# Concussion Treatments

Last week I hit my head on a car door frame getting into the car at a gas station. There were no dramatic symptoms at first and barely any pain, but the next day I couldn’t look at my phone for more than five minutes without getting a headache. It was clear I’d given myself a concussion, the second in ten months.

I’m a week in now, resting and recovering, but I sadly had to admit that I wasn’t going to hit my [new, lowered target](https://www.uncertainupdates.com/p/uncertain-updates-february-2026) of just one blog post a month while I finish [the book](https://fundamentaluncertainty.com/). Then it hit me, I could use Claude to do some research into concussions and write something short about that!

So I asked Claude to do some research into concussion recovery. Specifically, whether there’s anything useful I can do beyond the standard advice of “rest”. I already sleep and meditate, and I’ve been hearing more about psychedelics as treatments for brain injuries, so I had Claude to do a deep literature review on all three as concussion interventions. We focused on psilocybin because it’s the psychedelic with the most research about concussions available. The [full report is here](https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/e96611d6-aefd-4c5b-ae43-c3051bb1293b). Here’s what came out of it.

**The three interventions are complementary, not redundant.** All three reduce brain inflammation after injury, but through different biological mechanisms. Hitting the same problem from three independent angles is a well-established principle in pharmacology, and it tends to work better than hitting it from one angle three times as hard.

**Each one is best at a different thing.** Sleep drives the brain’s waste clearance system. During sleep the spaces between brain cells expand by about 60%, allowing fluid to flush out damaged proteins and metabolic debris, and nothing else does this. Psilocybin provides the most potent signal for growing new neural connections, with a single dose producing structural changes lasting over a month in mice. Meditation offers the best-evidenced stress and immune regulation, creating the upstream conditions that let the other repair processes work.

**Psilocybin works around a problem the other two can’t.** After brain injury, inflammation hijacks the raw materials your brain uses to make serotonin and diverts them toward toxic byproducts instead. This depletes serotonin while simultaneously causing further damage. Because psilocybin is chemically similar to serotonin, it can activate serotonin receptors directly, bypassing the broken supply chain entirely. No endogenous process can do this.

**But the evidence is profoundly asymmetric.** Sleep has robust clinical data and an irreplaceable biological role. Meditation has one concussion-specific meta-analysis showing moderate benefit and near-zero risk. And psilocybin has zero completed human trials in brain injury populations, with the strongest direct evidence being a single rat study.

So the actionable takeaways are, sadly, anticlimactic. Prioritize sleep above everything, and not just “sleep more” but actively protect it, because the injury itself disrupts the very sleep needed for repair. Meditate if you already do and consider starting if you don’t. And probably don’t take psilocybin for a concussion yet, because the biology is exciting but there’s no human data and there’re unknowns around safety in an injured brain.

_The full research report with citations is [here](https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/e96611d6-aefd-4c5b-ae43-c3051bb1293b)._