While brain fog is a term that a lot of health care practitioners will kind of understand, it isn’t necessarily a diagnosis in and of itself. It’s a symptom for many diseases, including many autoinflammatory and autoimmune disease.
For those of you who’ve never experienced brain fog, I’ll try to define it in ways that can make sense for you. Imagine that you’ve been out of work for a week with the flu. It’s your first day back and you’re already exhausted and not focused, but then you hit that slump time of day when you normally might reach for a soda or go for a walk. Your brain stops processing things. The focus issue gets worse and worse. You can’t find words you’re looking for in your head or, if you do, you can’t actually speak them. You have the inability to access memory so you’ll go put your coffee in the microwave and two hours later realize you left it there.
And that happens just almost every day for many of us.
It sucks.
What sucks even more is that there isn’t really much to do except to treat the underlying cause of the condition and, if needed and possible, the symptoms. You may see a chronic illness patient on an ADHD medication because it helps them focus and helps with a lack of energy for example. That doesn’t completely kill the brain fog though.
For those of you living with brain fog, what are some ways you deal with it?
To combat brain fog, write yourself notes to join me on my MedX journey Sept 24-27! I’ll be live tweeting the whole time so hit me up @kirstie_schultz, catch the live streams at the Medicine X website, and join in the conversations using the tag #MedX.