Dr. Tabatha Barber explains that brain fog in women, especially during perimenopause and menopause, usually stems from hormone imbalances. Poor sleep, thyroid dysfunction, and nutritional deficiencies like low B12 make it worse. She recommends hormone testing, thyroid evaluation, and supplementing with B vitamins and antioxidants.
What can I do about this terrible brain fog issue? It's destroying my career. Apparently, she's struggling at work to follow through on tasks, have conversations. She can't remember what she's supposed to do. She blanks out in the middle of. It is a real thing. And why is it happening? It's your hormones, most likely, and that is one of the first signs that there's a hormone imbalance. Obviously, there's other reasons. If you are sleep deprived and you haven't been sleeping on a regular basis, your brain's going to struggle to make memories and do its basic functions. But maybe you're not sleeping because of a hormone imbalance. Right? Like, everything is so interconnected. And I want you to understand that there's never one problem with one easy solution. But a lot of times women who are in this perimenopausal, menopausal transition, if we're struggling with these things, it's because our hormones are not where they're supposed to be. They're either, like I say, tanked, or you're on a roller coaster. And they're. They're being produced at high levels, and then they're dropping down into low levels. So all, all of this happens during the perimenopausal transition. And brain fog is one of the most common symptoms that women suffer from. And unfortunately, we are afraid to talk about it, we're afraid to admit, because that means we're not able to be productive. We're not able to keep up with our male counterparts in the workplace. You know, and for a lot of us women, we're at the height of our careers when we go into menopause. You don't want to admit to anybody that you might not be able to handle this job because your brain's not working. There is hope. I promise you. Your brain can function again. You just have to do some things. You potentially want to go on hormone replacement therapy and get your levels where they should be. You potentially need vitamin and minerals, because vitamins and minerals actually are necessary ingredients to make your hormones. So if your body doesn't have the ingredients, it can't make the hormones. And so you'll go into menopause earlier because you didn't have the ingredients to make the hormones. They're also necessary to metabolize your hormones. What does that mean? That means to break them down. So sometimes the levels can build up and become imbalanced because you don't have the necessary vitamins and minerals to do those processes in your liver and in your Gut to get stuff out of there. We can no longer rely on diet to give us all of the vitamins and minerals that we need. Our soil is extremely depleted. You could eat a ton of vegetables and still not get enough of what you need. Especially if you're only plant based, you might not be getting your animal vitamins and minerals that you need. Necessary things like B12 to metabolize your estrogen. Basic things you can do, you have to be on a high quality multivitamin, multimineral B complex. You need some antioxidant support to get rid of all the damaged broken cells that your body's done using. Energy lift is a basic support that's gonna at least get you covered in that realm so that your body has the ability to make the hormones and metabolize the hormones. Like I said, you might want hormone replacement therapy for that brain fog. I know for me, I couldn't do stuff like this. I couldn't run a podcast, run a business, coach lacrosse, take care of my kids, run my household, do all of these things when my hormones were out of whack, like it just was not possible. I couldn't think, I couldn't remember, I couldn't plan, I couldn't organize. So don't be afraid to go and ask for help. Brain fog is a true symptom that you need to get things in check. So I would start with some energy Lift. That is some basic support. You give that a few weeks, you get your hormones tested. In the meantime, see what those levels are looking like. Talk to a doctor or provider who specializes in hormones, who understands hormones. There is help for your brain fog. The other couple issues I see very commonly are your thyroid looking like a hypothyroid picture. It's down regulated for multiple reasons. And when you don't have enough thyroid hormone, your brain will struggle as well. So if you are like me or millions of other women who have a thyroid issue and then you go into perimenopause, it's like a double whammy. Yeah, of course your brain's not gonna work, so you might need to tweak and adjust your thyroid. That needs to be evaluated in complete detail. So find a functional provider, find somebody who understands how all the systems interact together and you can get back into balance and go back to your amazing kick ass life. Being super productive, doing all the things, having a brain that works like it did 10 years.
