Concussions can happen to anyone at any moment. They can be a debilitating injury, setting cognitive processing, motor skills, visual abilities and other capabilities back. For athletes, these effects can be that much more devastating as athletes depend on their physical and mental abilities to perform at their peak.
Concussions, in both a literal and figurative sense, essentially shake up your brain, causing problems with the neural connections you’ve made in learning and developing various skills.
“There’s a misnomer that you have to lose consciousness to get a concussion. That’s just not true,” Dr. Bruce Wojciechowski, Doctor of Optometry and Founding Partner of Northwest Eye Care Professionals in Oregon, said. “There’s a range of severity with concussions. Some people could experience a concussion and not even recognize that’s what they experienced.
Some of the common symptoms of a concussion include, but are not limited to:
- Dizziness
- Headache
- Confusion
- Unsteadiness
Common vision symptoms following a concussion include:
- Sensitivity to light
- Trouble focusing or blurred vision
- Difficulty with reading
- Poor motion processing
- Reduction of visual field
More rare symptoms include, but are not limited to:
- Can’t recognize faces
- Amnesia
After a concussion, athlete’s often struggle to play at the level they previously had mastered.
When one of the things a concussed athlete now struggles with is vision, it can make even the most basic training exercises a massive struggle. Even walking a straight line in a large, open space can prove to be difficult.
“Following a concussion, your system is often operating in fight or flight mode and our peripheral visual system shuts down,” Juliet Machado, Certified Optometric Vision Therapist. “It’s not that you can’t see things, it’s that you can’t process peripheral information accurately. Additionally, the integration of central and peripheral visual information becomes disrupted.”
Visual Integration is the process in which multiple visual skills work together to help us navigate the world.
Think of a time when you were preparing to turn right at a stoplight. In that moment, you have to know where you are and where you want to go, you need to determine your relation to the lines on the road, be aware of where the cars are around you, prepare for the cars coming from the left side of the intersection and how fast they are moving, and remember the rules of the road.
You have to be processing all of this information together, accurately, and at a constant, quick rate of speed. Someone who has issues with visual integration, like a concussed athlete, could really struggle to complete the task of making a right turn without getting overwhelmed, leading to diminished visual information processing and appropriate follow through. This mirrors how they may perform when they return to the field or a court, if they haven’t had the proper therapy to redevelop their abilities.
Wojciechowksi said that an athlete who has multiple or recurring concussions will develop additional damage with each new injury.
“You have more damage to the same systems and damage isn’t cumulative. It’s exponential,” Wojciechowski said. “Each injury amplifies the problems. That’s why therapy and a full, proper recovery are so important to long term restoration and recovery.”
Thankfully, despite experiencing some or all of these challenges, there are ways to redevelop these abilities and sharpen our visual system after a concussion.
Through vision therapy, using neuroplasticity, our visual abilities can be redeveloped and enhanced.
Neuroplasticity is the ability of our neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization. This means that our brains have the ability to change and grow through specific activities, therapies and other rehabilitative tasks. For athletes who’ve been concussed, either once or multiple times, it means they can train their brain to redevelop those abilities that have suffered post-injury.
While there is no guarantee that an athlete can return entirely to their performance capabilities pre-injury, every athlete has a path forward to recovery and enhancement through vision therapy.
Individual vision enhancement programs can be designed to “build performance over demand” – meaning the training challenges the athlete’s visual system above what they may need in high-stress competitions.
For an athlete with a concussion, their “high-stress competition” might now look like a high-stress visit to a grocery store, where poor processing of where they are in space and where things are around them, leads to feelings of dizziness and nausea. Whichever high-stress situation an athlete is experiencing, individual vision enhancement programs can help them train how to deal with and overcome that stress to accomplish their goals.
“Our goal is to help get the athlete’s visual systems back online,” Wojceichowski said. “We want to help them reach their recovery goals and maybe go a little further, if we can.”
Machado said realistic goals are critical to achieving success in therapy.
“Setting realistic goals is key because realistic goals are achievable goals,” Machado said. “Our goal is to optimize performance at every turn and small, achievable goals is our path there.”
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Praxi is a Vision Therapy experience in VR and on mobile devices designed to relax your eyes and neuro-visual pathways to restore you to a rested and relaxed state of focus. Through various exercises, you will train your visual system, learning skills such as improving your focus, improving your reaction time, opening up your depth of vision, and increasing your peripheral vision.
