In this personal recovery video, David Brimacombe, who has endured seven concussions over twenty years, argues that attempting large, abrupt lifestyle overhauls hinders healing from persistent post‑concussion syndrome (PCS). He explains that after his injuries he lost trust in his body and became a passive observer of his symptoms. By shifting from a victim mindset to an active, agency‑focused approach, he discovered that tiny, consistent habit changes compound over time, reshaping identity and belief in one’s capacity to heal. He illustrates this with simple practices— a daily gratitude sticky, brief breathwork, walking to the mailbox, drinking water before coffee— and introduces a 10‑minute “Belief Reset” audio designed to rewire subconscious narratives. Brimacombe concludes with a concrete call‑to‑action: choose one small habit and keep the promise to perform it daily for seven days, emphasizing that consistency builds habit, habit builds lifestyle, and lifestyle eventually transforms identity, enabling long‑term recovery.
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If you're trying to rebuild your life after a concussion, stop trying to fix the entire week, the entire month, and trying to map out your entire recovery. All I want you to do is keep one promise to yourself today. Hi, my name is David Brimacombe, and after 7 concussions over a 20-year span, I realized that the small changes I make today Compound over time. In this video, I want to go through and provide you with evidence that big changes that you want to make, all those drastic changes that you want to make, are actually going to slow you down, whereas starting small and scaling later is the key to your success. Let's begin. Now, I'm not sure about you, but the first thing I noticed about post-concussion syndrome when I was in that early phase where I was persistent and I just couldn't figure out how to get out of it was that my trust of myself was gone. My ability to heal, my understanding of my body felt foreign. Now, for the longest time as an athlete, as someone who had a pretty good understanding of their body, I felt like when I got sick, I would become well over time. And, you know, you broke your wrist, the bone would heal. The hardest part for me to understand with PCS was that this is not something that was healing on its own. The body didn't have the capacity, the ability to heal. Now, initially, I thought this was just something that I was going to have to live with, that I was going to just be a victim to. But here's the catch here. I learned to realize that I was a passive participant in my recovery. I was simply watching those symptoms. I was watching myself from afar. I was not I was not someone who was really trying to make those changes, really invested in my recovery. So understanding that started to change my focus from someone who was willing to learn everything, understand everything about my body and my state, to someone who understood that he knew enough, he had all the tools, and his biggest goal was apply now in order to to get the change that I was looking for. Now, I think people have a misunderstanding of habits, how they're formed, what they are, how do we start them. Now, most people, if you want to run a marathon, they start by just getting their shoes and start running, and that might work for a few days, but what they find is that their body's ability to maintain that habit starts to diminish, okay? Whether it's a day, a couple days, a week, A few weeks, but over time, a lot of people find that that resolution that they made in their mind doesn't stick. Hence why most New Year's resolutions only last a few weeks. Now, this isn't because they don't have a strong pull or a reason for their recovery or what they're trying to do. The biggest reason is that they start too big. They pull— bite off more than they can chew. Most people with persistent post-concussion syndrome Have a reduced capacity. It might be hard to get out of bed. It might be hard to work a full day or be a responsible parent, a husband, whatever the case may be. So to expect that you're going to go ahead and apply a new habit in its finished form is asking for trouble. Now, the biggest thing you need to understand about habits, and this is something I want to repeat because I think it is So profound. Habits don't need to be complicated. Habits need to be completed consistently. Let me say that again. I think that's got to resonate. They don't— habits don't need to be complicated. You don't need to have 5 different steps. What you need is consistency. You need to be doing something enough that the brain and body understand, this is me. This is the person I'm becoming. Now, the biggest change that you're going to make, regardless of what you add in your recovery, is that you're changing your identity. You're changing your body's belief that you can heal. Okay, so we need to start small. We need to make bite-sized changes in your recovery. So what does this look like? For me, the biggest changes I made was that I was a highly irritable person. I was not fun to be around. I found that my stress bucket was constantly full. I'd wake up and it was full. One thing would happen, one thing that wasn't planned in my day, that bucket would fill over and I would become the most irritable person on the planet. So I decided that maybe a form of gratitude would help. So I decided to do a gratitude sticky once in the morning. I'd stick that on the wall, on the mirror, someplace that I was going to pass multiple times in the day. And that profoundly helped, not only with my state in terms of getting frustrated and angry and really taking perspective of things around me, but it also started to shape who I was as a person who was responsible for my recovery. Now, you are not the one necessarily responsible for the situation you find yourself in. In most cases, for me at least, I was just a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time for most of my concussions, playing sports, being a phys ed teacher. But at the end of the day, I, I did not want to be a victim of my circumstances. I wanted to have agency and power. I was responsible for my recovery. And it was hard to hear that at first because it felt like someone was blaming me for what had happened and the fact that I hadn't recovered. But that blame Started to diminish when I started to add things like this gratitude sticky. This gratitude sticky became breathwork, which became mindfulness, which became walking to the mailbox and back, which became having water before I had coffee or tea. These are all little small things, but again, on the surface, they don't seem like they're going to change much. But what they did is they changed my identity. I then started to understand that Hey, wait a minute, this is something that I can change. I have power. I have a say. Once you realize that, the sky is the limit. Now, these lifestyle modifications don't have to be complicated, and to be quite honest, like I said, they have to be simple to start. So whether it's having water before coffee, having 2 rounds of elongated breathwork before you start your day, Doesn't matter. If you're looking for a simple fix, it's something that's going to help kickstart that recovery. I want you to look below. I have what's called the Belief Reset. Now, that is a 10-minute audio. All you need to do for this is you need to be present. The audio is going to walk through and start shifting that subconscious loop that you have in your mind about this recovery taking so long, nothing working, me being a victim of my circumstances. You lay down, put those headphones on, be present, okay? It's going to start your recovery and it's going to start changing that identity and that mindset that you have. So here's what I want you to do today, as soon as you're done this video, is I want you to make yourself a promise for the next 7 days. So for a full week, you're going to keep one promise. Doesn't matter what it is. Again, it can be, I'm going to do that belief reset. I'm gonna do that every day for a week. Maybe it's I'm gonna drink water before coffee, or I'm going to go ahead and I'm gonna walk to the mailbox every morning. I'm gonna get morning light. Anything that you can control, you can choose. But the value of this is that you're starting to shift from someone who is in a victim mindset, someone who is simply just living out the days, who is simply just trying to survive, to someone who is starting The process. And again, this process is going to take time. To change your habits can take weeks. To change your lifestyle, which can include multiple habits that you've changed, can take months. To change your identity, which is your lifestyle, all those habits, how you view the world, can take years. But those years are never going to come if you don't start today. So that keep one promise is your promise to yourself, but also the starting phase of your So choose one thing. You're gonna do it for 7 days straight. Now, if you happen to miss a day, it's fine. Just don't miss 2. Be consistent, okay? This is for you. This is for the future self that you know you can become. And know when you've taken that first step of keeping that promise to yourself that this is step 1. Step 2 and 3 and 4 and every subsequent step is going to be easier because you're laying the foundation. A foundation of someone who knows they can be active in their recovery. I hope this video landed and you found some value in it. I hope you have yourself a great day and we'll see you next time. Bye.
