Nasal Release Technique for Post-Concussion Headaches, Brain Fog, and Sleep | E64

Waking up exhausted after a concussion can feel like betrayal: you “slept,” but the brain fog, head pressure, and headaches show up anyway. I sit down with physical therapist and nasal release technique instructor Cynthia Stein to explore a different lens on post-concussion syndrome, one that connects airway restriction, cranial sutures, and eye movement limitations to the symptoms that refuse to budge. 

We talk through what nasal release actually is, how a small inflatable device placed in specific nasal pathways aims to mobilize cranial restrictions, and why Cynthia believes it can be a game-changer for chronic headaches and breathing problems. Then we connect it to vestibular rehab in a practical way: testing eye strain in different gaze directions, re-testing after treatment, and pairing targeted eye drills with tongue clicking to support healthier mechanics and myofunctional strength. 

One of the most compelling threads is sleep. If eye movements are restricted or painful, Cynthia explains how REM sleep can be disrupted, stress hormones can spike, and restorative sleep can collapse, leaving the brain without the nightly “clearing” it depends on. We also dig into why concussion can be cumulative, why airway issues are so common, and how to find trained providers. 

If you’re navigating concussion recovery, share this with someone who’s stuck, and subscribe, and please leave a review so more people can find real help.

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Watch a demonstration video: Video

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Medical disclaimer: this video or podcast is for general informational purposes only, and does not constitute the practice of medicine or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical advice. No doctor patient relationship is formed. The use of this information and materials included is at the user's own risk. The content of this video or podcast is not intended to be a substitute for medical advice diagnosis or treatment. Consumers of this information should seek the advice of a medical professional for any and all health related issues. 

Transcript

REM Sleep Clue for Concussion

Dr. Ayla Wolf 0:00

And so what you're saying is with REM sleep, uh, there's the rapid eye movements, which is why it's called REM. But if you can't make certain rapid eye movements because of restrictions within the ocular muscles, because it's painful.

SPEAKER_01 0:13

And when it's restricted and painful, your body secretes adrenaline and cortisol. And it essentially wakes you up. It doesn't allow you to stay in that phase. That makes so much sense. That's why people that are concussed do not have restorative sleep.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 0:32

Welcome to Life After Impact, the Concussion Recovery Podcast. I'm Dr. Ayla Wolf, and I will be hosting today's episode where we help you navigate the often confusing, frustrating, and overwhelming journey of concussion and brain injury recovery. This podcast is your go-to resource for actionable information. Whether you're dealing with a recent concussion, struggling with post-concussion syndrome, or just feeling stuck in your healing process, know that you are not alone. This podcast can be your guide and partner in recovery, helping you build a better life after impact. Cynthia Stein, welcome

Meet Cynthia Stein and the Problem

Dr. Ayla Wolf 1:10

to the podcast. How are you this morning?

SPEAKER_01 1:12

I'm fine, thank you.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 1:13

Good. Well, I came across some of your videos, and I've seen videos of the nasal release technique, and you are instructor of this technique. And it sounds like some of the people who have received this technique have had really phenomenal results with chronic headaches. And most of the people with persistent post-concussion syndrome, I would say headaches are usually the most common symptom. And at the top of the list of people's frustrations because they try so many different things and those headaches can be so stubborn. Why don't you introduce the nasal release technique, what it is, how you discovered it, and your journey towards really focusing on this particular tool?

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I I am a physical therapist and have been since I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh. Right after graduation, I was a commissioned officer in the Navy. And while I was there, I saw a lot of PTSD and traumatic brain injury. But at that point in time, I didn't know what to do for it. And so I I we actually sort of thought these people were crazy, you know, because they kept coming back. We couldn't help them. Um so it ended up that I um sort of stopped treating it for a long time. I was more of a musculoskeletal physical therapist, manual therapy, until um I began, because I had a lot of osteopathic and lymphatic training, I would I started to get all of these concussion patients that weren't getting better with the standard of care. And as and when I did those techniques, I would help some of them, but so many I didn't. And so I I started to get these um flyers for this myofascial release kind of um classes that were being held by chiropractors. It's called fascial manipulation. And I decided to get the training, which was very extensive. It was 16 days. And while I was at this training, I met a chiropractor from Oregon. And I told him that I had a concussion clinic of vestibular service. And he said, You have to learn this work. It is very effective for post-concussion syndrome. So I went back to Pittsburgh where my practice was. Nobody did it there. So I

How Nasal Release Entered Her Practice

SPEAKER_01 3:30

ended up um finding a person in California. I went out and got the treatment myself because I had had a lifetime of um sinus infections. I'd get at least two a year. And as a child, I had a lot of ear infections. And so I decided to go try it for myself because I knew that I had an airway issue. I was starting, I had sleep apnea. I was having a lot of trouble breathing at night. I was snoring. So I had the procedure done on myself. And I have not had a sinus infection since two since I had the procedure done on myself in 2013.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 4:09

Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

Truly the single most effective thing that I have ever done in my practice. The three things that it really helps are headaches, airway issues, and post-concussion syndrome. And as you know, because you do these podcasts, that's a huge problem. A lot of these people that have it end up ending their lives over it because there isn't help out there. So this is the key, I believe, to it. Now, it goes beyond what I teach, which is this technique. I also think that if you have an airway issue, if you have post-concussion syndrome, you typically then will also have myofunctional issues because any breathing problem leads to that. You get a weak tongue, you get all kinds of things going on with your facial muscles, with your TMJ joint. So, again, that's all of what I introduce to people when I teach the class. I give them the direction on where to go for this treatment and where to go for this training.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 5:17

And why don't you describe to our audience what this technique is, what it looks like, and then how how it's actually making a shift.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

The history behind it is that it is a chiropractic technique. It was discovered back in the 30s and 40s by chiropractors that figured out that if you put a balloon, a finger cot, attached to a blood pressure bulb, you insert it in between the meatuses in the nose, inflate it inside the nose. That's what you do when you do that is you actually open up the sutures of the skull. And the big pioneer that really did the work to get it out there, which again, he he did it as well as he could because he taught at

What the Nasal Release Technique Is

SPEAKER_01 6:00

Western States, he was both a naturopath and a chiropractor. His name was J.R. Stober. And J.R. Stober uh had a method of doing it where you inserted it in eight different insertions, you inflated it, and and you got amazing results from doing it. Now, my work though has gone a little step further because I am a vestibular therapist, and we uh one of the big treatments that we do in concussion rehab is we strengthen the eyes. And when you strengthen the eyes, essentially what you're doing is the eye muscles, the eye muscle contractions pull the bones back into position. And that's why in 80% of the people that do that standard of care, they get better because their sutures aren't jammed so badly that they can't be moved by the contraction of the eye muscles. 20% of the people, though, do not get better with that. And that's telling me that they are their bones are very jammed. And um, everything else to be done. And that's what this procedure does. I use the eye restrictions that I find um uh in the procedure, and the eye muscles along with the procedure help to move the bones back into place.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 7:21

And in your exam, you're looking, you're having patients look in different directions and subjectively report also where they feel eye strain in different eccentric positions. And then after you do the technique, you're retesting this, but you're also giving people some eye exercises where you're pairing that with tongue clicking. Can you talk about that?

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Yes. Um I I actually discovered that after I went through my friend Laura Walls. I teach with her my functional program. One of the big things to str that she does to strengthen the tongue is clicking it on the roof of the mouth. The interesting thing about that um exercise is that not only does it strengthen the tongue, but remember, the tongue is not supposed to sit on the floor of the mouth. The tongue is supposed to be on the roof of the mouth, engaging the hard palate. Most people, though, are mouth breathers, and as a result of that, their tongue is on the floor. The tongue fascia is the longest fascia in the body. It goes from the tongue all the way down to the heel cord. So when you have a weak tongue and it's sitting on the floor of your mouth, it changes all your posture.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 8:29

Did you just say the tongue? Did you say the tongue fascia goes all the way to the heel?

SPEAKER_01 8:34

Yes, it's the longest fascia of the body in the body.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 8:37

Okay, where does it go after the throat? I'm so curious.

SPEAKER_01 8:39

It goes all the way down, uh, you know, into it goes into the the uh the the, I guess the cord, and then goes all the way down to the heel cord. Amazing.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 8:49

I

Pairing Nasal Release With Eye Rehab

Dr. Ayla Wolf 8:50

had no idea.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

So you could actually look that up. I think somebody dissected that fascia. You can see it.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 8:56

Okay. Okay. I wonder if that was guilt.

SPEAKER_01 8:59

So I tell all my patients, I want you to go sit in a park sometime and watch people walk by. You'll see most of those people's mouths are open. And the other thing you'll see that they have very bad forward head, round-shouled posture. And particularly, you you really see that in the elderly. And that's what happens from a lifelong of a lifelong issue of having breathing issues, is you become a mouth breather, which causes major metabolic problems. If you don't have the right, people think it's about breathing is about getting oxygen in your body. It's not only that, it's about having the right levels of both CO2 and oxygen uh there. That's what makes you healthy. And if you're a mouth breather, you actually you're actually altering that uh the concentration of oxygen and CO2. You're making sense.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 10:03

And then for people who maybe aren't as familiar with the importance of these sutures, can you talk a little bit about these specific sutures and how an audience uh should think about this? Yeah, let me show you. Um the sphenoid bone is right here.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

Okay, now you see the black around the sphenoid? That's the sutures. And the sutures, you think that they they just go and it's like a puzzle piece. It's smooth. They aren't. They're interdigitated. And when they

Tongue Clicking for Breathing and Posture

SPEAKER_01 10:35

go together, they go together sort of like what I'm doing with my fingers here. So if I would have an impact on top of my hand here, on let's say on this hand, it would make this hand go down. And that's really what happens when we when we hit our heads is that we knock those sutures out of whack or we jam them. And when they're when that happens, we actually form scar tissue in those things because there's a little bit of bleeding and a little bit of stretching of the ligaments. And as a result of that, it it majorly affects the nutrition to the brain. The cranial rhythm uh of the head, it's called craniosacral rhythm, is uh a rhythm of expansion and contraction, just like the heart. And when we expand and contract in that way, it helps to circulate not only the cerebrospinal fluid, but also the um the lymphatic fluid and the and the arterial and venous blood. And that's the whole thing. When you have a concussion, you're messing up the rivers of the body, which are what I just said. You're messing up the fluid movement to the brain. And if that fluid movement is messed up, it affects the whole body. So did I question you asked? I know I went into a long answer. Oh, I wanted to say one more thing. When you click your tongue on the roof of your mouth, that force goes up uh into the hard palate, which on the other side is a bone called the vomar. The vomar is where this sphenoid, it's the pillar that it's right here, the red bone right here. It's the pillar that the sphenoid sits on. So when we send that force up through those bones, we are actually stimulating the pituitary, which sits right on this place on the sphenoid. Really, really a powerful thing to do. The pituitary is the master gland of the body, it tells the body what hormones to secrete.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 12:46

And do you find yeah, do you find when people uh that you start working with them that when they're trying to click their tongue, they actually feel like that feels weak

Sphenoid Sutures and Brain Fluid Flow

Dr. Ayla Wolf 12:55

to them? Some people, you'll notice it and uh it doesn't feel snappy when they do it. It should be real snappy. Mm-hmm. Fascinating, yeah. And that makes so much sense with people's subjective reports of just this constant sense of head pressure and most of their pain being between the eyes. It makes perfect sense that these restrictions within the cranial bones that are affecting blood flow, lymphatic drainage, cerebral spinal fluid movement, that all of that is just congested and not flowing properly, causing this constant sense of frontal pressure and headache. Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:30

So five of the six extraocular eye muscles attach right here in the eye socket to the sphenoid. Okay. So if I hit the top of my head, I am actually forcing the sphenoid down. So it would be harder for me to take my eyes up than to take them down because I'm pushed everything down. So that would be the eye restriction that you would see with somebody being hit in the head. If you hit your chin, the opposite happens. It's easy to take your eyes up, hard to take your eyes down. Okay. So now that the other thing, the lateral movements are if you hit your head right here, it shifts your sphenoid that way. So it would be easy to take it that way, hard to go that way, and vice versa. So you can actually tell by examining the eye muscles which bones are out of whack. So then when I do the procedure, if I, for example, find the right lateral is the tight one, I have the person take their eyes that way, I do the procedure, and the eye muscles help the procedure move the bones back into position. It's really amazing. And you can get people better in four or five treatments.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 14:45

That was going to be my next question was how often are you seeing people?

SPEAKER_01 14:49

I you can I when I see people, um, I they come in from out, a lot of people come in from out of town to see me, and I see them twice a day for about three uh two sessions a day for three days. Usually by the sixth session, they're pretty good.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 15:03

And so once you've re released these restrictions within the sphenoid, that typically stays after like you know five, six years.

SPEAKER_01 15:12

Now the big thing is they have to do the eye exercises,

Mapping Head Impacts Through Eye Limits

SPEAKER_01 15:15

and the eye exercises take you through the extraocular eye movements. You look up, click your tongue ten times. Let's go through them.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 15:23

You look up, click your tongue ten times, then you look down, click your tongue ten times, inferior rectus.

SPEAKER_01 15:38

Just as an aside, that is the one extraocular eye muscle that attaches to the maxilla in the eye socket, which is a lar which is on the floor of the eye socket. It attaches down here.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 15:50

Okay, then you look right lateral, click, keep your head still. And left lateral, keep your head still. And then you do the lateral right.

Treatment Frequency and Daily Eye Drills

Dr. Ayla Wolf 16:59

And there's one more, there's no clicking. You put your toes on the inside of your lips. You circle it clockwise while you circle your eyes clockwise. And then you do these same counterclockwise. I recommend to my patients they do them four times a day.

SPEAKER_01 17:28

If you do those exercises after nasal release technique, you assist in your brain getting healed. I love it. All concussion patients have airway issues. Why? Because when you jam the cranial bones, you jam the sinuses, and and you can't get very good exchange of air. You also, when you have a concussion, you injure your cranial nerves, particularly the trigeminal and the vagus, which are the huge, the two biggies that affect all the other nerves.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 18:04

Right. And where can people uh find somebody that does this technique that you can do?

SPEAKER_01 18:10

On my website, conquerconcussion.com. I have a practitioner referral list of all the people I've trained.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 18:16

Perfect. And are there people in most states? I know there's somebody uh not too far away from me.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

There are most states that haven't been trained yet. Hey, I want to talk about one more thing. When you have eye restrictions, you actually are affecting the ability to go into the deep phase of sleep, which is called rapid eye movement. I discovered this because I trained a group of psychologists in Honolulu that had a pediatric psychiatric practice, and they got started to test all their pediatric patients airways. All of them had an airway issue. The second thing they started doing was this procedure. And when they did this procedure, they discovered that not only did they open up the airway, but their patients were telling them that they were dreaming, remembering their dreams. And here's the reason why. If you have eye restrictions, you cannot move your eyes all over the place when you're dreaming. That's how you access the information in the brain to so that you can delete it. And you actually, if I ask a person a question and they answer it for me, where they take their eyes here, that tells me where that is in the brain. You could actually see where the person is accessing the information in their brain through the eye position that they go to when they retrieve a memory.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 19:44

And so what you're saying is with REM sleep, uh there's the rapid eye movements, which is why it's called REM. But if you can't make certain rapid eye movements because of restrictions within the ocular muscles.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

And when it's restricted and painful,

Airway Blocks REM Sleep and Clearing

SPEAKER_01 20:00

your body secretes adrenaline and cortisol. And it essentially wakes you up. It doesn't allow you to stay in that phase. That makes so much sense. That's why people that are concussed do not have restorative sleep.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 20:16

And then they wake up with the brain fog and the headaches and the car.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

So they're not essentially when you go, don't go into restorative sleep. You your lymphatic or your system cannot clear the brain. The deep phase of sleep is when that clearing occurs. It's what essentially when your body is getting all the toxins out of your head, it's getting all the cellular metabolites to move. Well, it makes perfect sense. I actually just wrote a book that's going to be called Concussion Riddle. Talk about that. What's in the book? I talk about all this stuff. I talk about what the treatment should be for concussion. I I educate people on what to do for it. When is the book coming out? I'm trying not only to educate um the masses that have it, but also healthcare practitioners. That's where that's what what's lacking is PTs don't don't want to admit that they don't know it all in in the sense that they think that standard of care is taking care of it. It isn't.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 21:18

So well, it's a good thing you're out there teaching these classes. When does your book come out?

SPEAKER_01 21:23

Well, right now it's in the process of I'm looking for a publisher. Okay. So hopefully I can I can get out onto the New York Times bestseller list like James Nestor did. Did you read that book? I did, yes. Breath. Okay. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 21:39

Yeah. Well, I love all these connections that you've made in terms of, you know, people not not just people's symptoms, but being able to say, here's why people are having these symptoms and why they're so difficult to treat or unresponsive to other therapies because of these restrictions that haven't been addressed yet. Now, I when I watch videos of this technique. It looks painful. So what is the patient's experience?

SPEAKER_01 22:04

First couple times. But here's here's another way that my work is different. If you actually go and Google this, you'll see that people really put a whole lot of inflations the first time they do it. I don't think it should

Comfort, Training, and Head Hit Prevention

SPEAKER_01 22:20

be done that way. I think you need to ease your patients into it. So the first time that I do it, I only do one balloon, one inflation. And that it's still not comfortable, but you're not traumatizing the person. I also believe that you have to do all eight insertions, which was right, lower, left lower. That goes along the floor of the nose. Then you have to go at a 45 degree angle and get in between the first and second turbinate. Then you go straight up and back to get above the second turbinate. Then you go back down and treat the lowers again. Stober said was you have to do all of them to open up the airwag to get those bones to move properly. But the reason that you want to do the lowers again is you want to push everything back down after after the procedure.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 23:13

And it's a quick procedure. It's it may be painful, but it's not.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

It's all the five minutes to do. Yeah. The big thing about it is being examined properly. And I teach all that in the class.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 23:25

And so is it mostly PTs and chiropractors that do the procedure?

SPEAKER_01 23:28

No, I'm training, I'm training dentists now. Airway dentists are doing the procedure. I train chiropractors, PTs, speech and language pathologists, nurses, massage therapists, acupuncturists, nurse practitioners. I've trained some some MDs, definitely osteopaths. The osteopaths that I have trained have said to me, Cindy, I it in doing hands-on work to work this with the sphenoid, there I could not get the bone, that bone to move as well as it moves when you do this procedure. Makes sense.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 24:04

So phenomenal. I love it. And I know you have a couple of videos too on YouTube. Would you like me to add those in the show notes so people can watch them?

SPEAKER_01 24:13

Yes.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 24:14

Okay. I will do that.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

You had the one that I sent you with the airway patient. That guy, that guy was actually pretty amazing. He got better in four visits. He had lifelong airway issues and he was going into sleep apnea. He had hit his head very hard on the top of his head. And you'll and you see when you when I examine him in it, the position that he can't do is up. And that's the that's because when he hit his head, he pushed everything down.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 24:42

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And some of the most difficult patients I've seen with a lot of autonomic symptoms. I had one patient, she dropped a barbell and it hit the top of her head and had that compression effect. Yeah. I think that these connections are so important to be able to map all that. So I'm so excited for your book to come out. I will link all of that into the show notes so people can find somebody in their area, hopefully, or if they're willing to travel. Sounds like that's also a possibility and not necessarily have to be more than just three days. So that's fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

Great. Yes.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 25:17

Anything else that we haven't talked about that you'd like to add in?

SPEAKER_01 25:24

I think the biggest thing is that we have to get we have to talk to our friends about this. And almost everybody in their life has had some kind of a head hit. You know, when you when you're playing football and you you hit the ground, your brain goes like this inside the skull. And and what happens with these football players, these repeated injuries, uh concussion is cumulative. So every time you joggle that brain back and forth, you're messing up neural pathways. And everybody in their life, when somebody tells me they haven't hit their head, I'm like, okay. What about when you were a toddler? When is the first brain injury? When you're born, when you come through the birth canal, your head gets munched. And especially if the doctor has used suction or or forceps extraction, it really messes up the skull. When you see somebody that's head looks like a cone head, that tells you they've had massive cranial compression, probably occurring from birth.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 26:26

Yeah. I've heard like kids, kids under the age of five hit their heads like 200 times. Right.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

Well, the other thing is, is the the important time to do this procedure is when the when children are very young. Stober did it on newborns. So if you're correcting the cranium and opening up the you know, this fluid movement in the brain from the very beginning, you're really going to help the health of that that human being.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 26:51

Yeah, I believe it. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for all of the work that you're doing, the trainings, the book, uh, the the videos. I'll share all of that. And when your book is out, please let me know.

SPEAKER_01 27:04

I will. I'll s I'll send you a copy.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 27:06

Thank you so much. I'll probably end up in one of your trainings.

SPEAKER_01 27:10

And my training, actually, when you do the training, it includ it includes the supplies. The fee includes the supplies.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 27:17

Super. Okay. Well, I'm very fascinated by it. It makes so much sense and matches up with so much of what I see every single day in my practice. So uh I definitely see the value of that. From someone who's also been doing craniosacral work for since 2008, uh, I can definitely see how adding this in would make a profound change.

SPEAKER_01 27:38

It absolutely does.

Dr. Ayla Wolf 27:40

Amazing. Well, thank you for your time. Yes, absolutely. Have a good rest of your day. Thank you. Medical disclaimer. This video or podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical advice. No doctor-patient relationship is formed. The use of this information and materials included is at the user's own risk. The content of this video or podcast is not intended to be a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and consumers of this information should seek the advice of a medical professional for any and all health related issues. A link to our full medical disclaimer is available in the notes.