If Your Brain Feels Foggy And You're Tired All The Time, You're Not Alone

Brain Fog 

 

In recent weeks, Dr. Kali Cyrus has struggled with periods of exhaustion.

"I am taking a nap in between patients," says Cyrus, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University. "I'm going to bed earlier. It's hard to even just get out of bed. I don't feel like being active again."

Exhaustion is also one of the top complaints she hears from her patients these days. They say things like, "It's just so hard to get out of bed" or "I've been misplacing things more often," she says.

Some patients tell Cyrus they've been making mistakes at work. Some tell her they can "barely turn on the TV. 'All I want to do is stare at the ceiling.' " Others say they are more irritable.

While some people who have had COVID-19 report brain fog and fatigue as lingering symptoms of their infection — what's known as long COVID — mental health care providers around the U.S. are hearing similar complaints from people who weren't infected by the virus. And many providers, like Cyrus, are feeling it themselves.

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Pandemic's Emotional Hammer Hits Hard

This kind of mental fog is real and can have a few different causes. But at the root of it are the stress and trauma of the past year, say Cyrus and other mental health experts. It's a normal reaction to a very abnormal year.

And while many people will likely continue to struggle with mental health symptoms in the long run, research on past mass traumas suggests that most people will recover once the coronavirus pandemic ends.

"We know that the majority of people tend to be resilient," says Lynn Bufka, a psychologist with the American Psychological Association. "They may have struggled during the time of the challenges but generally come out OK on the other end."

In the meantime, Bufka and other experts say that there are things we can do now to fight the mental fog and exhaustion.

How stress and sleep are linked

"Exhaustion can be a symptom of many things," says Cyrus.

For one, it can be a symptom of stress.

"We know from other research that people will talk about fatigue as something that they experience when they're feeling overstressed," says Bufka.

Life Kit

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A recent survey by the American Psychological Association found that 3 in 4 Americans said that the pandemic is a significant source of stress.

Millions of people have lost loved ones, have become ill themselves and/or have lost income as a result of the pandemic. The threat of COVID-19 alone has been stressful for most people, as has all of the upheaval that the pandemic has brought, says Bufka.

Stress "keeps our mind vigilant and our nervous system vigilant, and that uses more energy," says Elissa Epel, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco. That's one reason that prolonged stress can leave us feeling drained.

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Another way that chronic stress makes us feel exhausted is by interfering with sleep, says Bufka. "When we're feeling stressed, our sleep can get disrupted, which naturally leads to feelings of tiredness and exhaustion," she says.

"We really rely on sleep to recover each day," explains Epel. "And so for many of us, even though we might think we're sleeping the same number of hours, it's not the same quality. It doesn't have the same restorative ability, because we're getting less deep sleep, and we think that is tied to this chronic, subtle uncertainty, stress."

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Chronic stress also triggers low-grade inflammation, she adds.

"We have this inflammatory response when we're feeling severe states of stress that can last. It's subtle, it's low grade and it can absolutely cause fatigue and a worse mood."

A year of anxiety, grief and trauma

The fatigue and fog so many are feeling now also could be symptoms of other mental health issues that flared over the last year, says Dr. Jessica Gold, a psychiatrist at Washington University in St. Louis. "After this long, most people have had some degree of anxiety, depression, trauma, something," she says.

As studies have shown, rates of anxiety and depression in the population have gone up during the course of the pandemic.

I think that because so many people are struggling with this and because it is so normal, everybody has something to say. If we could just get to the point where we could be talking about the stuff more openly, we'd feel a lot less alone.

Dr. Jessica Gold, psychiatrist

Long-term anxiety can also exhaust the body, says Gold.

"We evolved as creatures, people that run from predators in the animal kingdom, right? To have anxiety as a way to predict and run from threat," she says.

When we're anxious, our hearts race and our muscles tense up as we prepare to fight a predator or run from it. But "you can only run a 100-yard dash for a short amount of time. Not a year, and not a year where they keep moving the finish line," says Gold. "We can't do that. Eventually our muscles and our body say, 'No, I'm tired.' "

njoy.

Brain fog: how trauma, uncertainty and isolation have affected our minds and memory

Our minds and memory 

 

After a year of lockdown, many of us are finding it hard to think clearly, or remember what happened when. Neuroscientists and behavioural experts explain why

Moya Sarner

Wed 14 Apr 2021 06.00 BST

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unslash

Before the pandemic, psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s patients might come into his consulting room, lie down on the couch and talk about the traffic or the weather, or the rude person on the tube. Now they appear on his computer screen and tell him about brain fog. They talk with urgency of feeling unable to concentrate in meetings, to read, to follow intricately plotted television programmes. “There’s this sense of debilitation, of losing ordinary facility with everyday life; a forgetfulness and a kind of deskilling,” says Cohen, author of the self-help book How to Live. What to Do. Although restrictions are now easing across the UK, with greater freedom to circulate and socialise, he says lockdown for many of us has been “a contraction of life, and an almost parallel contraction of mental capacity”.

This dulled, useless state of mind – epitomised by the act of going into a room and then forgetting why we are there – is so boring, so lifeless. But researchers believe it is far more interesting than it feels: even that this common experience can be explained by cutting-edge neuroscience theories, and that studying it could further scientific understanding of the brain and how it changes. I ask Jon Simons, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, could it really be something “sciencey”? “Yes, it’s definitely something sciencey – and it’s helpful to understand that this feeling isn’t unusual or weird,” he says. “There isn’t something wrong with us. It’s a completely normal reaction to this quite traumatic experience we’ve collectively had over the last 12 months or so.”

What we call brain fog, Catherine Loveday, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Westminster, calls poor “cognitive function”. That covers “everything from our memory, our attention and our ability to problem-solve to our capacity to be creative. Essentially, it’s thinking.” And recently, she’s heard a lot of complaints about it: “Because I’m a memory scientist, so many people are telling me their memory is really poor, and reporting this cognitive fog,” she says. She knows of only two studies exploring the phenomenon as it relates to lockdown (as opposed to what some people report as a symptom of Covid-19, or long Covid): one from Italy, in which participants subjectively reported these sorts of problems with attention, time perception and organisation; another in Scotland which objectively measured participants’ cognitive function across a range of tasks at particular times during the first lockdown and into the summer. Results showed that people performed worse when lockdown started, but improved as restrictions loosened, with those who continued shielding improving more slowly than those who went out more.

It’s likely that in a year or two, we’ll look back on some event this year and say, when on earth did that happen?

Loveday and Simons are not surprised. Given the isolation and stasis we have had to endure until very recently, these complaints are exactly what they expected – and they provide the opportunity to test their theories as to why such brain fog might come about. There is no one explanation, no single source, Simons says: “There are bound to be a lot of different factors that are coming together, interacting with each other, to cause these memory impairments, attentional deficits and other processing difficulties.”

One powerful factor could be the fact that everything is so samey. Loveday explains that the brain is stimulated by the new, the different, and this is known as the orienting response: “From the minute we’re born – in fact, from before we’re born – when there is a new stimulus, a baby will turn its head towards it. And if as adults we are watching a boring lecture and someone walks into the room, it will stir our brain back into action.”

Most of us are likely to feel that nobody new has walked into our room for quite some time, which might help to explain this sluggish feeling neurologically: “We have effectively evolved to stop paying attention when nothing changes, but to pay particular attention when things do change,” she says. Loveday suggests that if we can attend a work meeting by phone while walking in a park, we might find we are more awake and better able to concentrate, thanks to the changing scenery and the exercise; she is recording some lectures as podcasts, rather than videos, so students can walk while listening. She also suggests spending time in different rooms at home – or if you only have one room, try “changing what the room looks like. I’m not saying redecorate – but you could change the pictures on the walls or move things around for variety, even in the smallest space.”

Brain fog has resulted partly from ‘degraded social interaction’. Illustration: Franz Lang/The Guardian

The blending of one day into the next with no commute, no change of scene, no change of cast, could also have an important impact on the way the brain processes memories, Simons explains. Experiences under lockdown lack “distinctiveness” – a crucial factor in “pattern separation”. This process, which takes place in the hippocampus, at the centre of the brain, allows individual memories to be successfully encoded, ensuring there are few overlapping features, so we can distinguish one memory from another and retrieve them efficiently. The fuggy, confused sensation that many of us will recognise, of not being able to remember whether something happened last week or last month, may well be with us for a while, Simons says: “Our memories are going to be so difficult to differentiate. It’s highly likely that in a year or two, we’re still going to look back on some particular event from this last year and say, when on earth did that happen?”

Perhaps one of the most important features of this period for brain fog has been what Loveday calls the “degraded social interaction” we have endured. “It’s not the same as natural social interaction that we would have,” she says. “Our brains wake up in the presence of other people – being with others is stimulating.” We each have our own optimum level of stimulation – some might feel better able to function in lockdown with less socialising; others are left feeling dozy, deadened. Loveday is investigating the science of how levels of social interaction, among other factors, have affected memory function in lockdown. She also wonders if our alternative to face-to-face communication – platforms such as Zoom – could have an impact on concentration and attention. She theorises – and is conducting a study to explore this – that the lower audio-visual quality could “create a bigger cognitive load for the brain, which has to fill in the gaps, so you have to concentrate much harder.” If this is more cognitively demanding, as she thinks, we could be left feeling foggier, with “less brain space available to actually listen to what people are saying and process it, or to concentrate on anything else.”

It is the cognitive equivalent of feeling emotionally distressed – it’s almost the way the brain expresses sadness

Carmine Pariante, professor of biological psychiatry at King’s College London, is also intrigued by brain fog. “It’s a common experience, but it’s very complex,” he says. “I think it is the cognitive equivalent of feeling emotionally distressed; it’s almost the way the brain expresses sadness, beyond the emotion.” He takes a psycho-neuro-immuno-endocrinological approach to the phenomenon – which is even more fascinating than it is difficult to say. He believes we need to think about the mind, the brain, the immune and the hormonal systems to understand the various mental and physical processes that might underlie this lockdown haze, which he sees as a consequence of stress.

We might all agree that the uncertainty of the last year has been quite stressful – more so for some than for others. When our mind appraises a situation as stressful, Pariante explains, our brain immediately transmits the message to our immune and endocrine systems. These systems respond in exactly the same way they did in early humans two million years ago on the African savannah, when stress did not relate to home schooling, but to fear of being eaten by a large animal. The heart beats faster so we can run away, inflammation is initiated by the immune system to protect against bacterial infection in case we are bitten, the hormone cortisol is released to focus our attention on the predator in front of us and nothing else. Studies have demonstrated that a dose of cortisol will lower a person’s attention, concentration and memory for their immediate environment. Pariante explains: “This fog that people feel is just one manifestation of this mechanism. We’ve lost the function of these mechanisms, but they are still there.” Useful for fighting a lion – not for remembering where we put our glasses.

When I have experienced brain fog, I have seen it as a distraction, a kind of laziness, and tried to push through, to force myself to concentrate. But listening to Loveday, Simons and Pariante, I’m starting to think about it differently; perhaps brain fog is a signal we should listen to. “Absolutely, I think it’s exactly that,” says Pariante. “It’s our body and our brain telling us that we’re pushing it too much at the moment. It’s definitely a signal – an alarm bell.” When we hear this alarm, he says, we should stop and ask ourselves, “Why is my brain fog worse today than yesterday?” – and take as much time off as we can, rather than pushing ourselves harder and risking further emotional suffering, and even burnout.

People are finding themselves more sluggish – their physical and mental weight is somehow heavier, hard to carry around

For Cohen, the phenomenon of brain fog is an experience of one of the most disturbing aspects of the unconscious. He talks of Freud’s theory of drives – the idea that we have one force inside us that propels us towards life; another that pulls us towards death. The life drive, Cohen explains, impels us to create, make connections with others, seek “the expansion of life”. The death drive, by contrast, urges “a kind of contraction. It’s a move away from life and into a kind of stasis or entropy”. Lockdown – which, paradoxically, has done so much to preserve life – is like the death drive made lifestyle. With brain fog, he says, we are seeing “an atrophy of liveliness. People are finding themselves to be more sluggish, that their physical and mental weight is somehow heavier, it’s hard to carry around – to drag.” Freud has a word for this: trägheit – translated as a “sluggishness”, but which Cohen says literally translates as “draggyness”. We could understand brain fog as an encounter with our death drive – with the part of us which, in Cohen’s words, is “going in the opposite direction of awareness and sparkiness, and in the direction of inanimacy and shutting down”.

This brings to mind another psychoanalyst: Wilfred Bion. He theorised that we have – at some moments – a will to know something about ourselves and our lives, even when that knowledge is profoundly painful. This, he called being in “K”. But there is also a powerful will not to know, a wish to defend against this awareness so that we can continue to live cosseted by lies; this is to be in “–K” (spoken as “minus K”). I wonder if the pandemic has been a reality some of us feel is too horrific to bear. The uncertainty, the deaths, the trauma, the precarity; perhaps we have unconsciously chosen to live in the misty, murky brain fog of –K rather than to face, to suffer, the true pain and horror of our situation. Perhaps we are having problems with our thinking because the truth of the experience, for many of us, is simply unthinkable.

I ask Simons if, after the pandemic, he thinks the structure of our brains will look different on a brain scan: “Probably not,” he says. For some of us, brain fog will be a temporary state, and will clear as we begin to live more varied lives. But, he says, “It’s possible for some people – and we are particularly concerned about older adults – that where there is natural neurological decline, it will be accelerated.”

Simons and a team of colleagues are running a study to investigate the impact of lockdown on memory in people aged over 65 – participants from a memory study that took place shortly before the pandemic, who have now agreed to sit the same tests a year on, and answer questions about life in the interim. One aim of this study is to test the hypothesis of cognitive reserve – the idea that having a rich and varied social life, filled with intellectual stimulation, challenging, novel experiences and fulfilling relationships, might help to keep the brain stimulated and protect against age-related cognitive decline. Simons’ advice to us all is to get out into the world, to have as rich and varied experiences and interactions as we can, to maximise our cognitive reserve within the remaining restrictions. The more we do, the more the brain fog should clear, he says: “We all experience grief, times in our lives where we feel like we can’t function at all,” he says. “These things are mercifully temporary, and we do recover.”

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Want to Reduce Brain Fog And Improve Clear Thinking? Give up These Things Immediately

Brain Fog 

 

 

 

We are all looking for ways to create more meaningful lives with less to distract us.

Thomas Oppong

Mental fog is often described as a “cloudy-headed” feeling.

Common conditions of brain fog include poor memory, difficulty focusing or concentrating, and struggling with articulation.

Imagine if you could concentrate your brain power into one bright beam and focus it like a laser on whatever you wish to accomplish.

Many people struggle to concentrate. And when you can’t concentrate, everything you do is harder and takes longer than you’d like.

Give Up the Clutter

Mess creates stress.

There’s a strong link between your physical space and your mental space.

Clutter is bad for your mind and health. It can create long-term, low-level anxiety.

When the book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, by Marie Kondo became a best-seller, it wasn’t too surprising.

We are all looking for ways to create more meaningful lives with less to distract us.

Get rid of clutter at your office, on your desk, in your room, and you will send a clear message of calm directly to your brain.

Start decluttering today in small, focused bursts. You’re not going to clean up your entire space in a day, so start small to make it a daily habit that sticks.

Set yourself up for success by making a plan and targeting specific areas you’re going to declutter, clean up, and organize over a prolonged period of time.

Multi-Tasking Doesn’t Work

The ability to multi-task is a false badge of honor.

Task switching has a severe cost.

Your concentration suffers when you multitask.

It compromises how much actual time you spend doing productive work, because you’re continually unloading and reloading the hippocampus/short term memory.

Research shows that task switching actually burns more calories and fatigues your brain – reducing your overall capacity for productive thought and work.

Commit to completing one task at a time.

Remove potential distractions (like silencing your mobile, turning off email alerts) before you start deep work to avoid the temptation to switch between tasks.

Use the 3-to-1 method!

Narrow down your most important tasks to 3, and then give one task your undivided attention for a period of time.

Allow yourself to rotate between the three, giving yourself a good balance of singular focus and variety.

Give Up the Urgent Distraction

Disconnect. Your productivity, creativity and next big idea depends on it.

Urgency wrecks productivity. Urgent but unimportant tasks are major distractions.

Last-minute distractions are not necessarily priorities.

Sometimes important tasks stare you right in the face, but you neglect them and respond to urgent but unimportant things.

You need to reverse that. It’s one the only ways to master your time.

Your ability to distinguish urgent and important tasks has a lot to do with your success.

Important tasks are things that contribute to your long-term mission, values, and goals. Separating these differences is simple enough to do once, but doing so continually can be tough.

Stop Feeding Your Comfort

Comfort provides a state of mental security.

When you’re comfortable and life is good, your brain can release chemicals like dopamine and serotonin, which lead to happy feelings.

But in the long-term, comfort is bad for your brain.

Without mental stimulation dendrites, connections between brain neurons that keep information flowing, shrink or disappear altogether.

An active life increases dendrite networks and also increase the brain’s regenerating capacity, known as plasticity.

“Neglect of intense learning leads plasticity systems to waste away,” says Norman Doidge in his book, The Brain That Changes Itself.

Michael Merzenich, a pioneer of plasticity research, and author of Soft-wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change Your Life says that going beyond the familiar is essential to brain health.

“It’s the willingness to leave the comfort zone that is the key to keeping the brain new,” he says.

Seeking new experiences, learning new skills, and opening the door to new ideas inspire us and educate us in a way improves mental clarity.

Don’t Sit Still

Sitting still all day, every day, is dangerous.

Love it or hate it, physical activity can have potent effects on your brain and mood.

The brain is often described as being “like a muscle”. Its needs to be exercised for better performance.

Research shows that moving your body can improve your cognitive function.

30–45 minutes of brisk walking, three times a week, can help fend off the mental wear and tear.

What you do with your body impinges on your mental faculties.

Find something you enjoy, then get up and do it. And most importantly, make it a habit.

Stop Consuming Media and Start Creating Instead

It’s extremely easy to consume content.

You are passive. Even relaxed.

But for each piece of unlimited content you consume, it stops a piece of content you could have created.

Limit your mass media consumption.

Embrace the creation habit.

Start paying attention to the noise that you let seep into your eyes and ears.

Ask, Is this benefitting my life in any way?

Does all this information make me more prone to act?

Does it really make me more efficient? Does it move me forward in any significant way?

Let creation determine consumption.

Allow curiosity to lead you to discover and pursue something you deepy care about. Make time to create something unique.

The point is to get lost in awe and wonder like you did when you were a child. When you achieve that feeling from a certain activity, keep doing it!

Share your authentic self with the rest of us.

Thomas Oppong is the founder of AllTopStartups and writes on science-based answers to problems in life about creativity, productivity, and self-improvement.

Want to Reduce Brain Fog And Improve Clear Thinking? Give up These Things Immediately

Clear Thinking

We are all looking for ways to create more meaningful lives with less to distract us.

Thomas Oppong

 

 

 

Mental fog is often described as a “cloudy-headed” feeling.

Common conditions of brain fog include poor memory, difficulty focusing or concentrating, and struggling with articulation.

Imagine if you could concentrate your brain power into one bright beam and focus it like a laser on whatever you wish to accomplish.

Many people struggle to concentrate. And when you can’t concentrate, everything you do is harder and takes longer than you’d like.

Give Up the Clutter

Mess creates stress.

There’s a strong link between your physical space and your mental space.

Clutter is bad for your mind and health. It can create long-term, low-level anxiety.

When the book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, by Marie Kondo became a best-seller, it wasn’t too surprising.

We are all looking for ways to create more meaningful lives with less to distract us.

Get rid of clutter at your office, on your desk, in your room, and you will send a clear message of calm directly to your brain.

Start decluttering today in small, focused bursts. You’re not going to clean up your entire space in a day, so start small to make it a daily habit that sticks.

Set yourself up for success by making a plan and targeting specific areas you’re going to declutter, clean up, and organize over a prolonged period of time.

Multi-Tasking Doesn’t Work

The ability to multi-task is a false badge of honor.

Task switching has a severe cost.

Your concentration suffers when you multitask.

It compromises how much actual time you spend doing productive work, because you’re continually unloading and reloading the hippocampus/short term memory.

Research shows that task switching actually burns more calories and fatigues your brain – reducing your overall capacity for productive thought and work.

Commit to completing one task at a time.

Remove potential distractions (like silencing your mobile, turning off email alerts) before you start deep work to avoid the temptation to switch between tasks.

Use the 3-to-1 method!

Narrow down your most important tasks to 3, and then give one task your undivided attention for a period of time.

Allow yourself to rotate between the three, giving yourself a good balance of singular focus and variety.

Give Up the Urgent Distraction

Disconnect. Your productivity, creativity and next big idea depends on it.

Urgency wrecks productivity. Urgent but unimportant tasks are major distractions.

Last-minute distractions are not necessarily priorities.

Sometimes important tasks stare you right in the face, but you neglect them and respond to urgent but unimportant things.

You need to reverse that. It’s one the only ways to master your time.

Your ability to distinguish urgent and important tasks has a lot to do with your success.

Important tasks are things that contribute to your long-term mission, values, and goals. Separating these differences is simple enough to do once, but doing so continually can be tough.

Stop Feeding Your Comfort

Comfort provides a state of mental security.

When you’re comfortable and life is good, your brain can release chemicals like dopamine and serotonin, which lead to happy feelings.

But in the long-term, comfort is bad for your brain.

Without mental stimulation dendrites, connections between brain neurons that keep information flowing, shrink or disappear altogether.

An active life increases dendrite networks and also increase the brain’s regenerating capacity, known as plasticity.

“Neglect of intense learning leads plasticity systems to waste away,” says Norman Doidge in his book, The Brain That Changes Itself.

Michael Merzenich, a pioneer of plasticity research, and author of Soft-wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change Your Life says that going beyond the familiar is essential to brain health.

“It’s the willingness to leave the comfort zone that is the key to keeping the brain new,” he says.

Seeking new experiences, learning new skills, and opening the door to new ideas inspire us and educate us in a way improves mental clarity.

Don’t Sit Still

Sitting still all day, every day, is dangerous.

Love it or hate it, physical activity can have potent effects on your brain and mood.

The brain is often described as being “like a muscle”. Its needs to be exercised for better performance.

Research shows that moving your body can improve your cognitive function.

30–45 minutes of brisk walking, three times a week, can help fend off the mental wear and tear.

What you do with your body impinges on your mental faculties.

Find something you enjoy, then get up and do it. And most importantly, make it a habit.

Stop Consuming Media and Start Creating Instead

It’s extremely easy to consume content.

You are passive. Even relaxed.

But for each piece of unlimited content you consume, it stops a piece of content you could have created.

Limit your mass media consumption.

Embrace the creation habit.

Start paying attention to the noise that you let seep into your eyes and ears.

Ask, Is this benefitting my life in any way?

Does all this information make me more prone to act?

Does it really make me more efficient? Does it move me forward in any significant way?

Let creation determine consumption.

Allow curiosity to lead you to discover and pursue something you deepy care about. Make time to create something unique.

The point is to get lost in awe and wonder like you did when you were a child. When you achieve that feeling from a certain activity, keep doing it!

Share your authentic self with the rest of us.

Thomas Oppong is the founder of AllTopStartups and writes on science-based answers to problems in life about creativity, productivity, and self-improvement.

Dehydration Can Cause Brain Fog

The Effects of Dehydration

Brain Fog and quite a few other heatlh issues can be the result of dehydration.  Drinking enough water is vital to good health! 

Story at-a-glance

• Your body contains about 11 gallons of water: Your blood is 85 percent water; your muscles 80 percent; your brain 75 percent and your bones are 25 percent water, which illustrates the importance water plays in your health
• Drinking 16 ounces of water can raise your metabolic rate by as much as 30 percent; a 2 percent level of dehydration has been shown to cause a 10 percent decrease in athletic performance
• When dehydrated, your brain shrinks in volume. This shrinking is what causes a dehydration headache. Even mild or temporary dehydration can alter your brain function and impact your mood
• Dehydration-induced effects such as sleepiness, fatigue, moodiness and confusion are easily reversed within 20 minutes of drinking some water. Cold water absorbs 20 percent faster than tepid water, so to increase the speed of recuperation, drink chilled water