Brain Fog: What It Is and How to Beat It

Everybody, Dr. Diane Mold, Lyme brain and chronic illness expert here. We're talking about brain fog today and how to identify if you have brain fog. So brain fog. If you're wondering if you have brain fog, brain fog is different than that random day where you're like, what did I do with my keys? Right. If that's happening on occasion, that's probably not common. Classic brain fog. Brain fog. What it is is this sense of it. It is almost like a fog, right? It's a sense of almost this cloudiness in the brain. It's like. It's almost like the brain is like full. Sometimes there's pressure. Sometimes people feel a little pressure against the skull. There can be ease of forgetfulness. Another big sign of brain fog is having trouble tracking a conversation. So if you feel like you're listening to somebody and your head feels almost like spacey or like, almost like it's in a washing machine, right. That can be a sign of brain fog. So brain fog, for many people is something that will be different day to day. So sometimes people find that they have one day where they wake up and their brain is really foggy, and then another day where it's not so bad. So it can be really difficult to determine. Now, one of the scariest things for people, of course, with brain fog is dementia. So with brain fog, brain fog does not necessarily mean dementia. There's things that are used to analyze dementia, such as a mini mental status exam. These are online questionnaires you can find definitely with these symptoms, it's good to have a neurological workup to make sure you're ruling out scary things like cancer in the brain, a tumor in the brain, something that is putting that pressure on. I don't mean to scare you. Most of the time it's not that. But we always want to rule things out just in case while we have time. Now, from the standpoint of how do you know if you have brain fog? Brain fog is generally going to be diagnosed based upon symptoms. We do have some diagnostic ways that if you see a doctor, there's some ways that they will determine if you have dementia. For example, with things like dementia, we can see certain changes in the brain. We can see certain questionnaires that are. Certain in office tasks that can be done that are basically showing a level of inability to remember things, inability to have a. A quick recall, those sorts of things. But with brain fog, we can see that it's not that. Right. That sometimes we can do those types of cognitive tests and it's not showing dementia or maybe it's showing, like, slight dementia, but then the next day it's like, totally fine. So what is going on there? Right. So there's a lot of different reasons why this could happen, and there's a lot of different reasons why it can happen and be different from day to day. One reason why we see this cloudiness come on, and this cloudiness also can be seen with this immense amount of fatigue. Sometimes it can be seen with a symptom that we call depersonalization. That big word basically just means that you. There's a sense that one is not totally inside of one's body. It's a very, very weird sensation. Almost like maybe being a little bit drunk, but not exactly. So it's a sense of like, oh, my consciousness, my space spirit is outside of my body a little bit, almost looking into my body. Right. I've had that before when I was very ill. It's a very strange symptom and hard to describe, but that is oftentimes seen with brain fog. So what is going on with brain fog? There's some lifestyle things that are very, very important. Right. So we're going to talk later this month because this is Brain Fog month. Make sure you subscribe to the channel to get everything on brain fog that we're doing this month. So we're going to go more deeply into lifestyle things such as sleep and diet this month, as well as supplements. But for now, to begin to think what's actually happening to the brain. So again, before I start going down this road of explaining what's happening to the brain, in many instances, I don't want to scare you. Right. The biggest thing to remember is rule out the big bad things. Work with your doctor for that. And in addition to that, there's most of the time it's not the big bad scary things. It's these other things that oftentimes conventional medicine doesn't find. And that's what we're planning on teaching you guys this month. So what's actually happening is what we're going to talk about more in this video. So one thing that can be happening and leading to this brain fog can be something like a inflammatory scenario where we have inflammation in the brain and this inflammation is leading to a couple different things. You see, one thing that happens is we have this system in our brain. It's called the glymphatic system. This particular system is important for removing the trash from the brain. So if toxins get in, if too much sugar gets into the brain, that can be Toxic to the brain. If bugs and microbes and infections get into the brain, the glymphatic system, this garbage can system of the brain is really designed to detox and to remove this, this trash. And if this trash stays in the brain too long, we can get heightened amount of inflammatory molecules in the brain. We have heightened amounts of inflammatory molecules in the brain, then this can lead to brain fog. Right? Sugar, like I mentioned, can be one of those inflammatory molecules. So sometimes if we have a level of insulin resistance where our body is not utilizing sugar correctly, that sugar can end up in the brain and can also cause brain fog. Like I said, toxins and metals can. Another thing that is always worth considering too is blood flow. So we see sometimes there's, there's instances where low amounts of, of a molecule called VEGF can be shown and can be seen with brain fog. And essentially this is important because this molecule, what it does is it makes the brain, it makes the body grow new blood vessels. So we gotta get blood to the brain and if there's low amounts of the signal to make new blood vessels, then without any new blood vessels, we don't have oxygen supply to the brain. And the brain can feel foggy just from pure lack of oxygen and the nutrition that that provides. So kind of in a, like a deep understanding of this, we're really breaking this down to things like inflammatory processes such as infections, toxins, sugar overload. We're breaking this down to other things such as low circulation. And then we also want to consider nutrients. One thing to know is that the brain does love really healthy fats. So sometimes if we're really deficient in these good fats, that can be a major thing with brain fog as well. And that's why we're going to cover diet later on this month. So, again, I know that was a lot and it can be so scary. And I find that in my clients, it can be so scary to hear this information. And the other thing, though, the goal with this month is to not leave you with scared. Like, feeling scared is to leave you feeling empowered to get to the root of this. Because most of the time, like I said, it's not the scary stuff. It's problems that are not easily found with traditional labs. And that's why we're going to talk about common labs that could be missed. But there is a reason and there is solutions and you can get help. So stay tuned with me this month for more on this. Please do subscribe to this channel. Please look out below in the show notes for my upcoming masterclass, which is totally free, where we're going to go deep into brain fog and we're going to talk from there also about any questions you have. So if questions come up throughout this month, as you're listening to this, please do join that class live. It will be me teaching it and you can ask me questions and I can hopefully help you and support you on your journey. I'll talk to you then.