In this solo instructional video, David Brimacombe draws on his experience of seven concussions over 20 years to explain why people with post‑concussion syndrome (PCS) struggle to sleep. He argues that the nervous system after a concussion becomes hyper‑vigilant and needs a sense of safety before it can down‑regulate into restorative sleep. Brimacombe proposes recreating the predictable, warm environment of childhood story‑time as a therapeutic sleep routine. He outlines concrete steps: dimming/softening lights (prefer warm incandescent bulbs), adding rhythmic audio (soothing podcasts, audiobooks, or Brain.fm music), establishing a physical cue (warm bath, getting under the covers), removing mental urgency through a “brain dump” of worries, and finishing with light narrative reading. He emphasizes that consistency and predictability are essential; the routine may take days or weeks for the nervous system to recognize safety. The video ends with an invitation for viewers to comment and share their experiences.
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You didn't sleep better as a child because your brain was healthier. You slept better because you were at ease. Your brain felt safe. Now, one of the main benefits of having someone sit with you or read to you was the predictability, was the warmth. Your nervous system could unwind. And when you're struggling with PCS, it's not just a matter of being tired enough to sleep, but having an environment Where your body feels safe. Hi and welcome to the PCS Resilience Collective. And after 7 concussions over 20 years, I learned a lot about the need for your body to feel safe and the connection between safety and sleep. Let's begin. One of the biggest misunderstandings of people who have PCS is that the biggest thing they need, the most important thing their nervous system, their body needs Is to feel safe. Now, it's— safety is a relative concept. Just because you're in a house that is locked, that has a security system, that is in a safe environment, it doesn't mean your nervous system will translate that into safety. Safety is a concept that is different for our bodies than it is for our nervous system. Our nervous system is hypervigilant after a concussion, and as such, Everything around could be a threat, could be perceived as a threat. Okay, now understand that if you're trying to go to bed and your body is hyper-aroused or it senses any kind of danger, even if you can close your eyes and you feel like you're sleeping, you can't get into deep rest. You can't get into the proper REM cycles where you're actually going to have restored sleep. Now, I'm going to talk about something I never thought I'd produce a video about, creating stories or the connection of childlike stories to your PCS recovery. But it dawned on me a few weeks ago. I was sitting down, I was reading with my children, and I realized something. I felt calm. I felt at ease. I felt safe in my body. I started to almost doze off. Why? Because my body felt safety. It felt security. It felt warmth. It felt predictability. It felt everything I needed for my nervous system to say, okay, it's time to downregulate. It's time for us to sleep. Now, I'm not saying that you should go ahead and call your mom and have her come over every night and read to you, although if you have that option, then maybe that's not a bad idea. What I am saying Is why don't we recreate the best portions of nighttime stories or a child's wind-down routine and relate that to our PCS recovery? Now, I've spoken about this before, that when you're in kind of the throes, the deep valleys of your PCS recovery, you have to have a plan. You have to have an outline of how you're going to live your life. Now, it may seem difficult to live in a structured way like this. I know I used to just kind of go to bed whenever, get up whenever I felt like it. But during my PCS recovery, I realized that that was no longer possible. I needed structure. My brain-body needed structure to tell me, tell them it was safe, that in this environment it was predictable. Now, what kind of routines could we create that would replicate that feeling of safety, of warmth, of predictability that you get when you have a parent, an uncle, a sibling read a story to a child. Now, some of the main things you could include are lowering the lights. Now, understand that your body becomes stimulated for a number of reasons. Now, one of the things are bright lights. Now, if bright lights are shining in your eyes, it's telling your body it is still daytime. Now, it's really hard to have bright lights on, shut them off, and then tell your body it's time to go to bed. It needs time. So an hour before bed, you should be turning those lights down, using lamps, turning any overhead lights that you can off. Now, if you want to go to another level, you can even order softer lights. Now, they found that incandescent, those old-school light bulbs, are actually better For downregulating. So instead of the bright LED or halogen bulbs, those are harsh, bright lights. They come off with a cool white light that makes your body feel like this is midday. When it's midday, I don't want to be sleeping. My body is alert, it's awake, it's ready. So if you have some cooler lights, some floor tones, some lamps, turn off as many lights as you can. Again, it's starting the cycle. It's telling your body it's time to shift from awakeful time to sleep time. The second way we could recreate this story time is to add rhythm. I think one of the best parts of reading a story or having a story read to you was the rhythmic nature of someone's voice, the way they read it to you. It kind of gets you into a sense of peace and ease and calmness where your body can actually settle. Now, a couple ways you could do this: if you can find a podcast with a soothing voice, I think that's the best route, or an audiobook, same thing. Some soft instrumental music where it can actually calm your body. Now, there are certain types of music that actually help downregulate and lower your heart rate, and now you can look this up. I I personally, no affiliation, like to use what's called Brain.fm. Now, Brain.fm has a focus mode, a relaxing mode, and basically with that music, it's actually going to stimulate the brain to go into a focus or a hyper-aroused state or a calm, relaxed state, which is going to drop it down, what you need before bed. So, there are options. You can find stuff on YouTube. You can find many different sites. You're going to find something, whether it's a podcast, whether it's music, something that's going to calm your body. Okay, the next thing is a cue. Now, I always used to think like my kids would go under the covers, they'd snuggle up, that was their body cue. Now, you can create a cue. Maybe it's a warm bath, maybe it is getting under the blanket and reading your book or listening to your audiobook, but that cue is another sign. This sign helps create safety in your body. Which helps downregulate. Next, I want to talk about removing urgency. Now, urgency starts to stimulate the brain when you start thinking about the emails you forgot to answer, about your meeting tomorrow, what am I going to make for supper, my kid's recital. That's urgency. Urgency stimulates the brain, which gets the stress levels up, which does not allow you to downregulate. So At this point, your mind is now clear. If you need to do what's called a brain dump, by write out all those things that you have at the top of your mind. So maybe it is all those things that you want to get rid of. It's a brain dump. You write it down and you tell yourself, I'm clear of this till tomorrow morning. And then the last thing you can do before you go to bed is just to read a book. Now, the biggest thing is if you're reading something that's really stimulating, a nonfiction, a business book, something that's forcing Cognition, that's not going to help. So think of something, a narrative book, something easy, something light. And even if you're only going to read a few pages, okay, the point again isn't that— it doesn't really matter what you retain from that book. The book is just a vehicle for sleep. It's getting your body into that mode. It's getting your body shifting into a place where it's ready and comfortable to go to bed. So again, if I have— if I lower my lights, okay, if I have a body cue, if I remove the urgency, if I add rhythm, and then I read a few pages, what I'm doing is I'm providing my body with a predictable calming setup, a protocol that's going to get it into a place where it's ready for sleep. Now again, don't expect this is going to work day one. It may take a few days, maybe a few weeks for your body to actually understand that this is a safe environment. But like anything else, what you're doing is you're creating a routine. The biggest thing to do to create that safety in your body, in your mind, your nervous system, is predictability, is routine. So if you want to get back to a place where you can fall asleep like that, okay, think about sleeping as you did as a child. Okay, you were in a safe environment. The rhythmic nature of your parents' voice reading to you, you had the warmth, the predictability, the cues that are telling your body it is time to go to bed. Your body needs those cues. Again, you're in a state where you need to be the best version of yourself. To be the best version of yourself, you need to create some protocols, some routines that are going to create that safe environment in yourself. And this is a start. Okay, you remove that urgency, you remove that feeling of stress, of strain, of any kind of cognition. You're shutting the system down. It's like you're hitting that hard reset on the computer, and you're ready to go down with it. Okay, thank you very much for listening. I hope you got something out of this video. If you did, please add it to the comments below. I love hearing your comments, and I hope you have a great day.
