Daniel Bryan has opened up about his past concussions and why he's still addicted to wrestling despite not being cleared by WWE's doctors.
In a candid interview with Peter Roserberg, Bryan talked about his ongoing battle to get cleared by WWE to wrestle for the company. Bryan said a team of doctors and specialists from UCLA had already cleared the former WWE World Heavyweight Champion, but WWE has refused to budge on the matter.
"I have worked with some of the best people in the country. I have been cleared by specialists at UCLA that I did not choose. WWE sent them to me because they're the best. A whole team of people who work on concussions on a daily basis and they said to me, 'You are fine to wrestle.' I am also at the stage where all my brain EEGs, my MRIs, my neuropsychological tests [are fine]," Bryan said.
But even if Bryan has a job in WWE, he's not exactly in love with being the SmackDown General Manager. Bryan said he is mentally obsessed with being a wrestler although he doesn't enjoy everything that comes with being a professional wrestler.
"I love wrestling, but I don't love all of it. The hard part of wrestling is the travel, going here and there, going away from your family. The part that I love is being inside the ring wrestling, being in there and doing it. So now, I got the job, but it's the part of wrestling I don't love and so this is the thing: I'm okay where if you can't wrestle, that's okay. Let me stay home and do gardening. I am very appreciative of WWE giving me something to do, but some people think, 'Oh you're in wrestling and you're getting a paycheck, you should be happy...' I'm addicted to [wrestling] mentally and this is the part that people don't understand about wrestling. I go and do jiu-jitsu and still do kickboxing and do it on a regular basis. Physically I'm fine, but I'm addicted to it mentally. It's almost a borderline obsession that I've had since I was a kid and it's something I think about all the time," Bryan said.
Moving on to the topic of having seizures, Bryan actually revealed that he lied about having seizures to WWE. It wasn't until his last concussion in 2015 when Bryan told WWE about his seizures, with the last one happening in 2012.
"I had post-concussion seizures and I had hidden that and WWE is not wrong in this. This is one of the bad things that I have done myself is that I hid things from the doctors, so if your doctors can't trust you, if you start hiding things because you're afraid of what will happen to you, that is not good for you in the long run and that breeds this situation of distrust between you and the doctor. I didn't tell WWE until my last concussion which was in 2015 and I hadn't had a seizure since 2012, but I had never told them that I ever had a seizure," Bryan said.
The full interview can be seen at this link.
