In this instructional video, David Brimacombe shares the personal strategies that helped him overcome a prolonged recovery plateau from post‑concussion syndrome (PCS). He first describes the feeling of being stuck—making progress but then stalling for months—and frames the plateau as a “rut” that can be nudged out of with systematic lifestyle tweaks. Brimacombe then outlines three core approaches: (1) abandoning the search for a single “silver‑bullet” solution and instead aiming for 1 % daily improvement, using week‑long A/B tests to evaluate small interventions (e.g., a week of breathwork versus a week without); (2) practicing sub‑symptom‑threshold exposure, where brief, controlled visits to symptom‑triggering environments (like a grocery store) are gradually lengthened to build tolerance, analogous to progressive muscle training; and (3) down‑regulating the autonomic nervous system through breathwork—particularly the physiological sigh and palming—to reduce anxiety and heart‑rate spikes. He caps the breathwork guidance with the PACE acronym (Pause, Anchor, Close the cue, Elongate breath) as a quick, repeatable protocol for moments of heightened stress. Throughout, Brimacombe emphasizes that small, consistent wins create safety, predictability, and confidence, ultimately allowing the brain to recover. The video ends with a call for comments and support.
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If you've ever felt like your PCS recovery routine has hit a wall, like you've plateaued, your symptoms are not necessarily getting worse, but they're not improving either. If you if this is you, you came to the right video. Well, today I'm going to go through exactly what helped me get through this plateau and start recovering for good. For those new to the channel, thank you. For those coming back, I appreciate your support. My name is David Brimacombe, and here at the PCS Resilience Collective, we like to use lifestyle modifications to help you with your PCS recovery routine so that you can get out of that rut, out of that plateau, and get to the point that you can truly feel like someone who is back to where they were prior to your concussion. If you like the material I'm posting, please like and subscribe. Thank you. In my situation, a plateau looked like this. I was climbing that mountain of recovery. I felt like I was making gains. I was way better than what I was when I started, but for some reason, I just stalled. I was stuck in the middle of the mountain. I could see the top, but I could not reach it. I could not move. I was incapacitated by something. I did not know what. This was my plateau, and it lasted a while. We're talking months. Now, I'm sure a lot of you have felt this way. Let me tell you that this rut is only that— it is only a rut. You need a gentle push, a gentle nudge to help you get going in the right direction. I like to say that to know the road ahead, ask those coming back. I am someone coming back from the top of the mountain. I at one point thought that top of the mountain wasn't reachable until I started looking at these 3 simple steps that helped me get to the peak of my recovery. The first thing that I found to be incredibly helpful was to stop looking at finding that silver bullet, finding that one thing that was going to change everything. Scouring the internet, what about cryotherapy? Scouring the internet, what about something I've never heard of? It all seemed like something that was going to change everything. Guess what? It never did. It never amounted to what I thought it was going to because all my other routines and habits weren't where they needed to be. So I started focusing on being 1% better every single day, try to implement one thing every week that was going to help with my recovery. Now, the best part about using a week as your timeframe is that you can look at where you were and where you've gone to in a week. You can even do what's called an A/B test. What I'll do is I'll implement a new strategy like breathwork for a week, and then the following week I will actually take it out. So, I'll lose that breathwork and then I'll see how I feel from the week doing breathwork to the week that I'm not going to do it at all. Now, the benefit of this is that it's showing you that small things can have monumental changes in your recovery. It is not about doing more. It's about doing things more effectively, more efficiently, Finding what actually works and going with it. The second thing I noticed was super helpful for me was sub-symptom threshold training. If the grocery store was something that caused my light and sound sensitivity to flare, I just would not go. I would order groceries. I'd ask my wife to go. But little did I know is that was not helping me. That was hurting me. I was becoming deconditioned. To all these environments. Now, I had to start really small, like the previous point, micro steps for large wins. So maybe I'd go to the grocery store for 5 minutes. Maybe it only took 2 minutes for my symptoms to flare. At that point, I would then go back to the car or I'd go home because what I'm doing is I'm trying to train below that symptom threshold. So if I know that 2 minutes or 5 minutes are going to cause those symptoms to flare, That is my maximum exertion. I will stay below that. And then in a week or two, I'll try to push it a little more. It's like building muscle. You're not going to build muscle in one day, but what you are doing is you're increasing your tolerance, increasing your tolerance to how much weight you can lift, telling your body that it is okay to add more muscle. In this case, you're telling your body it is safe to go into these locations, whether it's the mall, the grocery store, go back to work. Do it in small incremental doses. Once your symptoms flare, your brain is not broken. That is your body telling you something. Your body is telling you it's time to stop. It's time to downregulate, and then we can eventually get back and try again. Speaking of downregulating, let's talk about your nervous system. Now, the autonomic nervous system controls more than you think. When you start to feel that tightness in your chest, that anxiety, a lot of times it is your body is in a stressed state. Now, easiest way to get out of that is through breathwork. Okay, I like to tell people, have one mode that you can use at any time. When I start to feel my heart rate quicken or I start to feel my chest tighten with anxiety, have one go-to type of breathwork. Maybe you'd like to do palming, where you take your hands and cover your eyes to the point where you're reducing the stimulus of light. Maybe you just like to get into some deep breaths where you're extending the exhale, which lowers your heart rate. Whatever the case may be, you need to find a way that works for you. Now, the simplest way I found was that I went into a quiet space, With limited light. So I'm taking away 2 senses that were a lot of times causing the dysregulation, the light and the sound. If I couldn't do that, I would do my palming where I'd simply take the palms of my hands, put it into my eye sockets, and that's reducing the light. While I'm doing that, I'm engaging in breathwork. One of the most important impactful kinds of breathwork I have found out is from Dr. Andrew Huberman. It's called the physiological sigh. If you've ever heard an infant or a child weep, they do a double inhale. They inhale and then they add that additional inhale. It opens up the lungs even further. So, what you're doing by doing that double inhale is you're allowing more oxygen to get in. You're allowing your body to actually downregulate quicker. 2 or 3 of these physiological sighs will have a monumental impact on your stress, on how you feel, on your ability to go back into that situation and feel more confident and comfortable that you're going to be okay. The most important thing you need to understand about recovering from PCS is that small wins create safety, safety creates predictability, and predictability tells your body we are okay. It gives you belief. It gives you hope that the future is going to be better than your current situation. Now, what I want to leave you with, okay, is one simple acronym that I use all the time when I feel my heart rate quicken, when I feel my anxiety come. I a lot of times even use it preventatively. It is called PACE, okay? It stands for pause, Anchor, close the cue, and elongate your breath as we talked about. So when I start to feel that chest tighten, okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to pause, I'm going to stop, I'm going to sit down, I'm going to anchor my feet, whatever the case may be. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to close the cue. When I say close the cue, I mean all those negative thoughts, all those anxious beliefs that are ruminating in my mind. I'm just going to stop it right there. Okay. And lastly, I'm going to elongate the breath. So I pause, I'm anchoring, I'm sitting down. Now I'm going to stop all those negative thoughts and I'm then going to breathe. It's going to tell my body it's safe, it's time to relax, and you are okay in this current situation. I hope this video helps you. If you have any questions or comments, please put them below. I appreciate your support. Until next time, see you then.
