Dr. Diane Mueller (chronic illness expert) explains how stress contributes to brain fog, describing physiological mechanisms (fight-or-flight/adrenal hormones causing blood sugar imbalances and cognitive slowing) and emphasizing that stress is often a contributing root cause but rarely the sole cause. She outlines clinical evaluation options—measuring DHEA (best as DHEA-S) and cortisol, noting limits of single-point cortisol tests and recommending multi-sample urinary cortisol collection—and treatment/management approaches including DHEA supplementation, adaptogenic/herbal options (ashwagandha, ginseng, rhodiola, magnolia bark for nocturnal cortisol spikes), sleep support, and daily resiliency practices (breathwork, embodiment/yoga, cognitive "mind-hacking" to uncover repetitive stress-triggering thoughts).
Chapters
Everybody. Dr. Diane, your chronic illness expert. We're talking about brain fog on this channel all month long. And today we have reached the part where we're talking about stress and brain fog. So we mentioned in the last video some processes which lead to the symptom of brain fog. We've already talked about what brain fog is, so we haven't talked about stress yet. And stress is a really important thing to bring up because it's very easy in our society to feel overwhelmed and stressed pretty easily. There's a lot we're taking in. There's a lot that everybody is doing. And when we are under that much stress, there's a lot of different things that can happen. One is oftentimes when we're running in that fight or flight, high adrenaline type of state, we are not in that state where we're sitting, sending chemicals of repair. We're not in the state where we are rebuilding our body. Right. Oftentimes when we are running around, we're very stressed. There's a level of blood sugar imbalance because stress hormones cause that. When we have blood sugar imbalances, this can actually throw off brain or throw brain fog into action. Right. So from a standpoint of stress as a huge causer of brain fog. It absolutely is. I always like to be careful, though, when we're talking about root causes of remembering that this can be a root cause, but also not necessarily blaming everything on stress. I treat a lot of brain fog in my clinical practice. I've probably worked on well over thousand people with brain fog at this point in my career. And essentially, one thing that I see across the board is that there's more than one root cause and that stress is oftentimes involved a lot of the time. But I've yet to see a single case where it's only stress. So we absolutely wanna consider stress as one of the things that are gonna lead to this cognitive imbalance. Right. We see this sometimes too. Where you ever had those days, even when you don't have brain fog and you just get home from a long day. And it's maybe been a lot of thinking. If you remember this from school, school days, there's these days maybe where you're going through finals, if you did all that, and then all of a sudden the brain like crashes. Right. And it's really hard to think about anything. So we do see that after chronic stress, there are changes in the brain from that, not permanent changes most of the time, so don't worry. So what can be done about the stress? So There's a few different things. One definitely consider getting proper adrenal evaluation. Adrenal evaluation basically means adrenals are the glands that produce hormones, including stress hormones. So we can measure things like cortisol and another hormone called dhea. These are great hormones to measure. DHEA is best to measure in its sulfite form and its storage form. And I'm only giving you this level of detail so that if you do ask your doctor about this, you ask for the right things. So you definitely want to consider dheas, which is a adrenal hormone. Oftentimes this hormone goes very, very, very low with chronic stress. When it's low, we can feel lethargic, our brain doesn't work as well. We tend to have not a lot of energy. The other big hormone to make sure to consider testing for is cortisol. Now, cortisol is common that it's tested for, but tell you, the reference range of cortisol is very, very, very off. And what this basically means is the what is normal when the doctor, when you test cortisol and the doctor says, hey, your value of what came back from the lab is in this range and it's only a problem that's lower than the range or higher than that range. Right? That's what I mean by reference range. So essentially, if your cortisol, when you take your cortisol, oftentimes you're told that it's normal. But the problem with this is, is that cortisol is supposed to be really high in the morning and it's supposed to go down throughout the day. So sometimes it can be normal at one point in time and it's not normal the rest of the time. So one benefit, and I don't see a lot of conventional docs doing this, but I can help you with this, is getting a urinary cortisol run. A urinary cortisol is basically where you urinate in the comfort of your own home or your office four times throughout the day. And essentially what that's doing, it's allowing you to see what this hormone is doing over time because it's not going to be the same, same level throughout the day, right? It's normal for it to change. So you want to see what it's doing at different points to know what your cortisol level is at once you get those results. And then you can do things such as take DHEA if you have too low dhea, if your cortisol is low, you can use herbs like Ashwagandha ginseng, rhodiola. We want to be careful with some of those things. Ginseng and rhodiola can be a little stimulating to people, especially if they have any anxiety. And oftentimes with stress and brain fog, many people, and I'm curious for you if this is how you are, have this, like, wired but tired feeling, right? Because they're running on adrenaline and. And adrenaline makes us wired. Adrenaline is. It can be problematic to the body to run on that. It's not very stimulating to the body to heal, but it leads to this still this, like, this energy, right, where you can get through your day. So it's this underlying crazy fatigue combined with this level of, like, juice, this adrenaline just pumping through your veins, right? So we see that a lot with people with adrenal imbalances. And so in addition to this, you can also consider things to help you sleep. So one of my favorite things is if you are spiking cortisol too high at night, that can mean that you don't sleep, and that can contribute to brain fog. And if that is happening, magnolia bark is a really cool herb for that. Now, we definitely always want to consider resiliency, right? Because there's only so much we can do with external stressors. So there's things that you always want to consider, like, are there any ways to change the external stressors in your life? Sometimes there is, sometimes there's not. And no matter how much you change external stressors, it's life. And we all have stress that is going to come up in higher or lower amounts throughout our life. That's just human existence, right? So essentially with that, we want to make sure that we're cultivating good resiliency to stress. So how do we do that? We do that in a few different ways. We do that by math, making sure we have something that is a calming activity every day. So even if it's five minutes of breath work, another thing, and I call this, and I teach this in some of my courses, is hack your mind. So there's a process, right, where we begin to uncover subconscious thoughts that are actually triggering our adrenaline. And every time I have people do exercises designed to help trigger and. Or help not trigger, but help find these subconscious thoughts, most of the time, people will have, you know, maybe say something to me like, oh, I thought. I thought only once a day I had a thought like, oh, my gosh, I'm so worried about my health and my brain fog, right? And then we do these exercises. They'll discover, like, holy cow. I had that thought 27 times throughout the day. Right. I had that thought all day long. And so what's happening when we have those thoughts is that's triggering. Triggering more of that stress response. So we work to get you out of those subconscious things. So embodiment exercises, doing things like yoga, anything to get out of the mind and into the body.
