Neurovascular coupling is the link between the neurons in your brain and the blood vessels in your brain. When a certain part of your brain performs work, blood flow increases in that area to supply it with oxygen and energy to be able to do that work. Cool science fact, Bill Nye, but why is this important for concussion recovery?

In a healthy, un-concussed brain, this link is dialed in: extremely sensitive and extremely accurate. Absolutely on point! No limits, no thresholds.

In a concussed, recovering brain, this link is disrupted. We use a specific part of our brain (frontal lobe, temporal lobe, and more) to do a specific something (binge-read Fourth Wing), and it doesn’t have the blood supply or oxygen supply to perform the task. Or it exhausts itself and we quickly hit our threshold (as Violet reaches the parapet, ahhhh!) and our brain forces us to stop. This threshold and symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, headache, nausea and more are driven by dysfunctional neurovascular coupling.

For comparison, it’s a lot like a muscle - if I asked you to do 100 squats, your thighs would burn out because you’ve pushed past your body’s ability to pump blood to those muscles and supply oxygen & energy to them (unless you’re Quadzilla and your thighs know no limits). The same happens in the post-concussion, recovering brain - we try returning to work and 3 hours in, certain brain regions have hit their thresholds and we’re feeling strong symptoms.

How do we re-couple?
☝️ Targeted physical exercise (retraining your physiology to work for you)
✌️ Targeted cognitive exercise (training certain brain regions to improve their capacity)

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