What a Concussion Is Still Doing to Your Body (Years Later)

Have you ever hit your head, shaken it off, and moved on? Most of us have. But what if that hit — even a "mild" one — never fully stopped affecting your body?

In this episode I'm talking about concussions, traumatic brain injury, and the blows to the head that never got named, treated, or connected to what came next. This is the conversation nobody is having — and it's one of the most important threads I pull in my client work.

I share my own history of head injuries — from falling down the stairs at four and a half, to passing out in a refrigerator box, to the pull-up bar incident in 2022 — and why it took me decades to connect the dots.

I cover the full spectrum of head injuries, from severe TBI to the subconcussive hits that produce zero symptoms but still change brain biomarkers, and all the everyday scenarios people never think to count — car accidents, falls, pool hits, contact sports, physical altercations.

Then I go deep into what a head injury is still doing to your body — sometimes years later — across five systems: the gut-brain axis and leaky gut, vagus nerve dysfunction and dysautonomia, glymphatic and lymphatic drainage disruption, limbic system sensitization, and critical mineral depletion including magnesium and zinc.

I also revisit the mold-brain connection from last episode and why compounding exposures — mold, chronic stress, illness, and head injury — create a layered burden that no single lens has ever fully addressed.

If you've been living with mystery gut issues, anxiety that appeared out of nowhere, a nervous system that won't settle, or you just feel like a different version of yourself — this episode may give you the missing piece of your story.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Well, hello, hello, and welcome back to the Rewilded Wellness Podcast. I'm your host, Lydia Joy. I'm glad you guys are here for this one because this episode has been living inside me for a while now. And to be honest, Aerie Season felt like exactly the right time to bring it out. Aerie season, we're in it right now. It's the season of the Ram, the head, the initiator, the one who charges forward first, ask questions later. And whether or not you follow astrology, I think there's something kind of poetic and honestly a little telling about the fact that we're sitting down to talk about head injuries right now in the season. I want to go deep on concussions, blows to the head, and traumatic brain injury, but not in the way you've probably heard it before. I want to talk about what happens months, years after the hit to your gut, to your nervous system, your lymphatic system, your minerals, your sense of safety in your own body. And I want to talk about all the hits nobody ever counted. So, first things first, I want to start with my own story because I think it'll help you locate yours. I am an Aries moon. I also have Chiron and Aries. And I don't know, I'm sure there is something certain to these astrological placements potentially being more prone. Um, but to head forward, you know, lead with your skull kinds of experiences. If there is, I'm exhibit A. And I'm gonna talk about my personal list because I think when you hear it laid out like this, you'll start doing your own inventory. So I have a lot. Uh some that I'm not gonna include here. But when I was four and a half, I fell down a flight of stairs, broke my right collarbone, and my head went into a wall and corner. Uh sometime when I was a kid, I don't know how old I was, I want to say like seven, eight, who knows. We had just gotten a new refrigerator, and it came in a giant box, and I did what any curious child would do. I wanted to get in the box. I climbed in. I had somebody help me stand it up straight, uh, one of my parents. And then, of course, what happened? I tipped all the way over before anyone could notice and whacked my head hard on the floor. I remember feeling very disoriented and out of it after that. Then there was the time in elementary school, I don't know what grade I was in. I we had this old-fashioned metal seesaw. I don't know, I'm 51, so maybe if you're in my age range, you remember those old seesaws. They're freaking huge. And there was like a middle section, and my friend dared me to put my head in it. So I did. I stuck my head in between these metal bars, and then unfortunately got stuck. And she had the school wasn't open yet. Nobody else was there. Uh, we my bus always got there early. Anyway, long story short, she had to go find the somebody, the nurse. Took a real long time my head was stuck in that thing until we found someone to help me get it out. And I remember being very disoriented and woozy and um also I remember slipping on a concrete basement floor uh in in vacation Bible school one summer, some point in elementary school as well. I remember like being disoriented after that as well. I remember hitting my head on the bottom of a pool really hard, at least once. I'm pretty sure I hit it on the side of the pool as well. Um, I had at least three car accidents that were significant enough impact to give me some, you know, ramifications there. Won't go into that. Uh I guess there was another time I was 25 or 26, um, swing dancing, something I knew really well. Doing a partner flip I'd done so many times. And I jumped into it too fast, he wasn't ready, and I landed hard directly on my head. Um, and then in 2022, uh, you know, I was like 47 years old at the time, I had a pull-up bar and a door frame, and I had resistance bands on it. And this was me being stupid, by the way. Like I pulled the bands forward, which is not something I ever did before because I was just using it to help me assist a pull-up. Walked forward with them, and the bar came with it right and whacked me right in the back of my head. I mean, that was intense. I had someone there, someone was standing right there, saw it coming, couldn't get there in time. And he was like, whoa, that was intense, Lydia. You took that like a linebacker, and uh, I didn't like pass out or anything, but that hit me like a shock, you know. I didn't think much of it. I had a lot going on that year. I moved on, and that's kind of the whole problem, isn't it? Like, where we forget about these things, right? Um, and there's ones that are like kind of cloudy for me. I try to remember the details, but anyways, that tells you something there, right? So here I am, right? Someone who has spent years, you know, studying the human body, studying the inner terrain, uh, working with clients. And it wasn't until in the last handful of years that I started, you know, pulling this thread, got some microbiome trainings, all this, and really started to make the connections of what all those hits might have been doing quietly, cumulatively in my system over time. And I'm not alone in this, right? Like, I feel like lately I have at least one in four or five clients that has had significant head injuries somewhere in their history. Um, right. And of course, they're, you know, the things that they're wanting to work on is like what's going on with my sleep, my hormones, my anxiety, my gut, right? They're not saying my head, right? So that's what I want to get into in this episode. So here we go. Did this happen to you? We're gonna get into a little bit of a spectrum here and talk about this. Um, because before we get into what a head injury actually does to your body over time, I need you to understand what counts as a head injury. Because I think a lot of people are gonna hear this episode and think, oh, this isn't about me. I never had a concussion. And I gently want to push back on that just a little bit because, you know, first I think the language could be a little bit confusing, even in medicine, right? We have the terms concussion and TBI, which stands for traumatic brain injury. And they're kind of used interchangeably a lot of times, and that's fine because the terms are often used that way in like the literature, clinical care, all that. But what matters more than those labels is really understanding the spectrum. So TBI severity is classified into three categories. We've got mild, moderate, severe. And approximately 70% of all the diagnosed TBIs are mild. Mild. Okay, that sounds reassuring until you start to understand that even when mild, a TBI often results in chronic disabilities with long-lasting effects on your health and quality of life. Okay, so let me slow that down for a second. Mild doesn't mean minor. I'm gonna say that probably more than once. So, what's actually happening inside your skull, right? Your brain floats inside your skull in cerebrospinal fluid, suspended, cushioned, but not like fixed. So when force comes in, uh, the brain moves. So there's a coup injury, and that happens when the brain slams into the skull right at the point of impact. Then there's a contra coup injury, and that's the rebound. So it's when the force is strong enough that the brain violently slams into the inside of the skull on the opposite side from the initial impact. So it's one event, two injury sites. And these contusions can appear after a delay of hours to a day, which is a big reason why people feel fine immediately and then maybe don't. All right. And here's one of the most like we don't even consider, you don't have to hit your head at all, right? We have the coup and the contra coup. Those brain injuries can occur in a car accident, even when there's no direct impact to the head, right? Because you have the forceful, sudden back and forth movement that can cause the brain to move in exactly the same way. Um, basically, the brain doesn't just get hit once, it hits where the impact happens and then it rebounds and hits the other side too, right? So the clinical presentations of whiplash and concussion have considerable overlap. And differentiating between the two can be kind of clinically challenging, right? So, how many people were in rear-end collisions and got treated for neck pain and never had anyone ask about their brain? And then there's the one that nobody talks about is the non-concussive hit. So a subconcussive brain injury results from a blow to the head. It produces no noticeable symptoms, and people might not even realize they've been injured at all because they don't have like the dizziness or the stars or anything that you would report. And yet the scientific evidence suggests that these non-concussive impacts cause uh subclinical traumatic brain injury, meaning changes to brain biomarkers, imaging or function, even without any symptoms in the moment. All right. And the number that really stopped me when I was looking at this was for every concussion and like an athlete is diagnosed with, if you think about all the different sports that you're gonna hit your head, right? Like soccer, for example, heading the ball, football, you know, all kinds of things. They may experience like hundreds of additional head impacts over time that never got thought about, right? Um so I just want to be clear that the diagnosed concussion isn't necessarily the hardest hit. It's just the one that got noticed for whatever reason. So when we talk about head injuries, we're not just talking about the one event, right? We're talking about the accumulation, right? The headers, the tackles, the hits you shook off, the ones no one tracked, uh, but your body did. So here's the full spectrum. I'm gonna keep it in plain language, right? We have severe TBI. This is where you have loss of consciousness for extended periods, maybe coma, structural damage on imaging, high impact accidents, serious falls, violence. Uh, then we have the moderate TBI, and this is significant loss of consciousness, prolonged confusion, and possible imaging findings, right? Then there's the mild TBI or the concussion, and this is the most common category, and it may or may not involve losing any sort of consciousness. Um, it could be brain fog, dizziness, headache, light sensitivity. And this is what most people have had and never fully named or treated or got support for. And then we have the subconcussive and non-concussive hits where there's no symptoms in the moment, but they are the hits that accumulate over time, right? Like the soccer headers, the tackles, the physical altercations, the ones you shook off. Why I didn't want my son to become an MMA fighter because I knew too much about the brain. Um and then the category I think about most with my clients is the forgotten one, right? Like mine, for example, the hit that happened during a hard or busy season of life, the one you just got up and moved on from, right? It didn't seem serious enough to track you, you fell off a ladder, uh it hit your head, you whatever, right? Um, but your body registered it, your nervous system reorganized around it. So there's a lot of everyday scenarios that we could all recognize. Maybe I've had clients tell me all kinds of different ones. Maybe you hit your head on a cabinet, maybe something fell out of a closet and hit you on the head. It was heavy. Uh, a car door bashed your head into a low ceiling. Ever done that? Tall people. Um, and then you feel briefly off, right? Or you just fell and hit the back of your head. Um, you were in a car accident, especially the rear end kind. You took an elbow or a ball to your head during play, like playing some type of sport, right? Maybe you were in a physical altercation. Um, you hit the bottom of a pool. That happened to me. You played years of contact sports, even recreationally. All right. So you get the point, right? Currently, available imaging technologies and blood tests can't always detect damage from mild concussive injury. So people get cleared, they get sent home, they're told they're fine. But, you know, normal imaging doesn't mean nothing happened. All right, so this is the part I want you to hear, especially if you've been listening to my podcast for a while, because it's always all about your history and your terrain. In my last episode, I talked about um mold, okay, and I mentioned mold brain really briefly. And what happens neurologically when you're exposed to mycotoxins from a water damage building, um, it actually looks similar to what happens after a head injury. And I want to come back to that connection here because for some of you, and certainly for me, it's not one exposure, it's several and they stack. Uh, there's several small studies that concluded um that neurologists could not differentiate between people with repeated mold exposure and people with mild to moderate traumatic brain injury. They had similar neurological and cognitive deficits. So let's think about what that means for a second. The brain under mold and the brain after concussion look that similar to trained clinicians. Okay, so neuropsychological testing on people exposed to mold showed impairments similar to those seen in traumatic brain injury. Impaired learning, slowed processing, cognitive fog, emotional dysregulation, and both involve neuroinflammation, both disrupt the blood-brain barrier. They affect the lymphatic clearance system, the limbic system, and cause gut dysfunction through overlapping pathways. So if you've had head injuries and mold exposure, or head injuries and chronic stress, or head injuries and a significant illness, your system may be carrying a compounded load that no single lens has ever fully seen. Right. And that was certainly true for me. And it's something that I'm watching closely in my practice with my clients. You are not any one thing, right? Your history's layered. And so the work we do has to be layered too. So, what is it doing to your body? Okay, now that you know where you might sit on this spectrum, let me tell you what the research says is actually happening inside the body after one of these events, especially when it goes unaddressed. So I want to walk you through five uh five key areas, right? We've got the gut brain axis, the vagus nerve, the lymphatic and lymphatic system, limbic system, minerals. Because none of these are separate stories. They're one story told through five different parts of the body. So let's talk about the gut brain access. Because TBI is a chronic and progressive dis-ease. And so, you know, anyone who's had it enough to know that they needed to take care of it in the moment knows that managing it requires a lot, right? We have to understand not just the brain injury itself, but the secondary effects on the peripheral organs, right? Including uh also the gastrointestinal tract, because your gut takes a hit when your head takes a hit, the gut-brain connection. We always have to remember that. And so TBI induces a stress response, and that impacts your autonomic nervous system control of your gut function, which can lead to dysmotility and then the increased uh mucosal permeability, right? Leaky gut. I have a whole episode on that. I did my whole gut terrain map series as well. Um, and so this is a downstream consequence of a head injury, right? And most people have no idea that's even possible. And what it does is it disrupts the intestinal barrier by increasing intestinal permeability. It initiates the translocation of bacteria, bacterial products into systemic circulation. And markers of this disruption have, you know, been able to show up within hours of injury. So then the loop begins, right? Because the connection is bidirectional. You can get trapped in a bad feedback loop that's very difficult to uh break out of. So, because like when gut dysfunction worsens, then the brain inflammation, which worsens gut dysfunction, is also in place. So it so it starts to like increase, if you will, uh it's seemingly. Does that make sense? Um, and there I I found, you know, in when I was researching um over the years, uh, you know, especially in the microbiome world, you know, um, and they simply said, until your gut microbiome has returned to normal, you haven't recovered. And so this is one of the reasons why I ask about head injuries and every health intake, because, you know, someone coming in with what they feel is like a mystery digestive issues, right? I have someone right now who had a concussion in the last year, and these digestive issues that they never had showed up along the way, and they're like, this is so crazy. I this has never been a part of my health history, right? Um, and then of course the dysbiosis that comes along with that. And then, you know, people have like these food sensitivities that they're like, where did these come from? And so my question is not, did something happen to your head? Um, well, it is. It's like it's like, but I want to kind of understand that story, right? And and that timeline. Um, because it does play a role. So then we have the vagus nerve. Um, right, that I have an episode on that as well. If you can go back and just find all these episodes, if you want to geek out. Um, but I think most people following me are literate enough to understand the vagus nerve is a big deal. And it's basically your brain-to-gut superhighway, right? That main channel of your parasympathetic nervous system, your rest and digest mode. And brain injury shuts down the parasympathetic activity of the vagal nerve in favor of vigilant sympathetic activity. And when that happens, vagal inhibition starts to reduce your uh digestive enzyme production, it disturbs your gut homeostasis, and eventually it leads to dysbiosis, even SIBO. Basically, a pro inflammatory state. So damage or pressure to the vagus nerve after a head injury can contribute to inflammation and symptoms that even can look like things like PTSD or chronic pain or. Chronic fatigue syndrome, IBS, right? So if you take nothing else from this section, hear this. Um, and this is what the research shows. And again, you know, research is always developing, we're always learning more, but it's showing that 40% of concussion patients experience autonomic dysfunction. That's close to half. I would wager a bet we're going to find more over time. So living in a body stuck in high alert with a nervous system that got knocked off its axis and never quite found its way back, right? We have a lot of that going on in the collective. And not everyone is connecting it back to their head. Now, we have to talk about the lymphatic system and lymphatic system. And this is um important because when I think about especially the lymphatic system, it really helped me kind of change how I think about brain health because we know that the brain has its own waste clearance system, which is the lymphatic system. And it runs primarily when you're sleeping, right? Because uh it's flushing out the metabolic debris, uh, it's in it's getting rid of inflammatory proteins, any kind of like neurotoxic waste, if you will. And this system is damaged in the acute phase following even a mild concussion, right? Due to any changes in the the water channels and astrocytes. Um, and that results in reduced potential for waste removal. Now, a lot of people who've had head injuries in my practice have told me suddenly their sleep was shot to shit for a while. So if you're not sleeping, you're not, your lymphatic system is not as efficiently able to clear out all that waste, right? Um and then the uh menageolymphatics, okay, this drains the cerebrospinal fluid into the lymph nodes in the neck. And they can show severe deficits in drainage that begin within hours of even mild brain trauma and can persist for a couple of months post-injury. So basically, after a head injury, the brain can start accumulating waste and inflammatory debris that it's normally supposed to clear out, but now it cannot do that as efficiently. Right? Um, and and that sleep disruption that I mentioned that so many people experience after a head injury, it definitely makes it worse. Um it's like the system that the brain needs the most to heal is like one of the things being the most disrupted. And I think, you know, for a lot of people, that's why they have to do the cranial work, you know, any like maybe even manual lymphatic drainage, especially in your head, neck, and um, you know, uh upper body, right? You can look up Dr. Perry's big six as starting to trend. People are doing it. That's really helpful. Um, but you know, and then the sleep, huge. Sleep quality is huge. And these are not optional when you're trying to recover. They end up becoming like a crucial part, uh a foundational part of like your recovery. So then we get into the limbic system, right? This is your amygdala, your hippocampus, your emotional and threat processing center, and that takes a very specific hit with head injury. There's a lot of research that suggests that mild TBI can exacerbate the impact of the brain microstructure on PTSD symptoms, especially within regions known to be vulnerable to chronic stress. So basically, a concussion can prime your brain's alarm system to stay on even long after the event is over. So the TBIs can cause dysregulation of these mood-altering uh neurotransmitters, including serotonin, norepinephrine, which uh can induce like seemingly like PTSD symptoms, right? Can even explain things like major depressive disorders that people are experiencing. Um, and so what this does is it shows up as like heightened emotional sensitivity, right? Like an anxiety that wasn't quite there before, or like you'll feel like a nervous system, your nervous system just like cannot settle. Um, you feel like a different version of yourself. You know, and a lot of times people are like trying to attribute these things to like their hormones or something, right? Or, you know, oh, I'm just stressed, or, you know, oh, I'm burned out, right? And those are are real too. But there could be, like I keep returning to the head injury question because there could be these things that set you off more than you realize, right? And the body encodes physical trauma in the same terrain as emotional trauma. So when the limbic system is involved, that ripple effects, you know, it just touches on everything. And then, of course, we have the mineral piece of the puzzle, right? The mineral depletion. And I want to slow that down for a second because this is like my whole world. It gets real practical. Um, this is the most immediately actionable piece and one of the most overlooked. One of my sons just got clocked in the head. Um, unfortunately, he is doing a version of uh fighting right now. And so, of course, thankfully I know what to tell him, what to do. Um, right. So it's important to start to understand these things because we're not gonna all avoid getting hit our head hit, right? We can try, but you can't live in a bubble, right? So, following any kind of head injury, concussion, the brain experiences a significant loss of key minerals, especially magnesium, obviously. And we know we gotta have our magnesium, it's gotta be replenished for proper healing to take place. Because when the magnesium drops, the brain becomes more excitable, more easily triggered, harder to calm down, right? And that ties directly into what so many people experience after a head injury, like the sleep disruption, anxiety, the sensitivity, the nervous system that won't settle. And there's also an increased loss of zinc after a brain injury. And we know zinc is critical for cognition, memory, mood, overall repair, so many things, right? So when it drops, you lose part of your ability to recover effectively. Um and I also I found some somewhere. I'm sorry, guys, I don't remember, but I've spent so many years like touching into this over time. There's uh a lot of people that just um didn't have their basic micronutrient needs met after, you know, a traumatic brain injury. So, you know, it's like, okay, well, if that's true, then why aren't we, you know, re-mineralizing and giving people these core nutrients that they need, right? We already know it's hard to do these days. So why are we not including this into like the standard care practices? If we have seen this, right? Um, so typically, if you get a head injury and you go the typical route to find that out, no one's talking to you about minerals. Like no one's talking to you about the nutrients you need. Um and, you know, for your body to actively try to repair, it needs them, right? And there's one more piece here that is particularly interesting to me uh that I don't hear a whole lot being talked about is lithium. Uh obviously, I'm not talking about pharmaceutical lithium. I'm talking about a trace mineral, lithium, nutritional lithium. And it actually plays a really important role in how the brain regulates and protects and repairs itself. So after a head injury, we know that the brain is in that state of inflammation, excitability, vulnerability. And lithium can really help to buffer that because it supports uh neuroprotection, it uh helps with the reduction of inflammation and the uh repair and growth of your neurons. So basically, it kind of helps the brain not overreact, right? And it helps it rebuild more effectively. Um, so this is something I've paid attention to closely in my work. When I look at hair tests, uh, I look at a few markers, I can see like where they may have limbic system, you know, really low limbic system um markers, you know, and there's a pretty significant depletion there. And it's typically in people with chronic stress, mold exposure, the head injuries. And so basically what that ends up doing is you don't have the same buffering capacity in that state, right? Um, so when we're looking at recovery, it's not just about what happened, right? It's about what does the system now need to feel supported enough to repair? And by golly, minerals, including lithium, are such a foundational part of that. All right, I could have gone way deeper with this, but I wanted to just give you a high-level overview. Um, and I want you to walk away today, like understanding that a concussion is not just a brain event. It's like a whole body reorganization. It touches your gut microbiome, your vagal tone, your lymphatic drainage, your emotional regulation, your mineral stores. It can look like anxiety, it can look like IBS, it can look like hormonal chaos, it can look like um a nervous system that's just tired and wired, right? Um, and because we live in a culture that says it was mild, or you didn't lose consciousness, or you seem fine, so many people never connect what happened to their head with what started happening in their body. And then, of course, you know, when you layer on top of that any other things like mold exposure, chronic stress, illness, whatever it may be, the compounding effect becomes more significant, right? Um, our bodies, you guys, our bodies aren't actually like dramatic. They're just keeping the score, right? Um so I do ask my clients if they've ever had a head injury because more often than not, it ends up just being a part of the story. Um, and so, and I just want people to be aware, not to send anyone into some kind of spiral, right? But it it it could be a thread that might be worth pulling. You know, it could be something that's playing a role for you. Um, and so I for me, like understanding that, understanding that about my life history and what's happened to me, it just gives me more context to sit with, um, you know, and understand why my terrain may have the challenges it has had, right? To me, it's very helpful to understand. And, you know, then it's just a place that we can work from versus like react to. Do you see what I'm saying? So if this episode had you thinking about your own history, your own list of hits that you took and moved on from, don't ignore that. This thread could be worth pulling on. And if you're starting to connect the dots between your head, your gut, your nervous system, how your body has been feeling, that's exactly the work I do. Um, inside my client program, minerals and microbes. You don't have to figure this out on your own. Uh, you can reach out, email me, or just learn more through the link in the show notes below. Read it over. If you find yourself in it, um you're welcome to uh join and get support. And, you know, if this blah this episode, um, you know, if it helped you understand your body in a new way, please by all means share it. I love it when people share this work with others, especially with anyone who maybe has more of the situation where it would happen, like parents of athletes, right? Or, you know, people who've been in a lot of accidents, or, you know, just with anyone who has a loved one who can't fully explain why they don't feel like themselves anymore. So I appreciate you for being here, for taking the time to tune in. And until next time, take care of your heads, your gut, each other. Stay wild, stay well. I'll be back real soon.