7 WARNING Signs Your BRAIN Needs Help (Inflammation, Brain Fog, Insomnia)

But you can look into the other things. You can look at your sleep cycles. You can look at just your regular dietary habits. You can look for patterns such as this always comes on at this time, or this started after this event or set of events. Sometimes you have to look backwards to find this. Welcome to my YouTube channel. I'm Dr. A, and I've been treating patients with complex chronic illness for decades, and I've also been researching and teaching in the integrative medicine space for 30 years now at this And I like to do these YouTubes to share observations, answer questions, etc. Today, I want to cover seven signs that your brain might need some healing help. Your brain function is imperative to how you feel and the rest of your body, obviously. And so let's think of some ways that we might be able to tune up our brain function. So the first thing is when we have brain symptoms because our brain controls everything in our body. We can have a brain issue and we can have a neuromuscular problem. We can have a brain issue and we can have digestive or other organ problems. We can have a brain issue and we can have cognitive problems, anything else, because our brain controls everything. One of the areas your brain controls that can really make you feel strange is what we call your autonomic nervous system. That's the one that's running in the background all the time. So if that gets out of balance, your whole body can feel very strange and sort of off and not respond like it's supposed to. So your brain's very important. But I'm going to go through a series of common presentations. And of course, if you're having any acute medical issue or if you have something that's not resolving, please talk to your healthcare provider. These are just general for-information-only thoughts. The first thing is a topic which we have other videos on actually called brain fog. And this is a really common symptom that people will report and it can manifest in many ways. Now, we often hear about people who are on certain medication protocols such as chemotherapy, maybe radiation, et cetera, and they'll complain of brain fog. And that indeed is something that happens quite a bit. We'll also see people in the complex chronic illness spectrum and they'll complain of maybe persistent or comes and goes sort of brain fog. Now, brain fog is a general term. It means different things to different people, but the idea is I just don't feel like myself. I feel like I'm kind of clawing through the fog literally, or clawing through, you know, wet cement to try and get anywhere mentally. And I just feel sort of like somebody turned my brain down. Another thing that you'll see with certain types of brain issues is a lack of concentration, inattention, inability to follow through on tasks, et cetera. That's a fairly straightforward set of symptoms, but that can come along with any number of triggers. Talk about. The next thing that can be obviously a brain issue could be poor sleep, lack of sleep, sleep cycle disruptions, et cetera. Now, of course, there's more than your brain involved in sleep, such as your hormonal system, et cetera. But the brain is often where a lot of the imbalance will start with sleep disturbance. It should come as no surprise the next one, and that would be mood disturbances or mood changes. So we'll see people, whether they're in the cancer or chronic illness spectrum, and they'll say, you know, I'm going through this patch of healing or this patch of aggravation. And normally I'm a pretty even-keeled person, but I find I'm, you know, getting really down or, you know, I'm getting really agitated or, you know, aggravated, et cetera. So mood changes are a common type of a symptom. Related would be lack of motivation. And this comes from a lot of things that we talk a lot about, you know, energy being a whole body-wide thing, but lack of motivation can come from a mental, emotional neurotransmitter balance, all sorts of reasons that your brain is in control of. And again, that can be induced by medication. It can be induced by a sudden inflammatory state, induced by lots and lots of things, but a loss or a decrease in motivation is one of those symptoms. And it pretty much, if it's not mitochondrial or hormonal, it's probably a neurological inflammatory issue. Also, just general things like loss of interest in things that you like, loss of interest in your hobbies, in dealing with your friends, interacting, social environments, things that you may like all the time and you just sort of feel like you're unplugged from that scene. Very, very common. And then the final thing is an aggravation of prior issues. So let's say I used to have a little bit of anxiety and now because of maybe new medications or my health situation, my anxiety used to be a 2 out of 10 and now it's an 8 out of 10 or depression or OCD symptoms or any other type of neuro-emotional type thing that you used to have that maybe was handled or maybe at a lower level. Now it's at a higher level. So just in general, what are the best places to start thinking about what would I do with these symptoms? And the first thing that I want to say is that if anybody anywhere has any thoughts of self-harm, you need to call a crisis hotline. In the United States, you can do 988 or 911, either one. In other countries, there are other avenues. You can call an emergency room. You can call your personal healthcare provider, but you need to get help if you're having any of those sorts of thoughts. But beyond that, if you're not having those sorts of thoughts, one of the things that kind of sneaks by people are dietary and environmental effects. So for example, I've had people that had cyclic brain fog and they would say this one patient in particular, you know, I work in the morning at one location, I have lunch, and then I drive to a second location for my afternoon work. And on the drive to my second location for work, I wind up feeling like I'm going to fall asleep for the whole drive. Which is obviously very scary and you shouldn't be doing that if you're driving. I get to that work and a couple hours later I start to feel a little bit better. Now I've had that be what they're eating for lunch and sometimes they've eaten the same thing for lunch for years and this didn't used to happen. But like we've talked about with food sensitivities and other things around, you know, blood sugar control, et cetera, sometimes there are things that will literally be eaten and you get no stomach symptoms, but you have a brain symptom from it. So sometimes it's worth looking if it's, that's the timing, it's after lunch. That's one of the things. But I've also had— I said, remember diet and environmental— had a similar sort of a setup with a professor, and they generally taught in the afternoon. And so they would spend their morning with office hours and getting prepared, etc., and then they would go do their classes in the afternoon. And they had the same complaint: I come to work, I don't have brain fog, I feel pretty good, I'm working along, you know, I'd usually eat lunch at my desk, and then I go off and teach in the afternoon. And it takes me an hour or two to feel like my head is cleared. And it took them you know months to figure this out. Well, in that case, we kind of went through the dietary stuff, and there didn't seem to be anything there. What we found out was is that their office had mold exposure that nobody knew about, or at least no one told about, and they were experiencing mycotoxin effects. So when they were in their office, they were sort of marinating in these biotoxins called mycotoxin, and that can make you feel very brain. Brain foggy or disconnected, et cetera. And they would go to the lecture halls where there wasn't this problem apparently, and it would go away as they got into fresh air. So diet and environmental are huge. The next thing is just general nutrition. Sometimes you just don't have enough fuel going into the system so that your brain kind of feels like it can keep going. You can have too little micro and macronutrient, and you can have too much actually. Both can make you feel not quite right in your mental space, whatever that might be. So sometimes when we're looking at people's dietary habits and let's say they tell me, you know, I work out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and we look at their dietary intake and it's pretty good for the days they're not working out. But the days that they're working out, what they notice is they work out in the morning and they kind of run out of gas, run out of energy mid-morning. And we have to adjust their macros or adjust, you know, the intake of the macro and micronutrients. So that can be something very important. There's also enough sleep. Now, most of us have experienced this. You have a bad night of sleep or a number of bad nights of sleep, your brain's not going to work normally. One of the problems though is that people can have 2 situations. One is they're not sleeping as well as they thought, but they don't know it. And the other is that they're just so used to being sleep deprived that they don't realize how much their chronic sleep deprivation is feeding into brain fog, inattention, lack of concentration, anxiety, whatever it may be. Now, there's a lot of people now who might have You know, a watch device or a ring device or some other thing, and you can actually see your sleep cycles, and you can correlate those real basic biofeedback and correlate those to what was different about you know these nights where I slept well versus these nights where I did not sleep well. Sometimes it's eating too late. Sometimes it's not eating enough. Sometimes it's working out too late at night. That can go either way for people. Sometimes it's a taking of a medication at the wrong time. Sometimes it has to do with alcohol or other substances. And any number of things can go on. But nowadays, if you have access to something like a Ring device or a watch device, et cetera, that can track your sleep patterns, that can be really helpful. And the other thing that I've seen clinically is you can have people, and we used to see this with our chronic fatigue fibromyalgia people, and this is before we had all these fancy devices we have nowadays, and we would get them a sleep monitor. So it used to be a big to-do to do sleep monitoring. You didn't, couldn't just put a watch or a ring on and figure it out. And we saw And a lot of our people that, that was one of the missing pieces was they were unconscious at night because usually they were on a medication or something, but they weren't getting good sleep cycles through the night. And when they got good sleep cycles, a lot of their fatigue started to go away. So sleep's huge. Light, getting enough light. Now, if you live in an area, you know, like Arizona or Florida or somewhere where you get a lot of light and sun, it might be easy to get. If you live in the Northwest up where I do, or the Northern Northwest part of Canada, you might have a long periods of time where it's pretty gray outside and it's kind of hard to get enough light. In psychiatry, they use seasonal affective disorder, SAD lights. That's one way to get light. The other thing is that, of course, light is related to your levels of vitamin D and also the function of melatonin, other topics for other webinars. But light ties into the way we are light-responsive creatures as humans, and not getting enough light can be a big problem for neurological function. Then there's movement, and that's literally just moving the bigger muscles in your body. And this can have a number of effects that can be helpful or hinder your brain depending on whether you're moving or not. One that has come out in more recent research of the last few years is that moving the larger muscles in the body actually helps to repair your blood-brain barrier, which is one of the first things to go in chronic neurological issues. So it actually is a direct connection between moving your muscles and having your blood-brain barrier be maintained. The other thing is, is that the more you move your muscles, the better your blood sugar and insulin control are. And blood sugar insulin fluctuations can be a huge thing for your neurological brain function, et cetera. And then there's other hormonal effects beyond blood sugar that are very important. So there's a whole bunch of things you can look at. You can look at this, the landscape of your diet, your lifestyle, all those things. And obviously there, there can be medication or other substance crossovers here. So for example, you generally want to work with somebody integrative medical provider of one type or another. And one of the reasons for that is that you can look at, are the medications I'm taking having any effect on the way that my brain feels and works? For example, we just had a patient the other day and they have an autoimmune condition and they're on a disease-modifying drug. And one of the symptoms of that is for about 12 hours after they dose it, they get extremely tired. And then that kind of goes away and they didn't realize that was a side effect of the medication. Sometimes there's just a matter of timing of medications or supplements. Sometimes your integrative healthcare provider may actually have you move your supplements around if these things are going on. The other thing is that brain fog, inattention, increase in an underlying anxiety, et cetera, may have other things that need to be diagnosed. And so that might be looking at a hormone panel, might be looking at food reactions, might be looking at any number of other diagnostic entities. So take some advice from a qualified professional as well, but You can look into the other things. You can look at your sleep cycles. You can look at just your regular dietary habits. You can look for patterns such as this always comes on at this time, or this started after this event or set of events. Sometimes you have to look backwards to find this. All right, I'm Dr. A. If you like this video, we're going to put up some other links here that you can take a look at. We have a lot of content on the YouTube channel. Thanks for listening today, and I'll see you on the next video.