What actually is brain fog?

Like many people living with chronic illness and chronic pain, brain fog is a normal (but bloody annoying) part of my daily life. Whilst I can talk about it subjectively, I never spent much time thinking about what brain fog actually is.

And that’s what we’re going to be exploring in today’s episode.

I had the opportunity to talk to Dr Sabina Brennan, a neuroscientist and health psychologist, who is the author of the book Beating Brain Fog.

Sabina shares some of the fascinating science behind what brain fog is, why people experience brain fog, and all the different ways brain fog can impact us. We’ll also explore what we can do to help.

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Natasha: Hello and welcome back to The Rest Room, the podcast about living well with chronic illness. I’m your host, Natasha Lipman.

In today’s episode we’re talking about brain fog.

Now brain fog isn’t technically a medical term, it’s more a catch-all for a very real variety of symptoms, but it’s something many people who are chronically ill or who live with chronic pain are all too familiar with. Myself included.

I’m not particularly adept at using visual and descriptive imagery to explain things, but brain fog is something that I struggle with a lot.

I asked my followers on Instagram what brain fog feels like for them, and their answers were so much more evocative than anything that I could come up with, so I really wanted to share a few of them with you now…

CLIP 1: Like trying to turn rusty gears that someone spilled treacle over

CLIP 2: Like my head is in an agitated fish tank and it has water swooshing around in it

CLIP 3: Like trying to load netflix on dial up internet on a windows 98 computer

CLIP 4: it feels like someone is rewinding my thoughts as I try to fast forward

CLIP 5: Like my brain is an intricate map that had an inkwell spilled on it obliterating all detail

My guest today is Dr Sabina Brennan. She’s a health psychologist and neuroscientist who lives with brain fog herself, and is the author of the book ‘Beating Brain Fog’.

Brain fog is something that many of us know subjectively, but it’s so much more complex than I thought, and there were so many things I just had never heard before reading her book. So I was delighted when she agreed to speak with me for this episode.

To start, I asked her what brain fog actually is…

Sabina: Well brain fog’s not a disease. It’s not a disorder. It’s not a diagnosis. That’s important to kind of say. It is, however, a sign that something is amiss and a signal to take action.

So really I use the term brain fog as an umbrella term to describe a collection of symptoms. That’s probably why you get so many different answers from people as to what brain fog is. One of the reasons I wrote my book, Beating Brain Fog, was to help people to pinpoint and identify which aspect of their cognitive functioning is affected so that they could take specific action or speak to their doctor about the specific area of their brain really that is affected.

So brain fog generally is associated with loss of mental clarity and inability to focus or concentrate. You’ll see problems with learning, and I don’t mean academic learning. I mean, just learning in the everyday sense. Learning how to use the washing machine or the remote control or how to do a new thing in work, and remembering.

Also, big problems with slowing of thinking and issues with language. Word finding is quite common and trouble navigating spaces, which a lot of people would describe as clumsiness. People are often surprised to hear that’s part of brain fog, but navigating your way around the world is controlled by your brain and it happens to be affected also when you have brain fog.

Then just a very general mental fatigue. I’ve been sort of canvasing wherever I can in a way for a distinction to be drawn between physical fatigue and mental fatigue because they are two very, very different things.

Physical fatigue, of course, is exhausting and you need rest, but it doesn’t really affect your mental processes. However, mental fatigue really does impact on your ability just to function in the world. Also, when you’re mentally fatigued, your time to physical fatigue is sooner. So if you’re mentally fatigued, you will become tired physically earlier than someone who’s not mentally fatigued. So there’s interesting knock-on effects. So yeah. I mean. Things that I would like to say, if you say, “I can’t think straight” or “I can’t concentrate” or “I’ve trouble recalling what I did yesterday.” “I’m really struggling to find the right words”. For me, sometimes my life is like a game of charades trying to get across a message of the word that I was looking for. “I’m too tired to think,” or “I keep bumping into things.” They are everyday phrases that we would use.

Of course, I think it’s important to say that every single person will have experienced one or all of those symptoms at some point or other in their lives. But the difference with brain fog is that those symptoms are persistent. They’re ongoing. They occur regularly and they are interfering with your quality of life, your ability to carry out your job and your relationships. I think if anyone is listening, who hasn’t experienced brain fog, one good example of it or that can give you a sense of what it’s like is if you’ve ever been jet lagged. Everything is kind of a bit out of sync and you can’t think properly and you’re a bit slow, but that usually rectifies itself after a few days. But yeah, no, it really can be quite debilitating.

A lot of people have said to me, and I’m sure some of your listeners have this experience, that with brain fog, they feel like they’ve lost themselves. That makes perfect sense to me because for example, if you’ve always been a quick witted, funny individual who’s always in there with the smart comment, if you have brain fog and your processing speed is slowed, you’re not going to be able to do that anymore. So one of your defining features has just disappeared and you don’t feel familiar to yourself and you seem different to other people. Then other people, we always tend to interpret our interactions with other people in terms of something we may have done and people are saying, “Gosh, she’s not being her usual self with me. What’s up?” It really has knock-on effects.

Similarly, if you have problems with memory or retaining information, if your husband tells you that he’s going on such and such a trip or whatever and whenever that occurs, he goes to go and you kind of go, “Where are you of to?” He says, “Well, I told you I have to go to such and such a meeting or such and such a trip,” and you kind of go, “No, I don’t remember that.” That can suddenly turn into, “Well, you don’t listen to me anymore. I told you. You don’t care anymore. You’re too busy thinking of something else.” You can see in those very simple ways how it can really have knock-on effects, aside from the ability then maybe to carry out your job if it requires the particular brain processes that are affected in your case.

Natasha: Anecdotally speaking, most people I know with chronic illness or chronic pain have told me that they struggle with brain fog in some form. And Sabina says that it’s very common for people living with long-term conditions to experience it.

Sabina: Brain fog is very common with autoimmune diseases. So, things like lupus, Sjogren’s, with inflammatory conditions, with chronic pain conditions. You probably have heard of fibro fog, that’s often what people refer to it who have fibromyalgia. But things like Crohn’s disease, also with Type 2 diabetes, depression, neurological conditions like multiple sclerosis and migraine, with certain cancers. So, there’s a lot of conditions where brain fog occurs.

Brain fog can also be a consequence of a medication that you’re taking. And unfortunately, many of the medications that are prescribed for the conditions that bring about brain fog also impact on your cognitive functioning and can give rise to brain fog. So, you may have a double whammy. Now, I think it’s really important to say, never stop taking a medication that you’ve been prescribed without consulting with your prescribing doctor, because many medications need to be gradually titrated down and can cause problems if you suddenly stop, et cetera.

But I would discuss it with prescribing doctors, because there may be other medications that may not have the same impact on your cognitive functioning, but basically, any medication that acts on the central nervous system, has the potential to bring about brain fog. So, painkillers, antihistamines, anti-nausea medication. So, for a lot of people, so maybe if you have an underlying autoimmune disease, but you’re taking antihistamines for a hay fever, maybe actually, you weigh up, well, which is worse? Can I survive without the antihistamines or is there another antihistamine that I could take, that actually wouldn’t? And you may find that, “Oh my God, there’s a big difference. It’s actually been the antihistamine moreso, that’s disrupting my cognitive functioning.”

Of course, people will have heard of chemo brain. Chemotherapy will impact, and certain antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications. Brain fog can also be caused by hormonal fluctuations or hormonal imbalance. Interestingly, an awful lot of, and I don’t know about your listener profile, but an awful lot of autoimmune diseases and chronic conditions disproportionately affect women, particularly the ones then that bring about brain fog. And then, the hormonal fluctuations also, obviously, disproportionately affect women.

Now, I say obviously, because most of the research is actually done on female hormones, less done on male hormones. So, I suppose we don’t know for sure. But the thing is, brain fog can be associated with premenstrual tension, during pregnancy, post-pregnancy, menopause, et cetera. So, you may well find that if you have a chronic underlying health condition and you have brain fog, keeping a diary could be very helpful, because you may find that your brain fog is really at its worst, we’ll say, when you have PMT.

And the value in that is, well, you can talk to doctors, people, about regulating your hormones, et cetera, in various ways, but the value in keeping a diary of your symptoms, and I do have little diaries within the book, you can then plan your life in a way to minimise the impact of the brain fog. So, if you know that three days every month, “My brain is just mush.” Well, don’t plan challenging or demanding activities or tasks for those three days. Yes, it’s a pain in the ass to have to do that, but if you want to improve the quality of your life, doing something like that can absolutely change it.

A lot of my work is very taxing on my brain and then there’s other work that is more mundane and can be done a little bit automatically or without having to think too much. Even writing a book has things like that in it. So, what I would find say is, I would always keep some activities that are mundane and easier to do, so that if I have a day where I do have brain fog, I can still be productive, because for me, it’s really important to be productive. I hate for my health to stop me doing things. And I think a lot of people with chronic conditions feel like that. You want to do things. The days you feel really good, you try and do everything and then you end up floored for days afterwards. But balancing out your work, balancing out what you do, and matching what you do with your current capability, is a good way to be able to get more done and to feel productive.

Natasha: I know that “productive” can be a loaded word in the chronic illness community, but to me, productivity can be about anything, not just work.

Finding ways to do the things we want to and need to do with chronic illness, with brain fog, can be a real challenge, and it’s really interesting to hear Sabina link brain fog back to pacing and the boom and bust cycle we’ve talked about in previous episodes. It’s more proof that the ways in which we manage our chronic conditions are so intertwined and they all have a knock on effect.

Rather conveniently, I recently released two episodes on how to get started with pacing, no matter where you’re at with your symptoms, which you can find further back on the podcast feed!

While I was reading Sabina’s book, it was fascinating to learn about the mechanisms of the brain and how it all works. Especially that there are different types of brain processes that can be impacted by brain fog.

I found it very validating, and it really helped me to understand why my brain struggles so much with certain things, and how different lifestyle factors can also affect brain fog.

One thing many of us with pain and fatigue talk about is challenges with “executive function” and the impact it can have on our daily lives. But what exactly is executive function and what happens when it gets a little…wonky?

Sabina: … the frontal lobes of your brain. They were actually, from an evolutionary perspective, the last part of the human brain to evolve and, from a developmental perspective, they’re the last part of our brain to fully develop, and they’re really not fully developed until we’re about 24.

They are a very, very well-connected part of the brain. They’re connected bidirectionally to almost every other part of your brain and, as the name suggests, they are involved in executive control. So they are involved in the very complex functions that, in a way, separate us from other species, complex functions like being able to plan, to organise, to make decisions, to assess risk. That part of the brain accesses all the information we have about various things from our senses, from our memories, from previous experiences, from our unconscious parts of the brain related to emotions and stress, et cetera.

So if you have impairment to executive functioning, if that’s part of your brain fog, it can really be quite debilitating and people tend to think just because they’re what we call higher order functions, they’re complex, people think, “Oh, that might mean, oh, gosh, they’ll affect when you’re making work complex decisions about how to do X, Y, Z.” But they will apply to making decisions about what to have for dinner, and I think I lay that out in the book, literally, what is involved in actually deciding what to eat, preparing food, sequencing the actions and the order in which you have to make that food. They all rely on executive functioning so it can become quite difficult to even let alone decide what to have for dinner.

I mean, I often used to struggle deciding what to wear in the morning, but like what to pack if I was going on a business trip, do you know, because there was so many things to consider about what’s the temperature going to be like, what’s the weather going to be like, have I meetings to attend? Something like that could completely overwhelm me if I had brain fog.

Natasha: And have you ever felt as though you take longer than you used to to understand or process information? You’re not alone.

Sabina: Processing speed is a very general sort of function that affects every domain, really, and it is simply as it sounds. It is the speed at which you can take in information, process it, i.e., make sense of it, and then formulate a response to it, and that really does slow down.

Now, the good news about that is that when it slows down, if you give yourself the time, you can still process that information, make sense, and formulate a response. The problem really occurs when you start to panic and you can’t, and then stress comes into the equation, and that just kind of screws everything up all together, but if you have twisted your ankle or broken your leg, you’re slower walking. Nobody expects you to walk at the same speed or pace as you did before you had that injury. People make accommodations for it, and you allow yourself to take more time.

There’s something strange in that if our brain mental processing speed is slowed, somehow we don’t allow ourselves that more time. We don’t give ourselves that permission to take more time. If we do, and if we relax into it, actually, you will get there in the end. We can look to the literature also on older adults. As we get older, as we age, our ability to process it, our speed of processing information also slows, as does our ability to run and walk, et cetera. It’s really not much difference. It’s just a bit slower, but all the literature shows that older adults are just as accurate as younger adults. It just takes a little bit longer to get there.

So, older adults can cross the road just the same as younger adults can. It just takes a little longer to get there. So, I think in talking about brain fog and being more open about brain fog, we should also hope that that extends to people in the workplace and our colleagues and our friends and family understanding that we will get there, but it takes time, but most important of all is giving yourself permission to take time.

This episode is made possible thanks to the support of my premium subscribers on Substack. If you’ve learnt something from The Rest Room and want to support my work, please consider subscribing to my newsletter. I share what I like to call “slow content” about chronic illness – from personal insights into how I try and figure out pacing, to why so many people with chronic illness feel so impacted by the weather. It’s longer-form writing that goes beyond an Instagram caption, and I have so many plans for it. If you’re able to, you can become a premium subscriber for £5 a month or £50 a year, which gives you access to two extra issues a month, plus other perks which will increase with the number of premium subscribers.

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Natasha: As some of you know, I’m currently learning Yiddish (it’s a Jewish language, in case you’ve not heard of it!)

I’m absolutely loving it and it has brought a huge amount of joy into my life. But after my first class, I literally called a friend of mine and cried down the phone because I was so worried that my brain fog would prevent me from learning it at all.

I’ve realised through learning a language that my ability to actually learn and remember things is really affected when I’m experiencing periods of brain fog. Additionally, when I’m foggy and fatigued, my ability to produce the language is also much worse.

It’s especially difficult because I always had a really good memory growing up. It meant that I never learned how to learn, because I could just rely on reading something once or twice. That’s absolutely not the case anymore (plus, I’m not a teenager), but there are things that have helped significantly as I’ve learned how to navigate learning with brain fog.

Firstly, re-learning how to learn languages was vital (I’ve actually started a newsletter on that very theme with my brilliant friend and linguist Colin Gorrie – the one that I cried to – you can learn more by visiting howdoyousay.substack.com, if you’re interested in that kind of thing), but I’ve also had to spend a lot of time thinking about how I engage with learning something new, and dramatically adapt it based on my abilities that day or that week.

But as Sabina says learning isn’t just about learning a language or learning at school. It’s something we do all day, everyday and brain fog can make it so much harder…

Sabina: Learning is what occurs in your brain anytime you encounter anything new. Anytime you have a new experience, even encounter a new taste or anything like that. Learning is really vital for brain health, actually, because it encourages the growth of new brain cells and connections between those brain cells and that leads towards a very healthy brain. So it’s important that we constantly keep learning. Unfortunately, when you have brain fog, it is more challenging to learn new things, but if you adopt a brain healthy lifestyle, it will help.

There’s lots of different types of memory, but there’s a couple of types of memory that are specifically affected in brain fog. One of them is working memory and that really is an executive function. That’s the ability to, for example, tot-up the items in your supermarket trolley. You kind of go, “Oh, I’ve 20 quid in my pocket. What do they add up to? Have I enough money?” You’re doing that mentally. And in a way, that’s an executive function. That’s quite complex. That really can be affected when you have brain fog. But then there’s just the remembering, the remembering to do things. The remembering that somebody said something. Remembering to do something in the future, as well as consolidating memories.

Language, the thing with the language is it’s very much around an inability to find the correct word, but also I think it is a loss of fluidity, where you find that your language isn’t as rich as it used to be. And then there’s the spatial navigation. Every time that you walk into a room, your brain is assessing the distance between your body and the things that are in that room and how you’ll navigate it without bumping into things, et cetera, and that becomes affected.

Natasha: I found that last point very interesting, especially as someone who lives with EDS and is almost pathologically incapable of knowing where my body is in space! Let’s just say, nothing is safe from my rogue elbow!

Now, I don’t know about you but one of the biggest things I struggle with is the inability to focus on something if there’s noise coming from somewhere else.

For example, if I’m trying to read or have a conversation and there’s a tv on, it’s just not going to work…and I know that I drive my parents up the wall when I get into the car and turn off the radio. BUT IF WE’RE TALKING, WHY DO WE NEED THE RADIO ON?

I struggle a lot with noise from the flat below mine, and it is so beyond distracting and fatiguing to me. It often feels like my brain is fracturing. Beyond drowning it out with noise cancelling headphones, at times it can feel unbearable to me.

My ability to naturally “drown things out” has definitely deteriorated over the years. And this coincides with my brain fog getting worse.

I often feel like I need to live in a perfectly sound controlled room (and while we’re at it, let’s make it light and temperature controlled too) to give my brain the best chance of functioning optimally. It’s probably why I could never work in open-plan offices. All of that external stimulation made it not only impossible to concentrate, it was extremely fatiguing.

The funny thing is, my fiance Sebastian is totally the opposite. If he’s reading something, I can be talking at him and it literally doesn’t register that I’m saying something. He’s got the most remarkable ability to deeply focus on something and drown out anything else. I’m very jealous.

So, I was super intrigued to learn from Sabina that this has a name and I’m not alone in struggling to sort through the noise – it’s actually pretty common. It’s called Selective and Divided attention and can be a big symptom of brain fog…

Sabina: That ability to tune out information that’s not relative is really one of the symptoms of brain fog. And it makes it almost impossible to function, to focus, to concentrate. So that’s why people will say things like, “I can’t focus. I can’t concentrate.”

And I’m the same. I don’t know whether some of us, maybe have a lower threshold anyway for extenuating noises. I suspect I have. I would hear things that my husband would never notice anyway. I’d say, “Oh, that blooming alarm is annoying me.” And he’d say, “What alarm?” “The alarm that’s been going off from the house down the road for three hours sort of thing.” And I’m like you. And it’s funny, even though I say to my husband and explain to him things like brain fog. I get in the car, I turn off his radio or I say, “Can we please turn that off?” He’ll still say to me, “You just don’t like me listening to music, do you?”

And I kind of go, “No, I really don’t mind but I can’t tell you how tired that’s making my brain feel. I can’t think and have that music on at the same time. It’s just interfering with everything that I want to do.” And that’s kind of why I say that relationships can really be affected by brain fog. Because it’s difficult for people to grasp what you’re actually experiencing. So that difficulty in tuning out on other information, but also then the ability to sustain your attention for any length of time, finding yourself trying to read a book and then finding yourself reading the same sentence or the same paragraph over and over again. And a kind of a combination of those two can make it very difficult.

Natasha: The night before I interviewed Sabina, I had a nightmare that one of my noise cancelling headphones broke. I can’t sleep in them, because I sleep on my side (although I’m trying to train myself not to do that), but they’ve become something I carry around with me at all times.

Not only do they help me block out this noise that I can’t control, they also stop me hooking into the anger and frustration I feel – which then spirals into fear about my health due to an inability to get the rest that I need. I don’t always have to live IN the noise that my brain can’t drown out itself.

Not only do they help me block out this noise that I can’t control (and impacts at all times of the day and night), they also stop me hooking into the anger and frustration I feel – which then spirals into fear about my health due to an inability to get the rest that I need. I don’t always have to live IN the noise that my brain can’t drown out itself.

Sabina: They’re an excellent tool, when you have something like that. And I think it’s, I’m really glad you kind of brought that up because it’s not just the symptom itself. It’s what that leads to and how that impacts something. As you said, you get drawn into feeling angry with your neighbour. You could get drawn into having an argument with your neighbour. Do you know? And it affects your whole mood and everything. So yeah, it’s all the knock on effects as well.

Natasha: Another thing Sabina talks about in her book is brain neuroplasticity – which is the brain’s ability to modify, change, and adapt.

There’s actually a fair bit of research about how neuroplasticity can help to improve pain response, but that’s perhaps a topic for another episode.

For now, how is neuroplasticity linked to brain fog?

Sabina: The brain has this incredible capacity to adapt and change with learning. It is the core of resilience. Gosh, if you take the pandemic, for example, with time we adapted, and that’s what has allowed us as a species to evolve, is that we have this capacity to adapt and change.

But when you learn new things and adapt and change, new connections are grown in your brain. That’s what it means that your brain is plastic. Not credit card plastic, but we used to have a thing called plasticine, like Play-Doh, that it’s kind of elastic in that way. But really, it just means that your brain can adapt and change. And, neuroplasticity, it’s a fundamental feature of the brain. And if you were to sustain a brain injury, for example, and if you were to be sent for rehabilitation to a rehab hospital, an occupational therapist or a physiotherapist will be trying to harness neuroplasticity to get other parts of your brain to take over the functioning of a part of your brain that has been damaged.

Basically, your brain starts to shrink from about the age of 30. So we start to lose brain connections and brain cells. It’s called atrophy. And we, as in the Royal, we of scientists, used to think that atrophy was age-related, that it’s just something that happened with age. But actually, we realised that, now it’s really related to lifestyle factors. In a way, a lot of the things that we stop doing, from about the age of 30, are things that encourage the growth of new connections in brain cells, so learning new things, exercising, taking on new challenges, all those kind of things. Kind of at the age of 30, maybe you’ve done all your education. You stopped playing sports. You know how to do your job, and you maybe start to plateau and you’re not setting yourself challenges in life.

So we now know that if you adopt a brain healthy lifestyle, that you can harness your plasticity and build also a thing that we call reserves, which can help you keep pace with this atrophy, so you can actually hold on to the volume of your brain, so basically, to stop it shrinking. And, the thing is, when it comes to brain health, more is better. You want a big, healthy brain with lots of connections.

Natasha: A lot of the things that Sabina mentioned as contributing towards a brain healthy lifestyle, and things that people tend to let go as they age, are also things that can be exceptionally challenging for people who live with chronic illnesses – especially if they cause energy limitations and pain.

One of the questions that came up a lot when I shared on Instagram that I was doing an episode on brain fog, and if I’m being honest, is one that I’ve also been curious about too, is whether the dysfunction that us younger people experience with brain fog is putting us at risk of issues like dementia as we get older?

Sabina: Basically, I do want to make that clear. Brain fog and dementia are entirely different things. Brain fog is temporary. It’s reversible. There’s a lot of things that you can do. It’s really just a sign or a signal that something else is amiss. And as I said, that can be your underlying health condition, medication, hormones, dietary issues or lifestyle factors. In contrast, dementia is a progressive neurodegenerative disease. There’s actually a disease process going on in the brain that is making it impossible for the brain to function properly. Okay.

Now what you can do, I like to say that adopting a brain healthy lifestyle is like investing in brain capital, that you can cash in at some point in the future to cope with or compensate for disease, damage, or decline. And it’s never too early and never too late to start investing in brain health. So I would say there’s no known link between having brain fog and going on to develop dementia, etc. But I can’t remember if it’s the second or third chapter in my book, it’s full of strategies. Basically what we focused on really is the lifestyle factors, but also while you’re living brain fog, I have a chapter that is jam-packed full of strategies that you can employ to minimise the impact that it has.

There’s tons of them in there. Don’t ask me about them now because my own brain is getting tired, but there’s tons of them in there. But yeah, learning anything, the whole thing is novelty. And that’s why I wish there was another word for learning, because we so associate learning with sort of negative connotations in school, and learning things off by rote. But you know, it could be learning carpentry, how to do cross stitching, learning the lyrics of a song, anything. Preferably something that you love doing, and that you’ve wanted to do. Set yourself small goals, small steps, but the challenge aspect of it is what is important.

You know people often say to me, “Oh, I do crosswords every day. I’m challenging my brain every day.” Well, actually no, you’re not. When you learn how to do crosswords, that promotes neuroplasticity. Once you know how to do them, and they’re easy for you, there’s no learning involved so there’s no neuroplasticity benefiting. If you’re enjoying it, that’s fab. When you learn something new, this is why I’m a fan of to-do lists, if you have a to-do list or if you have a wishlist of things that you would like to achieve, even if they’re really small, even just ticking them off the list activates the reward centres in your brain, and dopamine is released, and you feel good.

Yeah, and it is important, that sense of achievement. And that’s why I even say things like, and don’t look at your emails until you get one thing off your to-do list done. So at least at the start of the day, you get a little hit of dopamine, that you’ve achieved something. Because so often the first thing we do is look at our emails. And what’s that doing? Only giving us more work to do. You’re kind of on the back foot before you even start.

And I do also think doing something like only checking your emails twice a day or something, and putting an outgoing message on your email to say, I remember getting this once, and I think it’s a fab way to put it. “In order to serve you better, I check my emails twice a day, once at 10:00 AM, and once at 2:00 PM. If it’s urgent, contact X, Y, Z.” But it actually gives you more time to achieve and you’ll be less likely to become overwhelmed and stressed, which all add to the brain fog, you see.

Natasha: Today, we talked a lot about the different ways in which brain fog can manifest, but it’s important to remember to look out for what is ‘usual’ for you, and not compare your symptoms to someone else.

For example, when it comes to processing speed, even with brain fog, I’m naturally quicker than Sebastian. My brain has always processed things really really quickly. But this doesn’t mean that he’s experiencing brain fog, that’s just the speed that his brain runs at. As with everything, we need to think about all of this stuff as individuals.

Sabina: Some people have dreadful attentional ability. Some people, it takes them a long time to learn how to do something new. That doesn’t mean you have brain fog, it is where there is a change from what is usual for you. I hate to use the term normal because it’s got so many connotations, but usual for you. I also think, in terms of underlying causes, I know that, as you said, the majority of your audience are people who have some sort of chronic health condition. That’s one of the main underlying causes of brain fog, but there are multiple other factors that bring about brain fog, or exacerbate it or make it worse.

I think often, for many people, multiple factors at play, do you know what I mean? Even if you identify it’s your autoimmune disease or your inflammatory disease or your chronic pain or whatever it is that gives rise to it, there may be other factors in your lifestyle that are adding to it or actually just create the tipping point that actually if you sort those lifestyle factors, the fog that’s caused as consequence of your condition, may not be as bad.

Natasha: As I said earlier, I found reading Sabina’s book really fascinating, especially learning about the different mechanisms behind brain fog, and that there are things we can do to help.

But this episode has been long enough, and we love pacing here at The Rest Room. So, I really hope you’ll join us for part 2, where Sabina shares the four main factors that affect brain fog: sleep, exercise, diet and stress, and we’ll also learn how small lifestyle changes can help improve brain function.

Of course, I’ll be presenting them with an understanding that these changes aren’t always easy for people with chronic conditions, and offer tips and tricks for how to slowly, safely and sustainably work towards these changes.

If you’re interested in reading Sabina’s book, I’ll link it in the show notes. I’ll also include a link to the transcript of this episode, and the pacing episodes that I mentioned earlier.

Don’t forget you can subscribe to The Rest Room newsletter at natashalipman.substack.com

You can find out more at natashalipman.substack.com.

Please rate and leave a review as that really helps new people find us, and please share the episode on your social media and with anyone who you think would enjoy it.

You can find me on Instagram and Twitter @natashalipman.

Aaand that’s all from me. Thanks so much for joining me in The Rest Room. Ta ta for now!

What actually is brain fog?

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