Mona SharmaCelebrity nutritionist and wellness advocate

Still Tired, Anxious, and Foggy? Maybe It’s NOT Your Fault…🧠💥 | Dr. Austin Perlmutter

12 Oct 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:17

In this interview, Mona Sharma asks Dr. Austin Perlmutter to explain how chronic, daily stress leads to systemic inflammation that extends into the brain, causing neuroinflammation. Dr. Perlmutter describes neuroinflammation as a low‑level, background immune imbalance that not only contributes to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and reduced lifespan, but also drives a wide range of mental health issues—including anxiety, depression, PTSD, schizophrenia—and accelerates cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. He emphasizes that many people experience symptoms like brain fog without recognizing inflammation as the underlying cause. The conversation highlights the importance of identifying and addressing neuroinflammation to improve mental health and cognitive function.

Chapters

Let's open this up to the impact of stress and that core root of inflammation. Right. I know that you're going to say that some stress, you know, cognitively, can be really beneficial for us, but one of the first things we learn in school with nutrition is that this, you know, chronic, daily, persistent stress is the source of inflammation in any part of the body. We're now learning that neuroinflammation is linked to anxiety and linked to depression and also linked to Alzheimer's. But day to day life, I can't tell you the amount of people that I meet with who suffer from pregnancy, brain fog also. And they're not looking at the source of what's causing them to feel inflamed. So can you expand on how this neural inflammation, brain inflammation.
What most people don't understand is what inflammation looks like in the brain and what metabolic metabolism looks like in the brain when the immune system is put into a state of imbalance that we would call inflammation, kind of a low level background inflammation that not only does that contribute to cardiovascular disease and diabetes and obesity and a shorter lifespan, but in the brain, that inflammation is now recognized to be a principle of driver of mental health issues. Depression is the best example. We also have data for schizophrenia, for PTSD and a host of other mental health issues and then cognitive decline. So Alzheimer's disease as well as a host of other neurodegenerative conditions and as you mentioned, brain fog. So brain fog, super common thing.