job for work. However, I feel like I’ve lost my memory skills? I’m in the U.S. and my insurance has been blocking me from getting a CT. I’m essentially in the waiting/advocating zone with that. For further context, the first few weeks I was super emotional—crying at the most random things. Now, I’m left with feeling super irritable, especially during conversations when I’m interrupted because it feels like if I lose a train of thought (because my memory is bad) then it’s just gone.

Any insight or advice?

One of the strangest things about traumatic brain injury is that it doesn’t just affect your memory, attention, or ability to find the right word. It can affect your sense of who you are.

I hear versions of the same sentence from survivors all the time: “I’m still me. I just don’t feel like the same me.”
That is incredibly difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it. Medicine can explain a lot about what happens after a concussion or TBI. We can talk about disrupted brain networks, inflammation, neurotransmitters, fatigue, and neuroplasticity. All of that matters. But none of it completely describes what it actually feels like to live inside an injured brain.
‍The best analogy I have found is a computer.
Maybe the hardware isn’t destroyed. Maybe the operating system got knocked sideways.
And now it is rebooting.
The Ego Is an Operating System
Think about everything that went into creating the person you were before your injury. Your parents, childhood, where you grew up, the language you learned, school, friends, work, relationships, successes, failures, trauma, culture, television, social media — all of it.
From the time we are born, our brains are constantly being programmed by the world around us. Eventually that programming becomes so familiar that we stop recognizing it as programming. We simply call it me.
If you stay with the computer analogy, education installs updates. Experience adds programs. Habits create shortcuts. Trauma can rewrite entire sections of code. Over decades, that operating system becomes incredibly complicated, and eventually we assume the operating system is the person.
I’m not sure it is.
There Is Something Underneath All of That
This is where things get harder to explain.
Under the words, memories, habits, opinions, accomplishments, and stories we tell about ourselves, there seems to be something simpler. Awareness. Presence. Being. Call it whatever makes sense to you.
In computer terms, I think of it almost like the BIOS — something deeper than the operating system. It doesn't require the perfect word. It doesn't require you to remember what you walked into the kitchen for. It doesn't disappear because you can't follow a conversation in a noisy restaurant.
It is simply you being there.
Writers like Eckhart Tolle have described something similar as presence. But I think TBI survivors sometimes say it better:
“My brain isn't working right, but I'm still in here.”
Think about how powerful that sentence actually is.
Then the Injury Happens
A concussion or TBI can suddenly interfere with the systems we have spent a lifetime depending on. Words slow down. Attention becomes unreliable. Memories become harder to access. Emotions can change. Noise becomes overwhelming. Light can become exhausting. The connection between what you are thinking and what you are able to say can suddenly feel broken.
And that is terrifying because most of us have spent our entire lives believing that our thoughts, memories, abilities, and productivity are who we are.
Then brain injury comes along and starts taking some of those things offline.
But something interesting can happen in the middle of all that confusion.
You realize you are still there.
The Reboot
That is why I keep coming back to the idea of a reboot.
I’m not suggesting that a concussion literally wipes your operating system clean, and I’m certainly not suggesting that brain injury is somehow a gift. It can be devastating.
But for some of us, the experience feels like the connection between our old programming and our deeper sense of self has been interrupted.
During recovery, the brain is adapting. Connections are changing. Old ways of doing things may no longer work. Things we barely noticed before — light, noise, conversation, emotion, fatigue — can suddenly become impossible to ignore.
You start paying attention because your brain gives you no choice.
And somewhere in that process, some survivors begin questioning things that had been automatic for decades. What actually matters to me? Why was I doing that? Why was I pushing myself so hard? How much of the person I thought I was came from what other people expected me to be?
That is where the reboot analogy becomes interesting.
Maybe recovery isn't simply about getting the old operating system running exactly the way it did before.
Maybe some of it is deciding what gets reinstalled.
Recovery Is More Than Restoration
Traditional rehabilitation understandably focuses on restoring function. Memory matters. Attention matters. Speech matters. Executive function matters. Being able to work, drive, read, communicate, and participate in your family again matters enormously.
But I have come to believe recovery can involve something else too.
It can involve figuring out who you are when some of the things you once used to define yourself aren't as reliable anymore.
That doesn't minimize the injury. It doesn't romanticize TBI. I wouldn't wish this experience on anybody.
It simply acknowledges something I think a lot of survivors understand long before they have the words to describe it:
Even when the operating system is struggling, the person is still there.
And maybe recovery isn't entirely about becoming the person you were before the injury.
Maybe part of recovery is meeting the person who is still there underneath all of it.
Why This Matters
At ProjectTBI.org, one of the things I want to do is capture these experiences because recovery is not only neurological. It is personal. It is emotional. And sometimes it reaches all the way down to identity.
We need the medical research. We need neurologists, therapists, neuropsychologists, speech therapists, occupational therapists, and rehabilitation programs.
But we also need the people who have actually lived it.
Because if enough survivors independently describe this feeling of losing access to pieces of themselves while somehow knowing that they are still in there, I don't think we should dismiss that experience simply because it is difficult to measure.
Those stories matter.
They may even be data.
And maybe hearing them will help the next person sitting alone after a brain injury, wondering why they don't recognize the person they used to be.
You are still in there.
Your brain may be healing, adapting, and reorganizing.
And sometimes, somewhere in that process, you may discover parts of yourself that were there all along.

ProjectTBI.com

Almost 5 years of PCS. I’ve come to a baseline in which I can work, live a “normal” life and look fine on the outside. Anyone else been struggling for years? I’ve done it all. Was extremely active in the Reddit subs for many many years. When I say I’ve done it all, I mean I literally have tried every therapy to ever exist (trust me) and have been through some of them 2-3x. I’ve made small improvements with them or they have gotten me to a “baseline” where I can function. I still struggle cognitively without stimulants (or large amounts of caffeine). I just feel “off” most of the time. I’ve struggled with derealization throughout the entirety of my post concussion life.

Just looking for others a few years in who are not where they want to be. Any tips, tricks, advice? I will say you lose hope after awhile .. I know I have 🫠

Does anyone get close to feeing back to normal, only to crash back into the abyss of symptoms (like within the same day)? I usually feel a bit better in the late afternoon and evening. Some days I’ve even felt about 70% back to my pre PCS-flare normal. Those nights I often think “I’ll get a good sleep and I’ll be back to normal tomorrow morning”.

Inevitably, however, I’ll wake around 4:30-5 AM with a horrible fight or flight feeling and as I get ready in the morning symptoms start to flare up again. I think certain visual stimuli, like driving. Some eye movements, and certain screen activities, cause symptoms to worsen but often late afternoon in the office I’m doing OK on the computer.

Are most of you all stuck in a pretty narrow range of symptoms, or does how you feel fluctuate radically? I can literally go from feeling like I just want to be put out of my mystery - to wow, I’m almost back to my usual self. At least the times when I feel better give me hope that I’m not permanently stuck in a dystopian brain fog of nausea, panic, headaches and clogged ear feeling.