Sometimes, right in the middle of a riveting conversation, your train of thought just up and disappears. Sometimes in the middle of that conversation you might forget the word or detail you were just about to say, it might be on the tip of your tongue, but you just can’t remember it. While it might be jarring when such things happen, it’s quite common as we age. However sometimes these events are more than meets the eye and can’t just be chalked up as a part of growing older. If you’ve found that your ability to think suddenly changes and gets worse and more difficult over time, the culprit might just be brain fog. It’s become quite a popular term to use and is often a symptom of many other common conditions. But before we understand these conditions, let’s learn more about what brain fog is.
What is Brain Fog and What are its Symptoms?
Brain fog is a bit hard to define as it doesn’t have one overarching definition or diagnosis, but rather a cluster of various cognitive symptoms. It can consist of any or all the following symptoms:
- trouble with focus and attention
- trouble remembering details such as names, locations, or words
- slower reaction times and processing of information
- fatigue or lethargy
- cloudy judgement
- frequent loss of train of thought
These symptoms might make you feel like you have an issue with your memory, but really it is a problem with acquiring and retaining the correct information – you can’t remember and hold onto the information if it isn’t correct in the first place. In terms of the mechanism and cause for this, that’s another gray area with not definite answer. It’s possible that your immune system could be having a strong response causing brain inflammation and thus causing a temporary block in information processing. These symptoms can also be exacerbated by chronic stress, changes in hormones, and glucose imbalances. These can further impact your sleep or nutrition and can be associated with psychiatric disorders later.
Conditions with Brain Fog
As mentioned before, many conditions can be seen with brain fog symptoms. Examples include visual disturbances, depression and anxiety, chemotherapy, food sensitivities, hypoglycemia and diabetes, and autoimmune conditions. More recently, there have been many cases of long COVID that are associated with brain fog. Though it may be a direct effect of the initial COVID-19 infection, it may also be brought about by the other symptoms that can lead to brain fog, like decreased sleep or increased stress as mentioned above.
While learning what is causing one’s brain fog is important, of equal or perhaps even greater importance to a patient is to know what can be done to reduce the symptoms. Generally, there aren’t currently known medications and treatments to attack the brain fog head on. However, we can target those symptoms that might exacerbate the brain fog by working on improving sleep, focusing on balanced diet and good nutrition, as well as frequent exercise and physical activity. These are small changes that many of us can easily try to take on ourselves and together they build up slowly over time and can impact immune system and inflammation. Remember that this isn’t a race, and your life and brain fog won’t change overnight. Little by little though, you’ll be making key changes to your lifestyle that can help bust up the brain fog and improve your overall quality of life.
