Becoming Mindful with Michael Arnstein
Show Notes:
It’s not uncommon for a concussion to affect your vision, often causing fatigue, headaches, and visual impairments. Our guest today, Michael Arnstein, understands this all too well. He talks to us about the concussion he suffered in Cambodia in early 2020. He speaks about his efforts to get treatment, his experience with vision rehab and eye therapy, and the importance of getting your eyes checked after a concussion. We also discuss mindfulness and Michael explains how a visit to the Mindfulness Project in Thailand equipped him to deal, not just with the COVID-19 lockdown, but with his own pain and vision problems too. As a mindfulness-based wellness and lifestyle coach, Michael brings a unique perspective to the subject of concussions. For anyone who is struggling to cope, he has some valuable advice on how you can deal with your own pain and symptoms through mindfulness, so tune in today!
Key Points From This Episode:
• Michael explains how he suffered a concussion in a rural village in Cambodia.
• He describes his experience of trying to get home as the world was shutting borders due to COVID-19.
• He talks about his first experience with a neurologist and how his visual symptoms were worsening.
• What he learned from his own research into visual issues related to concussions.
• His experience of vision rehab.
• The importance of getting your eyes tested if you are a concussion survivor.
• How clarity of vision and amount of eye stain don’t necessarily correlate in concussion survivors.
• An introduction to eye therapy and what it involves.
• Thoughts on mindfulness and what it means to be mindful.
• The impact of the stories we tell ourselves on our recovery.
• The two layers of dealing with a concussion: The physical discomfort and the mental reaction to the pain.
• Micheal talks about visiting The Mindfulness Project in Thailand,
• How his exposure to Buddhist philosophy altered his perspective.
• How his spiritual awakening prepared him for both the COVID-19 pandemic and his own concussion recovery.
• How to be mindful in the moment when you are experiencing pain related to your concussion.
Connect with Our Guest:
Check out MTA Wellness: www.mtawellness.co
Follow Michael on Instagram: @mta.wellness
Insight Timer meditation profile: www.insighttimer.com/marstein
Follow Post Concussion Inc on Social Media to stay up to date on the podcast
Transcript - Click to Read
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:05.3] BP: Hi, I’m your host Bella Paige and welcome to The Post Concussion Podcast, all about life after experiencing a concussion. Help us make the invisible injury become visible.
The Post Concussion Podcast is strictly an information podcast about concussions and post-concussion syndrome. It does not provide nor substitute for professional medical advice diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.
Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast. The opinions expressed in this podcast are simply intended to spark discussion about concussion and post-concussion syndrome.
Welcome to today’s episode of the Post Concussion Podcast with myself Bella Paige and today’s guest, Michael Arnstein. Michael is a mindfulness-based wellness and lifestyle coach, specializing in digestive imbalances and stress management. He is also a meditation teacher trained in the tradition of Buddhist mindfulness and compassion meditation. He brings his unique training and experience with mindfulness to help clients cultivate awareness, acceptance, and conscious choice in order to successfully and sustainably reach their wellness and lifestyle goals.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:39.4] BP: Welcome to the show, Michael.
[0:01:41.3] MA: Thank you so much for having me.
[0:01:43.9] BP: To start, do you want to tell everyone about your concussions and where they occurred?
[0:01:49.6] MA: Yeah, I was backpacking through Southeast Asia at the time, I started traveling in December of 2019 and I had been there for over two months at that point, and this was in February of 2020. I was in a very rural village in Cambodia where I was volunteering for a week at a foundation to go set-up to provide more education to the local kids and Cambodia is already quite a rural undeveloped country. To say I was in a very rural village is saying quite a lot. It’s the kind of place where I had to go drive three kilometers by motorbike just to go buy potable drinking water. Not exactly the type of place that you want to sustain an injury.
The story of the accident itself isn’t so exciting, I was doing something under a very low roof and I was crouching to come out from under it and I stood up before I had actually cleared the roof. I stood up right into a wooden beam and I didn’t pass out or get dizzy or even see stars or anything, but I did sort of hit my head with such force that the first thing I said without even really thinking about it was “Oh my God, I hope I don’t get a concussion!”
I had never had a concussion or any head injury before, it wasn’t horribly painful but definitely the most force I’ve ever hit my head with. So much so that a tooth implant that I have rattled and sure enough, within a couple of hours, I developed a headache that didn’t seem to go away.
Here I was, basically in the middle of nowhere, definitely without any access to any medical care whatsoever. I contacted my doctor back in the US to let her know what happened and she advised that I avoid screens and reading for the time being and, fortunately at this point, I had been planning to go back to Thailand in the next couple of days, and Thailand does have quite modern and advanced healthcare, so that was fortunate.
I was traveling for about another five weeks in Asia after I got the concussion and that brought me to the end of March 2020, which, as we know, is sort of when the entire world started shutting down because of COVID. I had had on-and-off headaches and some fatigue during this time but it wasn’t that serious. Then, when I suddenly decided that I needed to fly back to the US so that I didn’t get stuck in Asia, that is when really bad issues developed. It’s not really advised to fly with a concussion, it had been about five weeks at that point. Once I got back to the US, that’s when things started getting quite severe for me.
[0:04:56.4] BP: How was flying? Because it’s quite the trip all the way back to the US.
[0:05:02.3] MA: Yeah, flying was interesting, in terms of my injury, that didn’t really pose any issue, what was interesting was yes, it took me about – I think it was 22 hours going through four different airports that was coming from an island, an island in Thailand to make multiple stops to get here and, of course, this was really at the very beginning of when Europe was already on lockdown, the US was entering a lockdown so flying was quite an interesting experience there: People in full-on hazmat suits! We were all wearing masks the entire time. It was interesting in that way, I was eager to get through it mostly for that reason.
[0:05:45.2] BP: What did you try? You got back to the US and then what did you do because the world was already starting to lockdown like you said?
[0:05:53.0] MA: Yeah, I got back to the US and, like I said, when I was in Asia, I had some on-and-off headaches, some fatigue and that was mostly it. Then, when I got back here, my headache started becoming really severe. My eyes were incredibly strained, really tense, had intense headaches in my forehead, behind my eyes, I became extremely sensitive to sunlight even from indoors, and I was so fatigued that I was sleeping 10 hours a night and waking up like I felt like I had just come out of surgery or from a coma or something.
No idea what was happening, my eyes were so heavy, I could barely open them. Clearly, something had really gone on with my visual system, the flying really exacerbated it. Initially I had stopped looking at screens and reading when I was in Asia and after a couple of weeks, I started reading again while I was in Asia and it was fine. Then, when I got back here and my vision was obviously compromised, I stopped doing that. I saw a neurologist when I got back here, the advice was, “Nothing’s really wrong and MRI looks fine. It’s sort of a waiting game,” which I think is probably something that a lot of people with concussion s here in a sort of like well, what does that mean? [inaudible 0:07:13.0]
[0:07:15.4] BP: You want to be proactive, you know? There’s something wrong, so to be told to sit and wait, you’re like, “This isn’t right, shouldn’t I be doing something to get better?”
[0:07:23.8] MA: Exactly. I stopped reading, I stopped looking at screens, I tried some supplements like omega three, CoQ10, Migravent which is really for migraines and it wasn’t really doing anything because my headaches weren’t really from migraines, right? They are from whatever these visual issues were that were sort of affecting my head and so, sort of not really satisfied with just hearing that it’s waiting game there’s nothing really to do about it, I started to do my own research about why visual issues can result from concussions.
I found a podcast about concussions, a different one - this was about 10 months ago or so at this point - I ended up listening to a podcast episode that featured a developmental optometrist and she was discussing visual issues associated with concussions, how sometimes vision rehab can be appropriate. She was saying things like, if you have a glasses prescription, that even before the concussions you didn’t really need to wear them because it was so small. Even if it’s really small, after concussion, the amount of work that your brain is doing is so much that it can really take a toll in order to, sort of, compensate for the imperfect vision. I thought, “Perhaps that’s happening with me.”
I started wearing my glasses, which I never wear because I have a tiny prescription and fair enough, that started helping a little bit and then I thought, okay, I’m going to get my glasses checked, make sure my prescription is up to date.
Happen to go to a developmental optometrist, they did an assessment and they said, “Yeah, you would be a really good candidate for vision rehab because, for whatever reason, the concussion just messes up the visual system, the eyes on the brain aren’t efficiently working together, the eyes aren’t working together with one another, everything is just sort of messed up.”
That started three months of vision rehab which turned into six months of vision rehab. For two months that I was back in the US, I didn’t read or look at screens, I pretty much spent two months doing nothing. I listened to podcasts, the world had shut down also, I was in my house all the time, not that I could go outside much anyway because of the sunlight.
[0:09:49.6] BP: I think a lot of people feel the same. It’s good to get your vision checked as well, even just like a simple, actually something I did, I guess a few months ago now was, I went and got my prescription checked and I get it done every year anyways because my prescription is very strong, it’s the opposite of yours, I can’t read or do anything. I can’t drive, I cannot do anything without my glasses on. What we did was we tried different prescriptions and the lenses, and I would decide what would trigger strain in my eyes versus actually how clear it was, because I actually went with a prescription that I could see a little less but I didn’t feel the same instant eye strain that I felt with a new prescription.
It’s kind of interesting to do it a bit different after I talked to her about some of the eye pain I’ve been getting from working with screens all the time now like I wasn’t doing before. It’s good to do different things to see what works for you and vision is a really a common problem with many concussion survivors.
[0:10:51.3] MA: Yeah, and there are a lot of different options like different prisms and you know, the axis and right balancing clarity versus controlling other symptoms like vertigo or “swimminess” so definitely recommend getting vision checked out as well.
[0:11:11.0] BP: For sure, I did eye therapy as well, what did your eye therapy involve?
[0:11:16.5] MA: It was a series of weekly exercises, I would have an exercise for two weeks but I would go in to the office weekly, learn these set of exercises, do them for two weeks and it was just a progression of building from like this very foundational exercises to getting to more complex, putting more, sort of, strain on my eye, so to speak, sort of like weightlifting progressively, getting tougher, assessing what was wrong, what the issues were sort of where there still needed to be room for improvement. So, things like working on one, just sort of like moving the eyes around back and forth. Divergence and convergence, which were my biggest issues, which are sort of like how the eye compensates for distance and close-up work, and then things like driving become really complicated. Driving is like the most complicated activity you can do with your eyes.
[0:12:20.1] BP: Yeah, did you find any of it tiring? I find my – I do eye therapy still and I have to do it at night, otherwise I’m exhausted. I don’t like to do it in the day because it kind of wipes me out for a little while.
[0:12:33.8] MA: Totally, some exercises were okay, some really kicked my butt, they could make me really fatigued, they could really make my eyes hurt. Yeah, it’s a bit like physical therapy I think where sometimes, it’s sort of like no pain no gain [inaudible 0:12:52.2]. Yeah, I would sometimes do them at night also, to avoid having the whole day be really uncomfortable or a wash, but then, you also have to balance well, I’m already more tired at the end of the day.
[0:13:06.2] BP: You can connect with Michael on his own website at mtawellness.co as well as @mta.wellness on Instagram. Both will be found in our episode description and shownotes but with that, let’s take a break, be sure to stay tuned for our talk on mindfulness.
[BREAK]
[0:13:27.8] BP: Want to create awareness for concussions? Want to support our podcast and website? Buy awareness clothing today on postconcussioninc.com and get 10% off using “listenin.” That’s “listenin” and be sure to tag Post Concussion Inc. in your photos. We’d love to see them.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:13:54.4] BP: Welcome back to The Post Concussion Podcast with myself Bella Paige and today’s guest, Michael Arnstein. To start, we’re going to get back into a little bit more of a mindfulness perspective. Something we had talked about when we had talked before recording, was the stories we tell ourselves affecting our recovery. How did that affect you?
[0:14:15.7] MA: That is a really good question and one that I have sort of a complex relationship to. I think the stories that we tell ourselves, whether they’re negative or positive, can have a really big impact on our recovery and can sort of get us wrapped up in expectations that can actually complicate our ability to move forward from where we really are.
To start, I think that when we’re dealing with any kind of injury and when we’re dealing with our concussions, there’s two layers to it: The first one is the physical experience of it, the pain, the disability, the way that it’s just changed the operation of our lives. As we know with our concussions, it’s all these painful and potentially debilitating effects like headaches and dizziness and fatigue, vision problems, the way that our day to day activities aren’t impacted and the way that we have to adapt to them and they can become more difficult. One is this physical change and discomfort.
Then there is the mental experience and the reaction to the pain and the physical changes that we have. Usually, we are reacting to pain and changes to our physical limitations quite negatively. We’re really averse to it because we don’t want to be experiencing these things. People typically don’t want to be experiencing pain or difficulties reading or getting up or going outside, or any of these things.
Often, we find ourselves wishing that we weren’t experiencing these painful things, these uncomfortable sensations. You know, we might wish things were different, we might dwell on the things we can’t do anymore. We might replay the incident over and over again, thinking about how it could have gone differently, or maybe how what we did was really silly and we could have avoided it, or how the injury has been a source of loss for us. How we lost our ability to participate in life and the way that we used to and so.
When we’re telling ourselves these kinds of stories I think they were adding more layers of pain on top of the physical impacts of the injury because now, we have all of this tension resisting the reality of what is actually going on and what we’re really trying to do is control what is ultimately uncontrollable. We’re fighting against it and we shouldn’t really underestimate just how much pain and unhappiness and dissatisfaction can come from the sort of mental interpretation of our physical injury.
If we really identified with these kinds of narratives that, “It shouldn’t be happening, it’s really unfair, it’s too painful to bear, I’ve lost the ability to do these activities that maybe I derive a sense of identity or meaning from,” then it can really trap us in these painful emotional states and it can hinder our ability to move forward from where we are, we can become really unhappy and maybe we can become depressed because we’re clinging to these stories that aren’t matching the reality of what’s in front of us, which is we have these injuries, we have these limitations, and this is all we can move forward from.
If we’re sort of unhappy, dissatisfied, depressed maybe then that can also affect the action we take, things like our willingness to put up with therapies or adapt to accommodations or just tap into our ability to be present and accept what is going on and find some peace in the present instead of clinging to the past or waiting for some point in the future and things get “better.”
[0:18:22.0] BP: Yeah, no, and a lot of us cling to- it can be really hard to accept that you kind of change who you are after a brain injury because you can change a lot. Your ability to do things changes, the way you think, like you had mentioned, can often change. I’d like that we’re always looking for that day that everything is better and that can be a really hard way to think about your recovery and kind of slow it down. Something that Michael did as he kind of mentioned it was go to Thailand.
It was a mindfulness project, correct? How do you believe that that helped you? It kind of worked out pretty well, right? Doing that and having that injury at the same time.
[0:19:04.7] MA: Yeah, so at the beginning of my travels in Asia, actually at the end of them as well, after I got the concussion, I spent time at this place in Thailand called The Mindfulness Project and it was started by a former Buddhist monk. It’s basically a permaculture community of about 40 volunteers at any given time who are always coming and going. It was set up to basically serve as this model for how to live a really mindful life.
Every day we meditated, we did yoga, we worked on the farm learning permaculture practices and natural building. We had nightly discussions of Buddhist philosophy and it’s all sort of combined into this healing system for transforming ourselves and the environment and inspiring this really radical way of living, of being totally connected to ourselves and the environment and other people. I say ‘radical’ on there, it’s not really. It’s radical in sort of our modern world but not really ‘radical’ when you think about it.
It was my first introduction to Buddhist philosophy and to really deepening my meditation practice and to living a life that is really rooted in being here and now. It started this path for me to learn the ways in which our minds and our egos can sort of become prisons of our own making: The way that we’re constantly thinking, the way that our minds can constantly just spin out into a million different tangents, the way that they can constantly be grasping onto things and wanting things to be different. It kicked off my adoption of Buddhist philosophy in my own life.
Really a spiritual exploration so that affected and really colored the next three months of my traveling in Asia. I started to understand how my mind really works, how it sabotages me a lot. I would fix things outside the present a lot to be satisfied and how it runs away from the present a lot of the time. So, this was the most valuable thing that I took with me and, since then, has really changed my entire perspective on life and my practice of mindfulness, of cultivating presence and acceptance as much as I can.
When I got the concussion and then when I flew back here and have these much worse symptoms and was also in lockdown, I felt like I had actually been so well-prepared and primed to deal with both of these situations, especially at a time when I think most people were probably spending a lot of time thinking about how they just wish everything were different, how they wish that COVID wasn’t happening but they couldn’t return to their normal lives. I was sort of sitting here like, “You know what? I can really accept that all of this is going on and sort of be aware of what I’m feeling and my tendencies to perhaps wish something were happening and just come back and cultivate some sense of peace with where I am.”
[0:22:26.1] BP: We talk about ‘mindfulness’ but I’ve done mindfulness work with a therapist before, but something we kind of miss is explaining it properly to people and what being mindful really means. Would you want to give a little bit more background of how you get there or what does it mean to be mindful. We tell our listeners to be mindful and it will really help you but that doesn’t – it kind of gives them like a lot, “Okay, well now what?” What do they do next?
[0:22:54.9] MA: Exactly. It is something of a buzz word these days especially when self-care and wellness have really cropped up almost as entire industries. Yeah, I think it is often prescribed as a way to slow down, to check in with yourself, sort of as an antidote to the super-fast paced and stressful lives that a lot of us live these days. It is good advice but it’s rather a vague instruction to sort of just live in the moment or be present and pay attention to what’s going on around you, because that is simple enough advice, and that is what it is. But when you sit down and you try to focus on a single thing for even one minute without your mind wondering off into some unrelated thought, you realize, “Oh, it’s actually really hard to be mindful.”
Say, I’m reading a book and I’m on a page and I come to the end of the page and somehow by the end of the page, I realize that I was thinking about what I am going to make for dinner, this [inaudible 0:24:03.2] that they have at work, some incident that occurred two months ago and I am replying in my head how I’d like to have a beer right now [inaudible 0:24:11.2] without even realizing it. Then I come to the end of the page and I’m like, “Oh I don’t even know what I just read” because my mind was actually somewhere else entirely.
Then we think, “Well, how do I actually live in the moment? How do I cultivate mindfulness and what is really the benefit of it?” We start with what mindfulness really is and it is pretty simple as it sounds. It is non-judgmental observation. It’s being fully present, it is noticing what is going on around us and also with the [noising 0:24:47.3] in our own minds and, an important part of it that I think is often overlooked, is that it’s doing this without judging or labelling.
It is being conscious and aware of what is going on around us, it is noticing when our mind is wondering off in thought and bringing it back to the present. It is doing it without judging, without getting into these sort of habits of criticizing or having an opinion about it. It is just sort of letting it be. We have a tendency to judge a lot or most of what we experienced. You know, it’s either good or it’s bad or it is just neutral and boring and weird [inaudible 0:25:30.6] which you know, sort of like 90% of our experience.
We sort of just toss it out the window because it’s not really stimulating one way or another and so we do that with external experiences like, “Oh, this food is good. This food is bad. This outfit is ugly. This outfit looks nice” but we also do it with our minds too. We can judge ourselves and we can judge the thoughts that we have and when we have opinions and criticisms sort of about everything that we experience, it can make it really hard to be at peace with what’s happening.
If we use an example related to a concussion, let’s say I am sitting here with my concussion and I am reading, and then I get a headache and my eyes hurt, one part of mindfulness is I’m in tuned with my body and I am just feeling these sensations. I feel the pains, the pressures, the tensions. I’m being mindful of what is going on within my body and I can recognize that I should stop reading and I don’t want to make this pain worse but then maybe my mind starts spinning off into these judgments about what’s going on.
You know, thinking, “Oh I hate this is happening. I can’t believe this injury is ruining my life so much. I’m not going to be able to read again normally” and as we talk about earlier sort of these thoughts, these judgments are really making me more miserable. They are making me more unhappy on top of, sort of, the physical things that I am experiencing and so mindfulness comes in again when I recognize that I am having these thoughts. I acknowledge the thoughts, you know, I see that they’re there and I don’t reject them or try to sweep them under the rug and pretend that they never happened.
I see them, I don’t judge myself for falling into this trap of negative thinking and I also don’t judge the thoughts themselves. I just see them, I let them go as soon as I recognize them and I come back to the present. So mindfulness is sort of like a third-party witness to what we’re experiencing and it’s guiding us back to the present when our mind wanders off. It’s really allowing us to recognize how our mind actually works because when we’re more aware and we’re more accepting, then it allows the spaciousness to not be so identified with our mental activity and our thoughts, our judgments, our criticisms and acceptance is a big part of mindfulness.
That is sort of what, you know, remaining not judgmental is. It is sort of seeing things and saying, “Okay, this is what’s come up, this is what’s happening. I can’t change that that happened and I am not going to judge it. It’s there.”
[0:28:29.9] BP: I really love the reading situation because it is something that happened to me a lot especially when first dealing with this, because I was an avid reader and then went from not being able to read at all and I remember getting – I get really angry. I get myself for not being able to read and then your thoughts just kind of – once they start, they kind of never ends.
What mindfulness allowed me to do was calm down those thoughts - and I talk about those thoughts in episode eight about my mental health - and that is something that mindfulness allowed me to improve significantly because those thoughts kind of destroyed my mental health because they would take over every day from something simple like not being able to read or being behind or forgetting something when going into a grocery store, and things like that.
I am really glad that you explained it that way because I think it is a really easy way to kind of understand what mindfulness is. Is there anything else you would like to add before ending today’s episode?
[0:29:31.1] MA: First of all, thank you for having me and just for sharing the space for people to talk about their recovery and everyone’s perspective on their journeys. You know, I think I would end by saying that, at the end of the day, our injuries can be really painful and pain is a part of life. Physical pain and also emotional pain and so, with mindfulness we can really learn to not eliminate the pain that we’re experiencing but really approach it with a lot more ease.
We can learn how to experience and accept it without generating a lot of unnecessary suffering on top of it. Then, the more that we learn how to live in the present, the more we can find this peace. I am reminded of a quote by Jon Kabat-Zinn, who is the father of mindfulness-based stress reduction, a western Buddhist teacher. He said that you can’t stop the waves but you can learn to surf.
Basically, we can’t really control all of these things that are happening to us and we can’t control the pain, the difficulties, the adaptations that we have to make, but we can learn how to sort of, roll with the punches more easily and sort of roll with the current rather than trying to swim against it and relax into what’s happening and that’s what mindfulness really allows us to do.
[0:31:06.7] BP: Yeah. Thank you Michael so much and make sure everybody checks out everything, you can find it in our show description so you can connect with Michael and see if he can help you if you are struggling. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing all your insights on living post-concussion and mindfulness.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:31:27.0] BP: Has your life been affected by concussions? Join our podcast by getting in touch. Thank you so much for listening to The Post Concussion Podcast and be sure to help us educate the world about the reality of concussion by giving us a share and, to learn more, don’t forget to subscribe.
[END]
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