In this motivational video, concussion survivor David Brimacombe shares his 20‑year, seven‑concussion experience and presents a concise three‑step framework to help people with post‑concussion syndrome (PCS) regain clarity and progress toward recovery. He explains that PCS often stems from a lack of mental roadmap, leaving the nervous system stuck in threat mode. To counter this, he advocates first inducing a calm parasympathetic state through elongated exhalation breathwork, then constructing a vivid future‑self visualization that serves as a neural pathway of safety, and finally embedding that mental image with light movement—preferably an outdoor walk—to increase blood flow and reinforce the new pathways. Brimacombe emphasizes that small, consistent actions generate momentum, belief, and hope, leading to incremental symptom improvement over weeks or months. He references research (e.g., Dr. Joe Dispenza) that the brain cannot distinguish rehearsed imagery from reality, underscoring the power of visualization. The video concludes with a reminder that healing is a process, not an instant cure, and invites viewers to watch his raw recovery journey for deeper insight.
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Before your body can heal, your brain needs to know where it's going. It needs to understand the path that lies ahead. Most people with PCS aren't struggling with a lack of motivation, more so a lack of clarity, a lack of understanding that recovery is possible. And your brain won't walk forward to a path that it doesn't know exists. Uncertainty keeps the nervous system stuck. With PCS, flare-ups happen frequently. They happen without reason sometimes, and that causes your body to think that you're constantly in threat mode, that any and everything is dangerous. Now, in order to change that connection, in order to tell your body that you are safe, that living in this world is not inherently dangerous, requires creating a roadmap, creating a path forward. So that your body knows where you're going, and it knows that in the future this won't necessarily be the case. Hi and welcome to the PCS Resilience Collective. My name is David Brimacombe. After 20 years and 7 concussions, I learned a lot about the lifestyle modifications needed in order to heal my PCS. One of the biggest things I learned is that if you don't build that recovery path in your mind ahead of time by remembering the future Your brain won't want to walk towards it. In this video, I want to give you 3 impactful and simple ways to help start the process to remember the future and to create a life of your dreams. Why do we manifest? Why do we think about what's going to happen in the future? Because we need to, because we need to understand where we're going, why we're doing all the protocols, why we're creating all the systems. why we are doing any and everything that might actually initially cause greater system disruption. Now, we know that musicians do this, athletes do this. They think about where they're going, they visualize their future performances. Now, we know from research from people like Dr. Joe Dispenza that the mind cannot tell the difference between what has been rehearsed and what is actually happening in reality. So If we can create those neural pathways, if we can create the roadmap for where we want to go, if we can provide that structure for our brain so that we know we're traveling to a future of safety, of predictability, it'll make the recovery a lot easier. Now, the part is that visualization creates a neural pathway of safety and direction, which is going to stop that initial pathway of threat and danger. By doing so, you're going to create this predictability. You're going to create a path that your brain can trust. My goal with this video is to make this practical, to make it simple. I don't want to create a 10-step process that no one is going to replicate. I want to give you a few things that have worked for me that could possibly work for you. Now, the goal of these tips and tricks aren't necessarily To stop those ruminations, those thoughts that continually go throughout your mind. Now we call those your automatic negative thoughts, your ANTs, things that come and cycle in your mind, right? We ruminate on thoughts. We ruminate when our symptoms start to escalate, our noise and light sensitivity. We're nauseous after eating. Our brain is broken. This is how it's always going to be. I hate this. That's rumination, right? How can we break that cycle? How can we remind ourselves that the future is going to look better than it does today? The first thing you need to do before you do any of this thought rewiring is you need to get into a calm, relaxed state. Now, this is the one thing that most people neglect to do. So if I want to rewire my mind, I can't be hypersensitized. I can't be in a sympathetic state because my brain isn't receptive. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do some deep elongated breathing where my exhale is going to be longer than my inhale. That's going to drop my heart rate down. It's going to drop me into a parasympathetic state where my mind, my body is receptive to the thoughts I'm going to provide. Once I've done that, I'm then going to go ahead and I'm going to come up with a phrase, a sentence, something that I can repeat throughout the day that is going to tell myself where I'm going. I'm going to walk down that path. Okay? A lot of times I might close my eyes. I'm going to envision myself moving towards my future self. I might even envision myself where I want to be when fully recovered. Okay? Now, what does this look like? Maybe it's you getting up in the morning without symptoms. It's you getting up eager to attack the day. It's you participating in those activities that you used to do prior to your concussion. Whatever it is, you're telling yourself that this future is possible. You're envisioning it in your mind. Okay, that's step 2. Step 3, okay, again, often neglected, is we have to try to embed that thought. We're trying to entrench that in our mind. Okay, now the easiest way to do that is to increase the blood flow. We increase blood flow through movement. So what I would typically do, I start with my regulation breath. Okay. 30 to 60 seconds of me visualizing my future self, and then I'd like to go for a walk. This is not a zone 2 cardio-based walk. I'm not trying to work on my aerobic capacity. What I'm trying to do is I'm going for a light walk outside, preferably, where I'm going to get the fresh air. I'm going to increase the blood flow. At the same time, I'm going to reiterate those thoughts of positivity, reiterate that future self that I'm walking towards. where I'm embedding that thought in my mind. Okay, so again, it's the breathwork. Okay, it's the visualization of that new me. And lastly, it's embedding it with movement, preferably movement outside, increasing that blood flow and increasing the chances that I'm creating those neural pathways that I can walk towards. Remember that small actions create belief, which allow for further actions, which will increase your Opportunity to advance, to lower your symptoms, to move towards the person you want to be. But it is a process. This is not a wake up the next morning and feel amazing. This is wake up the next morning, feel better than you did the morning prior, and therefore continue to do what you know you need to do. It is a process, but you will start to see small changes, and with small changes, you will start to create momentum. Momentum gives you belief, which gives you hope, which gives you an opportunity to be a better version of yourself. I know this all too well. For me, it started with a simple morning routine. That morning routine included breathwork and visualization. My morning walk was my time to embed that thought, to further entrench that who I was becoming was coming. Not tomorrow, maybe not next week, not month— next month, Maybe it was going to take a year or so. Didn't matter because I knew it was coming and I knew it was worth the wait. It was new. I knew it was worth all the work that I was putting in. Okay, but it takes time. Understand that healing doesn't mean you're completely symptom-free. Healing doesn't mean that you feel perfect. It means that you have a reason, you have a motivation. Okay, if you want to watch my healing journey, I've A video I put out about my raw recovery journey. Okay? You can look up and you can watch that. Until next time, stay happy and believe in your recovery.
