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

Listen to this episode anywhere you tune in — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

Have you ever hit your head, shaken it off, and just... kept going?

Maybe it happened in a car accident. Maybe it was a fall, a sports hit, a blow you took and didn't think was serious enough to mention. Maybe it happened during a chaotic season of life and you genuinely forgot about it — until something in your body stopped making sense and you couldn't figure out why.

This episode is for you.

The Conversation Nobody Is Having

We talk a lot about concussions in the context of sports and helmets and sideline protocols. What we don't talk about nearly enough is what happens after — months later, years later — when the hit is long forgotten but the body is still quietly reorganizing around it.

I've been sitting with this topic for a while, and Aries season — the season of the ram, the head, the one who leads with their skull — felt like exactly the right time to bring it forward.

In this episode I share my own history of head injuries. And it's a long one. Falling down a full flight of stairs at four and a half. Passing out after tipping over a refrigerator box as a kid. Hitting my head at the bottom of a pool. Landing directly on my head swing dancing at 26. And in 2022, a pull-up bar with resistance bands loosening mid-use and smacking me hard in the back of the head — my friend standing right there, watching it happen, saying afterward: "You took that like a linebacker."

I moved on. I had a lot going on. And that's kind of the whole point.

Because more often than not, that's exactly what people do. And the body keeps score whether we're paying attention or not.

First — Do You Even Know What Counts?

One of the most important things this episode does is expand your definition of what a head injury actually is.

Most people think: did I lose consciousness? Was it diagnosed? If the answer is no, they assume they're in the clear.

But the research tells a very different story.

Roughly 70% of all traumatic brain injuries are classified as mild — and mild does not mean minor. Symptoms can persist for months or years. And there's an entire category of head impacts — subconcussive hits — that produce zero noticeable symptoms in the moment but still cause measurable changes to brain biomarkers and function. These are the soccer headers, the tackles, the hits you shook off, the falls you forgot.

We also cover why whiplash from a car accident — even with no direct head impact — can produce the exact same brain injury as a concussion. And why so many people get cleared with "normal" imaging and sent home, when current imaging technology often can't detect damage from mild injuries at all.

By the end of this section, you'll have a full spectrum map — from severe TBI all the way to the forgotten hit — and a list of everyday scenarios that most people have never thought to count.

What It's Actually Doing to Your Body

This is the heart of the episode, and the part that I think will shift something for a lot of listeners.

A head injury is not just a brain event. It is a whole-body reorganization — and it touches five systems that most people never connect back to their head.

The gut-brain axis. Research shows that increased intestinal permeability — leaky gut — can develop within hours of a head injury, as the autonomic stress response disrupts gut function and barrier integrity. The gut microbiome shifts. Dysbiosis takes hold. And because the connection is bidirectional, gut dysfunction then worsens brain inflammation in an ongoing loop that's very hard to break without addressing both ends.

The vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the main communication line between your brain and your gut — the backbone of your parasympathetic, rest-and-digest system. Brain injury suppresses vagal activity in favor of sympathetic dominance, and the downstream effects include disrupted digestion, dysbiosis, SIBO, and a nervous system that gets stuck in high alert. Up to 40% of concussion patients experience lasting autonomic dysfunction. That's nearly half — living in bodies that never fully came back online.

The glymphatic and lymphatic system. The brain has its own waste-clearance system that runs primarily during sleep — the glymphatic system. Even a mild concussion can impair this system, reducing its function by up to 60%, with deficits lasting for a month or more. The meningeal lymphatics that drain cerebrospinal fluid into the lymph nodes of the neck are also affected. When the brain can't drain, inflammatory proteins and metabolic waste accumulate — and the sleep disruption that so commonly follows a head injury makes the problem worse, because deep sleep is exactly when this clearance happens most.

The limbic system. The amygdala, hippocampus, and emotional processing centers of the brain take a very specific kind of hit with head injury. Research shows that even mild TBI can sensitize the brain's alarm system, keeping it primed and reactive long after the event. Mood-regulating neurotransmitters like serotonin and norepinephrine are disrupted. The result can look like anxiety that appeared out of nowhere, emotional sensitivity that wasn't there before, a nervous system that simply won't settle — symptoms that get attributed to hormones, stress, or burnout, but that may trace back to something that happened to the head.

Mineral depletion. This is the most actionable piece and the most overlooked. Magnesium levels in the brain drop significantly following a concussion — and without correcting that drop, healing is impaired. Zinc levels fall too, with patients showing increased urinary zinc loss and reduced serum zinc almost immediately after injury. In one survey of TBI outpatients, not a single person met the recommended dietary allowances for the 14 common micronutrients assessed. The standard of care sends people home without a mineral protocol. The body is in active depletion and nobody's addressing it.

The Mold Connection

If you listened to my recent episode on mold brain, this one picks up an important thread from there.

Multiple studies have found that neurologists cannot reliably differentiate between patients with mold and mycotoxin exposure and patients with mild to moderate traumatic brain injury — their cognitive and neurological profiles look that similar. Both involve neuroinflammation, blood-brain barrier disruption, glymphatic impairment, limbic sensitization, and gut dysfunction through overlapping mechanisms.

So if you're carrying a history of head injuries and mold exposure — or head injuries and chronic illness, and prolonged stress — your system may be holding a compounded burden that no single lens has ever fully accounted for. That was true for me. And it's something I'm seeing more and more in the people I work with.

You are not one thing. Your history is layered. And the work has to match that.

The Question I Ask Every Client

In every health intake I do, I ask: have you ever had a head injury?

More often than not, it ends up being part of the story. Sometimes a big part.

I'm asking you that question now. Not to alarm you — but because that thread may be worth pulling. Because the anxiety, the gut issues, the fatigue, the feeling of being a slightly different version of yourself since a certain point in time — it may not be random. It may be your body responding to something real that was never properly addressed.

You are not broken. You are not dramatic. Your inner terrain may simply be waiting for someone to ask the right question.

Ready to Go Deeper?

If this episode resonated and you're starting to connect dots between your head, your gut, your nervous system, and how your body has been feeling — that's exactly the work we do inside Minerals & Microbes.

This is where we look at the full picture of your inner terrain — including the history, the exposures, the things that happened that nobody ever connected — and we build from there.

You don't have to figure this out alone.

Learn more : Minerals & Microbes.

And if this post helped you understand your body in a new way — share it. Especially with parents of athletes, anyone who's been in an accident, or someone who can't quite explain why they haven't felt like themselves in a while. This conversation needs to travel.