How to Dissertate Through Your Concussion: A Self-Care Manifesto

con·cus·sion
/kənˈkəSHən/
noun

1. a brain injury caused by a blow to the head. The term is also used loosely of the aftereffects such as confusion or temporary incapacity. |i.e. "they suffered a concussion"
2. a violent shock as from a heavy blow.
   i.e. "the ground shuddered with the concussion of the blast"

adapted from Google Dictionary

Spoiler alert: The take-home message of this post is in the title.  
Second spoiler: I wrote that sentence so that I would stop forgetting what the take-home message of this post was. 

Yes, I am luring you into reading this post with picture of an extremely thoughtful, yet entirely unnecessary gorilla. Also, I just really enjoy this photograph and it's my blog so I get to do things like that. ;)

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A brief introduction:

There are two pieces to my new series on my own concussion. Later, I’ll publish a longer, narrative piece about what I went through and am going through as I muddle my way through to getting better. This first bit is the shorter one. It started as a few quick tips and tricks to dealing with the symptoms of concussion, but it’s matured into a bit of a Self-Care Manifesto for two reasons.

First, at the end of the day, you should always take good care of yourself whether or not you’ve had a mildly traumatic (it has not been *mildly* traumatic for me, btw) brain injury. Second, it is so easy to forget to take care of yourself. This is especially true in academia. But when something takes away your brain (aka your academic capital) and forces self-care on you as the only way to get it back, it feels like a pretty obvious sign that you should make a few permanent changes to your life and treat yourself better.
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Then I thought I might forget my own advice so I ought to write it down. Then I thought maybe it might help other people so I ought to share it. Then I thought that this list is probably comprised of all the things that other better, more successful academics than me already do and so they don’t need this list and people will be mad I wasted their time. Then I thought, that’s probably my concussion mood-swing and anxiety talking and screw it, it could help one person so let’s publish it.
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What's a concussion?

Concussions happen when your head and/or body receive a traumatic blow or violent shake—basically when you hit something or something hits you with great force. The force causes your brain to bounce about or twist inside your skull. This, in turn, can cause damage to brain cells, lead to mild swelling (I disagree with this terminology given that it’s inside my head), and/or cause hormonal changes that generally wreak havoc on you until they’re sorted out.

Most people associate concussions with high-impact sports like football, especially given recent revelations about the long-term and compounding effect of multiple concussions. However, they also happen in other contexts like car crashes or slipping on the winter ice and falling. The important points to remember are that anyone can get a concussion and that you don’t even have to hit your head directly or lose consciousness to have suffered one. The handy little infographic below outlines the constellation of symptoms associated with concussions.  Each of these may be present or absent, either immediately or after a delay, may range from mild to severe, and may resolve themselves quickly or slowly and not necessarily in concordance with one another. Delightful, isn't it?

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image from https://concussionu.wordpress.com

I’ll be more honest about my symptoms and how badly this has been going for me in my next installment. At this point in time, things are still too frustratingly fresh to disentangle and describe accurately or precisely. Let’s just say that all of the things that one might need in their mental dissertating tool-kit like laser-like focused concentration, cohesive intractable logic, a top-notch command of written-language communication tools, and the ability so stare deeply into your lap-top for hours on end… can disappear like you never developed them in the first place. And so, if you’re like me, you might find that very frustrating… like collapse into a pile of tears frustrating… but I’ve found some incredibly helpful guiding principles and been working on organizing them.

Here are those thoughts before they disaparate....

How Dissertate Through Concussion:
A Self-Care Manifesto

Self-care is no bull-shit and the longer you deny your body what it wants and needs the worse the symptoms of your concussion will be and the longer they will last so listen to your body. When you have a concussion, most of the arguably adaptive symptoms are telling you to slow down, take a break, and take it easy on yourself for a minute.

Most importantly, despite what anyone has ever told you or whatever messed-up industry standards you’re stuck in, sleep whenever your body says so. Work whenever it feels ok. Don’t fight it. I can feel you thinking that I’m wrong and I’m obviously just weak and not cut out for this and that if it were you, you’d be able to find a way to meet your impossible deadlines no matter what. It’s ok to be wrong sometimes. It feels terrifying at first, but get real with yourself, you’re not doing good work when you’re mostly sleeping anyway. You may as well sleep and heal. Trust me.

Organize yourself in a way that sets you up for nailing it.

First of all, do yourself a favor and split up the parts of your day that require hard-core concentration and staring at a computer. In general, the most productive hours of the day for this type of work are the morning ones, right after you wake up. The concussion twist is that this type of work might tire you out very quickly and also give you a terrible headache. So what’s been working best for me is basically a brain-drain-then-relax circuit of waking up, starting to work through my task list (see below), giving up when I’m too tired or my headache is too bad, stretching or walking the dog, napping, and repeat.

Oh and another thing, patience comes harder and frustration comes easier when you're concussed so one added benefit of splitting up your hard-core computer time is that the less time you spend making yourself battle R or any other computer program with a bad attitude the less likely your laptop is to come to untimely end in a losing battle against the wall. Srsly it's hard enough for me when I'm not concussed so I advise giving yourself extra breaks if/when you are. 

Instead of trying to adhere to any typical rules and advice to maximize productivity, do you the way you do you best. For me, that means sitting down before bed (or over coffee depending on how tired I am) and writing myself a plan of attack (like a methods section) for getting through the next day. I write it in a digital document so that I can rearrange, add, strike-out, and delete things during the day. Sometimes I even write a daily goal at the top of the document. The big concussion benefit of this is that I have instructions written out for me to keep me on track when I lose my concentration or train of thought, or if I need to take a break to relax (see above).
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My personal concussion twist is that I write my daily schedule like a choose your own adventure novel. This stops me from feeling like a failure if the first thing (usually lab work) takes three times as long as it should. It also means that I have an immediate backup plan ready just in case the first plan doesn’t pan out. In my concussion-head-space, the idea of rearranging on the fly really stresses me out so this is a good way for me to reduce stress and maintain a bit of productivity so I don’t get down on myself about failure. One silver lining of this whole concussion shenanigans has been that rearranging the way I do things has actually led to a few of the most insanely productive days I’ve had since I got back from the field in August. I plan to keep this strategy even if/when I’m all-the-way-better.

Lastly, if you have a partner, or a housemate, or any other close friend that you trust, let them in. Everything I have been dealing with was making me feel like I was losing my brain, my identity, and even a bit of my grip on reality. And at first my concussion also kept me from working out and running through my stress which is a very important avenue for stress-management to me. If I hadn’t had my partner there to talk through things and help me put all the pieces together, I very easily and very incorrectly could have kept trying to force myself into being better instead of listening to my body and brain and checking in with a doctor too. All that forcing would have exacerbated the whole thing too because I wouldn’t be taking care of myself the way I needed to in order to heal. At the end of the day, pushing an injury can not only stretch out the healing process but it can also prevent healing. I do not want to be like this forever, so I am giving my Brain whatever it wants/needs.

It’s also important to remember that it’s alright to ask for help and lean on people when you need support. It has also been absolutely clutch to have someone to check-in with about how I’m feeling, the pace of my recovery, random tasks and reminders that he’s keeping in his brain to help me until mine starts working again. I cannot overestimate how helpful this has been.

Another reason to try and keep it real with your partner: concussions can cause unpredictable mood swings. This, coupled with the general confusion and other symptoms can make things super tough on your relationships. I’m not in the business of giving relationship advice, but I can tell you that open communication (almost stream-of-consciousness style at times) has been extremely important for getting my partner and me through this injury. Another silver lining: working together through this concussion has helped us work on communication and we both feel like we have an even stronger partnership.

In conclusion: take care of yourself through your dissertation, and your concussion, but especially through both. 

NOTE: if you read through this entire blog, are not my mother, and noticed any egregious spelling, grammatical, or factual errors, please message me. It took me a long and frustrating amount of time to write, organize, and upload this post. As such, I decided it would be best to cut those efforts and publish before the blog cost me my laptop. ;)  For instance, partner just texted me to tell me that I wrote "stranger partnership" instead of "stronger." Srsly ppl, don't concuss yourself.