You put a brisket on, the internal temperature climbs nicely, and then — somewhere in the middle — it simply stops. For an hour. For two. For longer. New smokers experience this as a crisis: the meat is broken, the smoker is broken, something must be done. Almost everything done in that moment makes the result worse. The stall is not a malfunction. It is the cook working correctly, and it deserves your patience rather than your intervention.
What the stall actually is
As the meat heats, moisture rises to the surface and evaporates, and evaporation cools — the same reason sweating cools you. For a long stretch, the heat going into the meat and the cooling from evaporation roughly cancel out, so the internal temperature plateaus even though everything is going right. It is essentially a large, slow-cooking piece of meat sweating. Nothing is wrong. The collagen that makes tough cuts turn tender is rendering during exactly this phase.
Your two honest options
One: wait. Hold your temperature steady and let the stall end on its own, which it will. This makes the best bark because the surface keeps drying and setting. Two: wrap the meat — the so-called Texas crutch — in paper or foil, which limits evaporation and lets the temperature climb again sooner, at the cost of softening the bark you have built. Both are legitimate. Which you choose is a trade between time and crust, not between right and wrong.
The real lesson
Good barbecue is mostly the discipline to leave things alone. The stall is the first real test of that discipline, and the smokers who pass it — by understanding it rather than fighting it — are the ones whose brisket is worth waiting for. Trust the process, watch your pit temperature instead of obsessing over the meat's number, and let the sweat do its work.