You might be experiencing brain fog when you’re feeling distracted, moody, and tired during the day. Do you feel like you can’t get yourself to concentrate and finish your tasks? It’s a common side-effect of unhealthy and busy lifestyles. In this article, we discuss what’s causing your brain fog. Find out the natural treatments and remedies you can do to avoid this clouded consciousness!
What You Need To Know:
- Brain fog, also known as clouded consciousness, is a term to define the series of symptoms that temporarily impair your brain’s function. This can impact your memory, language, information processing, visual and spacial skills, calculating abilities, and other functional abilities.
- Your lifestyle and other underlying medical conditions can be what’s causing your brain fog. If you aren’t sleeping enough, not eating a good diet, constantly being stressed, and having hormonal imbalances, these can result in the symptoms of brain fog.
- Adopting a healthy lifestyle that includes a good and balanced diet, managing stress, exercising regularly, and sleeping well can help prevent and avoid brain fog. In addition, you can use brain-healthy supplements to boost your mental function.
What Is Brain Fog?
Today’s society requires many of us to stay alert and think quick at all times. With work, school, and home life meddling in your daily responsibilities, it’s hard to be productive without the right focus and concentration. Unfortunately, your busy and unhealthy lifestyles may eventually lead to your deteriorating brain health.
Brain fog is the layman’s term to describe a clouded consciousness, which involves difficulties in mental processes such as thinking, understanding, and remembering. It can affect many brain functions, including:
- Memory. Some have problems storing and recalling information.
- Language. It may become hard to use and understand a language well.
- Information Processing. Some people find it difficult to focus, process, and understand information.
- Visual and spacial skills. Difficulties in recognizing shapes, navigating spaces, and illustrating.
- Calculation abilities. Doing simple math becomes a challenge.
- Functional abilities like organization, problem-solving, and planning.
Common Symptoms of Brain Fog
In general, brain fog describes the mild fluctuations and difficulties in your normal mental functions. This may include becoming forgetful, feeling confused, easily losing attention, inability to focus, and difficulties processing information.
Brain fog can manifest in different ways. For some, it may feel as if your head is clouded with empty thoughts. Other people find it hard to concentrate on a certain task for long. Look out for these common symptoms of brain fog:
- Feeling tired, fatigued, and having low energy
- Trouble concentrating
- Getting headaches
- Irritability
- Easily forgetful and troubles recalling information
- No motivation, feeling hopeless
- Mild anxiety and/or depression
- Confusion
- Difficulties sleeping at night
What’s Causing Your Brain Fog?
Many factors can have an effect on your mental health. In terms of lifestyle, diet, stress levels, sleep, and hormonal changes can have an effect on your brain capacity. In addition, your mental difficulties may be a symptom of other underlying medical conditions.
What’s Causing Your Brain Fog: Lifestyle Factors
Sleep
Having a well-rested slumber is essential to good overall health. That’s why you can notice the effects right away when you have lacked a few hours of sleep. Prolonged bouts of restless nights can result in brain fog.
Health experts always recommended a dose of 6-8 hours of sleep. This helps your body recover and replenish in preparation for the next day.
Stress
Stress has become inevitable in our daily lives. However, being stressed for longer periods can have detrimental effects on your mental health. Pushing your brain’s limits and capacities can lead to mental exhaustion and brain fog. This is why it becomes more and more difficult to think, reason, and focus over time.
Diet
Surprisingly, what you eat can also contribute to how well your brain functions. Nutrient imbalances, deficiencies in certain vitamins, high consumption of sugar, alcohol, caffeine, and refined carbohydrates have shown impacts on your brain health.
Your brain is fueled by the primary source of energy called glucose. This can be found in most simple sugars and carbohydrates. However, having excess amounts of sugar doesn’t mean that your brain function will improve. In fact, studies have shown that elevated blood glucose can cause harm to the brain, resulting in slow cognitive functions, weak memory, and poor focus.
Here are the other ways your diet results in brain fog:
- Vitamin B12 supports healthy brain function. Lacking in Vitamin B12 which can be found in animal products like meat, poultry, eggs, fish, and milk can eventually make you feel distracted and out of focus.
- Eating too much aspartame, monosodium glutamate (MSG), peanuts, or diary has also been associated with increased risk for brain fog.
- Following a diet low in carbohydrates (like Atkins or Ketogenic diet) can also make you feel the symptoms of brain fog like light-headedness and inabilities concentrating.
- Drinking excessive amounts of alcohol leads to short-term brain impairment, wherein you may also experience symptoms of brain fog.
Hormonal Imbalances
Changes in your hormone levels can also trigger brain fog. Especially for women who have varying levels of progesterone and estrogen, they feel the effects of brain fog like short-term memory and cognitive impairment throughout their monthly cycle. Moreover, pregnant women and those going through menopause can attribute their forgetfulness, poor concentration, and cloudy thinking to their hormonal imbalances.
What’s Causing Your Brain Fog: Medical Reasons
There are certain medical conditions that are linked with fatigue, fluctuations in blood glucose level, and inflammation that may cause brain fog as well. People experiencing chronic fatigue syndrome, which is long-term fatigue that may last more than 6 months, usually develop symptoms of brain fog. In addition, brain fog is associated with many other chronic conditions:
- Autoimmune diseases like Multiple Sclerosis (MS), arthritis, and lupus
- Depression
- Diabetes
- Sjögren syndrome
- Alzheimer’s disease
- Hypothyroidism
- Dehydration
- Migraines
- Iron deficiency anemia
- Taking medications such as chemotherapy drugs and anti-depressants
6 Ways To Treat Brain Fog
The best way to treat your brain fog is by first identifying what is causing it. If it’s just poor lifestyle habits, brain fog can easily be prevented once you correct your lifestyle. Brain fog caused by chronic conditions like diabetes, MS, and anemia can be managed by taking the right medication. Follow these 8 tips to regain your sense of clear-headedness, focus, and alertness:
1. Pay attention to sugar and carbohydrate intake.
Many people think carbs are bad for you since they make you gain weight and aren’t that nutrient-dense. However, carbohydrates and sugar are important for your brain health. It’s recommended to source this from complex and unrefined carbohydrates like whole wheat grains. Make sure to have at least 45 to 65 percent of your diet consisting of carbohydrates. Having enough carbohydrates will keep you energized and alert throughout the day.
2. Focus on improving your overall diet
Other than carbohydrates, it’s also vital to address nutrient imbalances and deficiencies that might be causing your brain fog. Make sure to get the essential amino and healthy fatty acids like choline and omega-3 fatty acids which are known to support healthy brain function. Vitamin B12 is also important as they help proper functioning and development of brain and nerve cells. You can acquire all these brain-healthy nutrients by including whole grains, lean meats, a lot of vegetables and fruits in your diet.
3. Fight the Stress
Stress from work, home, or school is part of our everyday lives. However, being stressed for a longer duration can lead to deteriorating mental health. There are many ways you can manage stress. Doing breathing exercises, practicing meditation or yoga, writing on a journal, or spending time outdoors are great techniques that you can do to relax your body and relieve stress.
4. Get Enough Sleep
The easiest and fastest way to restart and improve your brain function is through a good night sleep. When you get the recommended 6-8 hours of sleep every night, you get enough energy, become less irritable, be able to pay better attention to your tasks, and manage your emotions well. Improve your sleep by wearing comfortable clothing, dimming your bedroom completely, or infusing lavender in your sheets. It’s very important to establish a good sleeping pattern so you’re able to doze off right on schedule.
5. Workout and be active
Exercising doesn’t just improve your physique. It can also contribute to better brain health! Regular exercise can help improve insulin levels, balance out hormones, and enhance sleep. All of these health effects can aid in fighting fatigue and brain fog. In addition, exercise also releases the happy energizing hormones called endorphins that boost your stamina and lift your mood.
6. Considering Taking Natural Supplements
The truth is, many of us just fail to improve our diet. To solve this issue, many people use supplements to boost their overall health. When it comes to fighting stress and enhancing your mental abilities, adaptogenic supplements like Panax Ginseng and Gingko Biloba work the best. Along with the other lifestyle changing tips, you can prevent and avoid brain fog!
The Takeaway…
Brain fog is a lay term for the medical condition affecting your brain and cognitive function. It temporarily impacts your memory, language, information processing, visual and spacial skills, calculating abilities, and other functional abilities. Brain fog commonly manifests whenever you feel tired, get headaches, feel irritable, easily forget, lose motivation, have mild anxiety or depression, feel confused, and have difficulty sleeping at night.
What’s causing your brain fog are mostly lifestyle in nature. Not sleeping well, being chronically stressed, eating a poor diet, and experiencing hormonal imbalances can result in brain fog. However, brain fog can also become a symptom of other underlying medical conditions such as multiple sclerosis, depression, diabetes, iron deficiency anemia, Alzheimer’s disease, or dehydration.
To treat brain fog, it’s important to pinpoint the possible reasons why you are experiencing it. Overall, implementing lifestyle changes like improving your diet, fighting stress, sleeping well, and exercising regularly can boost your brain health. In addition, you may also consider taking natural brain-healthy supplements to prevent and avoid what’s causing your brain fog.
